History’s lessons for today’s world
Mayflower a chance for reflection says Dr Martha Vandrei of Exeter University
AS we mark 400 years since the Mayflower’s journey across the Atlantic it is fascinating to look back on how the story of those who sailed from Plymouth in 1620 has been remembered. Here in Britain, we have less of a sense of the Mayflower’s history than they do in America. But that’s not to say that Britain didn’t have its own views on the Mayflower.
British views of the Mayflower have shifted with the times. Today, especially in the US, the Mayflower “Pilgrims” are still portrayed as brave families escaping discrimination in England to create a new life and find freedom in the New World.
At the time of their journey the Mayflower pilgrims were viewed in Britain with a mixture of disdain and indifference. For many seventeenthand eighteenth-century commentators, they were just one group of many leaving Britain to seek their fortune – whether worldly or godly, and many people suspected the former – on other shores. Over time, and especially as Britain and America proceeded to fight a series of wars, the afterlife of the Pilgrims took on new connotations. British commentators used the story for a whole host of purposes, from encouraging colonial settlement, to agitating for the abolition of slavery. Romantic poets played their part, casting the Pilgrims as brave souls, undaunted by hardship.
But it is not until the end of the First World War, specifically the tercentenary of the Mayflower voyage in 1920 that we begin to see that kind of organised commemorative activity in Britain that had been going on in America for centuries. That year saw dozens, possibly hundreds, of events held to mark the three-hundredth anniversary of the Pilgrims’ historic journey.
I’m part of a team of researchers who have created a new digital map, hosted online by the University of Exeter, which shows the scale and variety of historic commemorative activity associated with the Mayflower in Britain. The map suggests that a key driver in the 1920 celebrations was religion, probably more than nationalism or imperialism – though it’s hard to disaggregate. A lot of the celebrations we see in 1920 were put on by non-conformist groups. It was actually still a relatively recent development that these groups were allowed all the same freedoms as their Anglican counterparts, so the Mayflower was an opportunity to showcase their reach.
The Pilgrims were themselves persecutors. There is no doubt that the Pilgrims became the aggressors once they arrived in what was, to them, the ‘New World’.. Not only were they violent, both physically and psychologically, towards indigenous groups, they also ruthlessly persecuted, exiled, or even executed people who did not share their brand of Protestantism. People like Quakers. So it is something of an irony that one of the main proponents of the Mayflower Tercentenary celebrations was a Quaker, the
Plymouthian, Dr James Rendel Harris (1852-1941). Rendel, as he was known, was a scholar and librarian who specialised in the Greek New Testament. He was also an enthusiastic antiquarian and hunter after rare manuscripts. After two brushes with death by torpedo while at sea in 1917, Rendel turned his mind towards securing long-term peace in the world. For him, the AngloAmerican relationship held the key. Rendel was a pacifist and had two motivations for pushing the commemoration in 1920. The first was to celebrate the non-conformist community in Britain. But the second was that, for him, the Mayflower story was a way to bring America and Britain together for a celebration of not just a shared past, but a shared future, too. Rendel travelled all over Britain trying to drum up support, but Plymouth was his main focus. He even went so far as to suggest the founding of a new university in Plymouth: the Mayflower University, which sadly didn’t take off. In 2020, the Mayflower is having another moment of commemoration, but this one will be very different. Indigenous groups today are suffering disproportionately from Covid-19, but that comes on top of centuries of violent persecution and social, economic, and political inequality, of which the story of the Mayflower is just one precursor. The “Pilgrims Fathers” judged and persecuted, and even resorted to violence, in ways that we still see today. The anniversary of the Mayflower voyage is an opportunity to reflect on what is different in 2020 from 1620 – as well as what is the same.