The Mayflower sailed from Southampton on 15 August 1620. This is not a disputed historical fact. The passengers had assembled in Southampton from Leiden in the Netherlands, where a Separatist congregation had been living in exile since 1608. They joined a second group known as the Strangers – non-Separatist settlers recruited by the investors financing the voyage – and the combined company of around 120 people boarded two ships in Southampton’s West Quay. The ships were the Mayflower and the Speedwell. The Virginia Company had its own quay at Southampton. The embarkation was a Southampton event.
The Speedwell leaked badly from the start. The fleet made two attempts to set out into the Atlantic, putting back first to Dartmouth and then to Plymouth for repairs. The Speedwell was judged unseaworthy and abandoned. Some of its passengers transferred to the Mayflower, some went home, and the Mayflower finally left Plymouth on 16 September 1620 with 102 passengers. This is the Plymouth that figures in the American founding myth: the last English port before the Atlantic crossing, the place from which the Pilgrim Fathers finally departed for the New World.
Who Actually Sailed
The Separatists from Leiden were a minority of the passengers. Of the 102 people who crossed on the Mayflower, approximately 37 were members of the Leiden congregation. The remaining 65 were the Strangers: servants, skilled craftsmen, soldiers and settlers with no particular religious motivation, recruited by the Merchant Adventurers investment group to provide practical skills and justify the commercial case for the voyage. The story of Pilgrims fleeing religious persecution obscures the fact that the majority of people on the ship were workers hired to make the venture viable.
Of the 102 passengers, 45 died in the first winter at Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts. The survivors relied substantially on help from the Wampanoag people, particularly Squanto, who spoke English having been kidnapped and taken to England earlier in the century. The first Thanksgiving harvest festival of 1621 is a real historical event; its significance as an American origin myth was constructed retrospectively over the following two centuries.
Southampton’s Claim
Southampton has the Mayflower Memorial, a column on the Town Quay erected in 1913, and the Mayflower Park, which overlooks the water. The city’s connection to the voyage is marked but not loudly asserted. The American tourist trade – worth considerable money to Plymouth in Devon – has shaped how the departure point is remembered. Plymouth spent the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries actively constructing its Pilgrim Father identity, including the installation of Plymouth Rock as a physical monument to the departure, despite the rock having no particular documented significance to the actual passengers. Southampton let it happen.
The 400th anniversary in 2020 provided some correction. The scholarly consensus that Southampton was the primary embarkation point received more mainstream attention. The connection to the Leiden congregation and the role of the Merchant Adventurers in financing the voyage also received better coverage. The myth of a purely religious exodus of oppressed Separatists is not quite accurate, and Southampton’s story of a commercial venture assembled on the West Quay is more complex and more interesting.
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