American Experience

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NARRATOR

Summer was fading fast, and the window for attempting the long and dangerous ocean crossing had already started to close when on September 6, 1620, an aging 180-ton ship called the Mayflower weighed anchor off Plymouth, off the south coast of England, and set out on her own across the North Atlantic on what would prove to be one of the most historic voyages of the millennium.

PAULINE CROFT

It's worth reminding ourselves that at the time, they were a very, very small group of very extreme people. And if we'd never heard of them ever again, nobody would be surprised. And most English people thought that they were well rid of them. The fact that they are, in the long term, extraordinarily successful, that they found the world's greatest democracy, throws retrospective luster. They are, one might say, if you wanted to be critical, they're religious nutters who won't settle for anything except the most literal reading of the Bible. They want to transform a nation-state into something that resembles what they take to be a godly kingdom.

NICK BUNKER

They weren't the people that you would expect to be founding a new colony. They weren't soldiers. They were not emissaries of a foreign government. They were not particularly well provided with supplies. At least half of them were Separatists, that is to say radical Protestants, who were religious exiles who had been living in Leiden in the Dutch Republic. They weren't the people you would automatically expect to be founding a new outpost of the British Empire.

NARRATOR

They were in many ways the least likely of task forces for establishing a permanent English presence in the New World. Fewer than 50 of the 102 passengers were adult men, many well past their physical prime. At least 30 were children, and nearly 20 were women, including three expectant mothers. By the time they set sail England had still not succeeded in establishing a truly viable colony on the shores of the New World, and their chances of survival, let alone success, were all but nil.

SUE ALLAN

When you look at Jamestown, Virginia, by 1620, they'd pumped in something like 8,000 colonists there, and yet they were struggling to keep their numbers above 1,000. The death rate was awful, so it was a very dangerous step to even contemplate, especially given the number of people on the Mayflower.

JILL LEPORE

They don't register at all numerically. It's a tiny handful of people, many of whom don't survive. We're thinking about migration to the Americas in the 17th and 18th century, we're talking about ten million Africans, for instance, as against this tiny handful of Englishmen and women? The fascinating thing then about the Pilgrim story is how this tiny group of people managed to get by and managed to tell the story in such a way as to erase that whole other history.

KATHLEEN DONEGAN

If you ask people, "Where does America start?" they'll say, "It starts at Plymouth Rock." Despite the fact that Jamestown was founded in 1607 and Plymouth was founded in 1620, it became our story of national origin.

NARRATOR

Somehow, with the passage of time, the arrival of this frail, unlikely band would come to be seen as the true founding moment of America, and the story of their coming enshrined as the quintessential myth of American origins, commemorated each year on the fourth Thursday in November at Thanksgiving and embodied in a handful of iconic and instantly recognizable images, including a rock and a ship, and a feast that almost certainly never took place as we imagine it did.

NATHANIEL PHILBRICK

I think we feel that we're such a new country that we need to know how it all began. We need that beginning moment, and the Pilgrims serve that purpose. But what people forget is that it wasn't all fated. These were normal people under extraordinary circumstances, and they were making it up as they went along. And it ends up being as much a story of survival as it is a story of origins.

NARRATOR

What no one could have imagined in the fall of 1620, as autumn winds blew the 102 passengers of the Mayflower west across the Atlantic, was how harrowing, dark, and deeply unsettling their pilgrimage to the New World would be, or how utterly their quest for a godly republic would transform the world they were sailing towards, the searchers themselves, and the nation that would rise up long after they were gone, consecrated to their memory.

DONEGAN

Because the Pilgrims have been so enshrined in the national imagination, because they've meant so much in what we've told ourselves about who we are as Americans, we need to go back and ask questions about why we picked that story, what it was about these people, what it was about their history that we wanted to see reflected in our own national image. There's been a tremendous amount of memory produced around the Pilgrims, but there's also been a lot of forgetting. You know, that memory is very selective. And so to look at what's been remembered and let that shed light on what's been forgotten, is an important exercise when we're thinking about something that has been so central to our national imagination.