Mayflower II Replica’s story, with a Seaport bow, gets its most rollicking treatment yet
Dick Stone couldn't get the image out of his head.
It was a 1957 photograph of the Mayflower II, the replica of a ship that transported the Pilgrims to the New World, in full sail near New York City with a retinue of watercraft by its side and a gigantic blimp circling low in the air on a picture-perfect July day.
Only it didn't look real. It had to be a painting, right, or Photoshopped?
No, he discovered it was a chromogenic print by the famed National Geographic photographer B. Anthony Stewart. The color effect of the print was breathtaking, but the image itself juxtaposing a boat harking to the 17th century with a dirigible above and motorboats roiling the sea with skyscrapers in the background, whetted Stone's appetite to find out more about a ship he soon realized was much more than a tourist attraction at Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts (now Plimoth Patuxet Museums, the old-fashioned spelling used to differentiate it from the town of Plymouth).
Stone, a resident of Cos Cob, was so intrigued that in September 2019 he drove up Interstate 95 to witness the relaunching of the Mayflower II at Mystic Seaport, where it had spent several years being fully rehabilitated. There, he heard the well-known historian Nathaniel Philbrick declare the Mayflower II was “more than the replica of a famous ship. She's a famous ship in her own right.”
And so the fuse was lit for Stone to write his first book, “Project Mayflower: Building and Sailing a 17th-Century Replica,” to be released May 7 by Essex-based Globe Pequot/ Lyons Press ($32.95, hardcover, available at Barnes & Noble and locally at the Martin House in Westerly). It's a book full of stories about how the Mayflower replica came to built and the men in the middle of it all who funded and sailed it to America as naysayers said it couldn't be done.
But Stone's idea for a book really started to come into full view after Stone met Randal Charlton, the son of Englishman Warwick Charlton, a marketing and public relations specialist who came up with the idea of building the Mayflower replica to thank the United States for its intervention to help save Europe from the Nazis during World War II. At the suggestion of a mutual friend, they met in Mystic shortly after the 2019 Mayflower relaunch, and Stone was hooked.
Charlton himself was completing a book on his father and the Mayflower II, titled “The Wicked Pilgrim,” and Stone helped him generate publicity locally through a “Recorded History” podcast The Day produced (I was the host) in which we semi-successfully recorded our first-ever overseas interview for theday. com (dealing with intermittent issues with the quality of our phone reception).
But while Stone was a fan of Charlton's book, he thought there was more to the story. So he decided to do additional research, tracking down other sons and daughters of key figures in the Mayflower II quest and diving into unexplored archives to be able to put the story of one man's quixotic drive to build and donate the replica into historical context.
One important breakthrough came when Stone tried to make sense of the 1956 Suez Crisis when Britain and Egypt were at loggerheads as the Egyptian president tried to nationalize the Suez Canal, a key passageway for European trade. The British sent troops to the Sinai Desert, much to the consternation of U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and English-American relationships were severely strained.
Ironically, though, the brief war in the Mideast turned out well for backers of the Mayflower II, which became a symbol of friendship between the two countries as the English government, heretofore cool about backing the project, suddenly realized it could be a publicity bonanza.
During this period, Eisenhower and British Foreign Minister Harold MacMillan met twice in private, according to a transcript tucked away in a State Department archive for 50 years until Stone got hold of it. The transcript showed that Eisenhower had three main topics: nuclear weapons, NATO and the “special relationship” between the United States and Britain.
“We got to figure out a way to show the world we're standing as one united people,” Stone quoted Eisenhower as saying.
And that's when MacMillan first mentioned Warwick Charlton's plan to sail the Mayflower II to the United States and give it to Harry Hornblower and his project to create Plimoth Plantation in homage to America's first permanent settlers from the Old World. The Mayflower II “did, in fact, play a kind of an unheralded role in mending U.S.-British relationships, reaffirming the special relationship following the Suez crisis,” Stone said.
Stone also was able to dig up more information about Hornblower and his Plimoth Plantation dream by talking to his daughter and reaching into the Harvard University archive where graduates are asked to submit an annual report on their activities.
“That gave me insights that other people hadn't been able to find,” Stone said.
The book, well written and replete with newly discovered photos, also pays homage to the workers at Mystic Seaport who helped restore the replica during the winters between 2014 and 2020. Along the way, they had to come up with creative solutions to counteract the wood rot that endangered the ship, and they found a new material for the sails that was much lighter weight yet stronger than what had been used in the past.
“Without Mystic, there wouldn't be a Mayflower II,” Stone said in a Zoom interview. “The shipwrights of Mystic ... they're the most skilled in the world.”
But Stone said he believes the story of Mayflower II is mostly one of fortitude and unity, which would be good qualities to advance as the nation approaches its 250th anniversary in 2026 in a seemingly divided state.
“When you think about how we got to this moment, you have to go back and say, well, where do we start?” Stone said. “And they started with a bunch of folks that were lost on a cold boat sitting in Cape Cod Bay at the beginning of November thinking, ‘Holy smokes, we're in a pickle here. But we're not going to let this deter us.”