Western Morning News (Saturday)
Amazing story of the ultimate journey to the New World
The story of the Pilgrim Fathers’ voyage to America is well known. Dawn Bebe reports on its re-telling, in a fresh and fascinating way
When we set out to write a book about the journey of the Mayflower, which set sail 400 years ago, little did we know that we’d be going on the ultimate voyage ourselves - one that would take us through space and time to the recurring global themes of racism, greed - and even pandemics...
It was in the stunning grounds of Pentillie Castle, South East Cornwall, in Summer 2018 that we heard the fateful words that would set in motion a journey like no other.
Charles Hackett, the CEO of Mayflower 400, was briefing the tourist industry that the commemoration of Mayflower 400 was not just something being ‘provided by the council’, but encouraged us all to be entrepreneurial and come up with our own Mayflower ideas.
With 30 years as a journalist and publisher, my background has always been in words. And, fifteen years in Britain’s Ocean City, helping found the Plymouth Culture Board, had taught me that Plymouth was a city of untold stories. Exploring the city, I was constantly blown away by its hidden gems. From the Hoe, to the Gin Distillery, to the parks and world-renowned marine heritage, it is an amazing place.
The story of the Mayflower, a small wooden ship that set off with 102 souls aboard, driven by the search for religious freedom and a better life, into the sea of darkness in hurricane season, sounded like a movie plot that needed to be dusted off and brought back into the sunlight. An iconic story, its link to Plymouth was hard-baked into the city’s DNA. Cogs started whirring, strands started spinning…
Months later, I ran into an old colleague, Juliet Coombe, mid-step between Sri Lanka where she had been living, and Cornwall, to where she was moving. A former freelance travelling Channel 5 news reporter and a travel writer and photographer, she has written and published a string of successful books on Sri Lanka focusing on places and people. She had also recently started working with book editor and researcher, Charlie Keeler, who was looking to become a Mayflower 400 tour guide.
One last piece in the jigsaw. Designer James Edgar was producing stunning book designs for people like Gordon Ramsey and Ken Clarke, from his studios in the Royal William Yard, Plymouth, and he’d recently designed some branding for Plymouth’s Illuminate, the amazing light festival for Mayflower.
We’d all worked at the top level in creative industries and the more we talked, the more we felt there was a brilliant book to be created: part history, part travel guide and part social history.
It would feature the story of the Mayflower as you have never read it – accurate but compelling, provocative and a very modern take on an old story.
We’d compare 20 people who lived and worked in Plymouth in 1620, with 20 equivalents living in the city now. We’d also scour the city for its hidden gems and uncover 400 of them to commemorate every year since the sailing of the Mayflower. And all using some of Plymouth’s best creative talent – Sarah Smalldon would illustrate, Guy Harris would do photography.
Sounds simple right? But an adventure lay in store…
First challenge: how to publish the book? Good quality books cost a lot of money to publish, it turned out. Good creatives need to be paid. We came up with the idea of crowdfunding it and ran a huge crowdfunding campaign on Crowdfunder.co.uk, receiving match-funding from Plymouth City Council, RBS and pledges of support from Urban Splash, the Crowne Plaza, Bistrot Pierre and Nash and Co, eventually raising
£27,000 – just enough to publish the kind of high quality book we felt Plymouth deserved.
Now for research: we’d been cautioned early on by an academic at Plymouth University that the Mayflower story had been romanticised and politicised in the 19th century and it was a more complex story than popularly thought, with dark and sinister aspects. So we decided that we’d go way beyond a superficial search on the internet and go to the original source materials wherever possible. This was no mean feat.
As working parents, with day jobs, we improvised. A kids’ football tour to Holland took a detour, and became a research journey to Leiden, where we got a real sense of the early life of the Separatist movement that had gathered pace there, after its birth in Austerfield, Scrooby and Babworth, villages in the north of England. We learned how in England they there was no freedom of religion in a country where non-attendance at church led to a fine; further absences, to imprisonment; and absolute resistance, to the death penalty.
A half term holiday in February became perhaps the most enlightening part of our journey, when Juliet and Charlie visited Massachusetts.
As many will know, the Mayflower was blown horrendously off course, some 200 or so miles farther north than intended, forcing the pilgrims to settle in what’s now known as Plymouth, Massachusetts. With their reserves severely depleted, many already sick and malnourished, a harsh winter killed half of those who arrived. It was the native tribespeople, the Wampanoags, who, seeing children and women in the party, took pity on them and taught them how to grow crops. In 1621, Massasoit Ousemaquin (the Great Chief, Yellow Feather) signed, with a wolf insignia, the Great Treaty with the Pilgrims, for mutual protection, going on to celebrate the first American Thanksgiving with them later on in the year of that first cruel winter.
But, we also learned it was the descendants of the Wampanoags who were ultimately betrayed, 54 years later, by the Europeans who came in increasing numbers soon after The Mayflower, to form the Massachusetts Bay colony and eventually subsume the Plymouth colony.
These profiteers took their land, subjugated them and brought diseases that reputedly killed up to 10 million Native Americans.
To find out more, we met Lee Filsom, Plymouth’s Head of Tourism and a former President of the Mayflower Society; Chris Messier, a brilliant tour guide; and the Chief of the Wampanoag Tribe of Aquinnah, Cheryl Maltais-Andrews.
Cheryl gave us the seminal interview for the critically important Foreword of our book. She acknowledged the great achievement of the Pilgrims in their quest and epic journey for a new life, but challenged us to acknowledge the consequences of that journey. It’s success, she argued, was ultimately owing to the Wampanoag’s help - the Wampanoags could produce enough food for one person from half an acre compared to ten acres grown the English way. So, what was done to the Native People after the Great Treaty was betrayed was in so many ways unforgivable, with repercussions lasting throughout history to this day, when they are still struggling to be heard. Lee also talked to us about the pilgrims and the journey one takes to get connected to them. Lee left us in no doubt that an exploration of our DNA would lead us to realise that elitism and racism are delusions of the ignorant, as we are all just variants of one, with multicultural roots if you go back far enough.
The story is endlessly fascinating - and our own story became increasingly so, when, as we went to press print for the book’s publication at Deltor printing, we entered ‘lockdown’ in a global pandemic.
Gone was the swanky book launch party and even the ability to sell a book at Waterstones… we are now selling the book with the support of the community and online…
Come on the ultimate journey, buy a book at: www.wordfluential.com/sea-change