Guest Post: Life On the Mayflower from Noelle Granger

Today I'm thrilled to have author and blogger (and a whole host of other things), Noelle Granger with us!  Noelle is the author behind the Rhe Brewster mystery series which you must pick up if you enjoy mysteries (my review for her 2nd book - Death in a Dacron Sail can be found here).

I am honored to be asked by Katherine to do a guest post.  When she asked me what I might write about, I didn’t have to think long or hard. One item on my bucket list is to write a historical novel about Mary Allerton, who came to the New World as a four-year-old, on the Mayflower. What’s so special about this particular woman is the length of her life. She lived to be 82, the last Mayflower survivor, and thus saw the unrolling of history beginning with the bitter cold November day when the Pilgrims’ transatlantic voyage came to an end with the sighting of land at Cape Cod.

Mayflower II, an exact replica of the original ship (As a young girl, I was privileged to be in Plymouth Harbor when the Mayflower II sailed into Plymouth Harbor for the first time. What a raucous greeting she got!

What I’d share is the story of the Mayflower and what life was like aboard during the months it took to reach the New World.  So what do we know about the Mayflower? It was a typical English merchant ship of the early 17th century – square rigged and beak bowed (square sails and a pointed prow) – with high, castle-like structures fore (in front) and aft (behind) for the protection of the ship's crew and the main deck from the elements.  The problem was these superstructures made the Mayflower unable to sail well again the prevailing west-to-east winds on the North Atlantic, which is why the voyage to American took sixty-six days.  With the westerly winds at it back, the Mayflower made its return trip to England in less than half the time, April-May of 1621.

The Mayflower and the Speedwell in Dartmouth Harbor by Leslie Wilcox
                By 1620, the Mayflower was an aging ship, nearing the end of a normal working life for a merchant ship, about 15 years. Surprisingly, there are no exact measurements of her hull because measurements in those days were not standardized. The best guess is that the Mayflower measured about 100 feet in length from fore to aft and about 25 feet at her widest point. That’s pretty small – think one third of a football field and half as wide. She had three decks: an upper deck, a gun deck and a cargo hold.                       

The gun deck (labelled above as the main deck) was where the passengers lived during the voyage. Imagine life in a dark, airless space 50 feet by 25 feet with a five-foot ceiling, crowded with 102 fellow travelers, 34 of them children! ‘Crowded’ is probably an understatement, and think about the noise level on the gun deck! The gun deck also contained port and starboard cannons, a storage place for powder and ammunition, and something called a windlass, which was used to raise and lower the ship's main anchor – hence only 50 feet of livable space. Imagine 34 children running around in this cramped and not particularly safe area for more than two months! It was possible to go up on the main deck for air, but there were no stairs; the passengers had to climb a ladder.

Below the gun deck was the cargo hold. Here the Mayflower’s passengers kept most of their food stores, clothing, bedding, tools and equipment and weapons.  There was no livestock on board; the Pilgrims did not have chickens, goats, or cows traveling with them, and this added to the misery of starvation during their first year in the Plimoth Colony.

There was no latrine or privy on the Mayflower. The ship's crew fended for themselves and gun deck passengers most likely used an open bucket affixed to the deck or bulkhead to keep it from being jostled at sea. There was no place to wash, either. Washing would involve using sea water, but most likely the passengers wore the same clothes for the sixty-six days of the trip. So add to their miseries the smell. This was compounded by the odor of sea sickness, especially during the storms the Mayflower encountered so late in the season. The crew called the passengers “glib-gabbety puke stockings.”

So who were among the Mayflower passengers? Roughly forty were Pilgrims. Of the rest, some men were going for adventure, but many went going with their families because they couldn’t find work in England. There was a doctor, a shoemaker, a blacksmith and a cooper, former farmers, weavers, and shopkeepers, along with some indentured servants.

What did the passengers eat? All of them had a steady diet of salt horse – salted beef, pork or fish – and hardtack, a hard, dry biscuit. Day after day, month after month. Early on, there were dried peas and beans, and some cheese and butter. But the hardtack, which grew harder with age, got infested with the bugs that were everywhere on board, the butter turned bad and the cheese got moldy.

To cook, the passengers built charcoal fires in braziers, but with the weather stormy and the ammunition in close proximity, this wasn’t possible much of the time. So the passengers ate their food cold for much of the voyage. There was water and beer to drink (not the same as modern beer), but the water became unsafe to drink after standing in barrels so people mostly drank beer, even the children. After a while, even the beer soured.

High winds and rough seas tossed the passengers about. To add to their misery, in the midst of one fierce storm, the main deck beam cracked, and salt water poured in on the passengers, soaking their clothes, bedding and food.

During another, John Howland, one of the Pilgrims, was pitched overboard. He survived because he managed to grab a topsail halyard that was trailing in the water and was hauled back aboard safely.  

What would children like Mary Allerton done for fun on the Mayflower? They might watch the crew, or they could play with the two dogs on board. There was also a cat, whose job was to catch rats. There were books to read, if the child could handle adult books. There was singing, too, but mainly psalms. Not so much fun, to my mind.

The worst was yet to come for the people on the Mayflower. During the winter of 1620, the passengers remained on board. The men had been unable to complete enough dwellings on shore for everyone because of bad weather, freezing temperatures, and sickness. In addition, there was a combined outbreak of scurvy, pneumonia, and tuberculosis. When it ended, there were only 53 passengers, just over half, still alive. Half of the crew died as well. On March 21, 1621, when enough huts had been completed for the move to land, the surviving passengers finally disembarked from the Mayflower.

So what do you think? Would you have survived this voyage?

Needless to say, my admiration for these doughty people has grown by leaps and bounds as I learn more about them.

The Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor, by William Halsall, 1882