Project Mayflower
by Richard A.Stone 29 Apr 2024 21:20 UTC
Project Mayflower © Richard A. Stone
The Mayflower II — the replica of the 1620 ship that brought the Pilgrims to America and launched a nation—is seen by some 2.6 million visitors to Plymouth annually and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. But there is much more to the replica’s story than meets the eye. In fact, the origins of Project Mayflower began in the 1950s not with an American, but with a British World War II veteran named Warwick Charlton who had what seemed an impossible dream: to build a historically accurate replica, sail her across the Atlantic, and present the finished product as a thank-you to his country’s wartime ally.
What Charlton didn’t know was that the son of a powerful New England financier had the same idea. Henry 'Harry' Hornblower II wanted a replica just as badly, though for a different reason: as the star attraction for a new museum he was building in Massachusetts, soon to be known as Plimoth Plantation, where the original Mayflower had landed centuries before. Despite clearly different personal motives, Charlton and Hornblower agreed to join forces when they met by chance in 1955. Charlton would be responsible for financing, construction, and the vessel’s safe passage across the Atlantic, while Hornblower promised mooring, maintenance, and exhibition. Neither man could imagine what would happen next.
Project Mayflower recounts the never-before-told story of a grand adventure, from the origins of the idea, through the financial and political influences that nearly scuttled the ship, and the challenges of building an accurate replica based on a single known mention: William Bradford’s reference in Of Plimoth Plantation describing his craft simply as “180 tons of burden.” From there, Stone traces the Mayflower II’s dramatic seven-week ocean voyage from Plymouth, England, to Plymouth, Massachusetts, in the skilled hands of Alan Villiers and a crew of thirty-three bold men, and finishes by exploring the legacy of praise for the achievement, the skulduggery to tarnish the reputation of the project’s creator, and finally the Mayflower II’s lasting—and ongoing—impact on the United States of America.
"I love this book! It’s vivid, wry, surprising; a wonderful and enlightening tale. It brings to life a cast of characters and a set of adventures that modern readers will learn from, remember, and enjoy." — James Fallows, author of the New York Times bestseller Our Towns and other books
Excerpt - Chapter 13: BON VOYAGE
Good spirits were joined by fine weather, and around five on Saturday afternoon, April 20, 1957, Mayflower II slipped from her moorings and glided forward, politely holding a rope offered by the tugboat Tactful. Easterly winds that had freshened the harbor for the past several weeks were gone. Not even a breath remained. Thus an offer of assistance was gladly accepted, and for ten miles ancient wood and modern steel moved as one until the pair reached the famous Eddystone Light, well into the English Channel. After that, the ship was on her own, leaving behind a flotilla of sixty-seven yachts, dinghies, launches, and rowboats cheering her departure.
Captain Villiers later told his global audience of National Geographic readers that he was concerned about stowaways hiding among the huge crates—so much so that he had his two sons, Kit and Peter, crawl around belowdecks to see if they could find anyone hiding there, although “I had searched the cargo hold rigorously before leaving. It was jammed full of heavy treasure chests, each bulging with British goods for exhibition and trade promotion in America. Any of those chests was quite large enough to house a stowaway, male or female, but they had been examined and each was documented and manifested.” That was true, but the irrepressible promoter Warwick Charlton found a way around those safeguards and snuck a man named Bob Lewis aboard during prelaunch distractions. He planned to have the stowaway appear once the voyage began, but his plans were thwarted when a final inspection was made. “The first mate had gone down to the lower hold and put his questing hand against a human head in back of a barrel. The man was hauled out, hustled up the companionway and over the side into the escort boat, which had been called along-side. Two buckets of swill from the galley cascaded down on him while we hooted and jeered.” It was all very annoying to Villiers, who addressed the crew shortly thereafter from the quarterdeck. “Now, lads, the bull and publicity are behind us! We have to get down to the job of delivering this ship to America.”
From now on it would be Alan Villiers’s show, and he looked forward to entertaining the world with talents learned on the last giant windjammers in the 1920s and 1930s. Those skills were then refined further on the Joseph Conrad when he sailed her around the world, a total of fifty-seven thousand miles, before the outbreak of World War II. Standing with him on deck as they sailed toward the Bay of Biscay were his senior officers, men born out of their time when square-riggers were being driven from the sea by steam. They were “the kind of shipmates he’d always hoped for.”
Villiers contacted Godfrey Wicksteed, who would serve as first mate, as soon as he got his job offer from Project Mayflower. The two had sailed together thirty years earlier on the four-masted barque Ballands from Western Australia around Cape Horn to Britain with a belly full of wheat for English buyers. That craft also fed Wicksteed’s desire to learn as much as he could about old sailing techniques, and when he had to climb masts that could be as tall as a fifteen-story building and work in every kind of weather from velvet to volcanic, it became the perfect classroom. With that knowledge, plus a sturdy temperament, he was asked by Villiers in 1934 to take command of the Conrad and sail her from Copenhagen to London as his stand-in. Then came war, followed by peace, and Wicksteed went ashore to pursue a career as a schoolmaster. Now fifty-seven, he was a respected academic looking forward to retirement, yet there was still seawater in his veins. The lure of becoming Mayflower II’s second in command was irresistible—provided, of course, that he could get permission from the Cambridge Education Committee and his wife. How could they say no? Alan’s first key hire was confirmed. Before leaving for the voyage, however, the chief mate went to nearly three hundred schools to tell them about the original Mayflower, describe his upcoming adventure, and commit to writing a lengthy letter to each one of them from the high seas. Aboard the ship, his teacherly ways would continue. The incoming freshmen—mariners who were unaccustomed to working before the mast—quickly discovered that Wicksteed had forgotten more about square-rigged sailing than they might ever learn. He was an inspiration.
Of equal competence was Adrian Small, who left England at age sixteen to apprentice under the renowned Finnish sea captain Gustaf Erikson on big four-masted windjammers that served Australia and the world. Small spent several years on the Erikson ship Passat as it circled the globe delivering agricultural products to eager buyers, and he was aboard on its penultimate grain race from Australia to the United Kingdom, as a way of life for generations of mariners came to an end. Coincidently, Villers wrote about that era in his 1933 book Grain Race, and the two men could talk for hours about their common love of the sea. Small subsequently worked as Villers’s second mate aboard the Pequod during the Moby Dick movie project, and today he stood beside the captain in that same capacity. At age twenty-eight, the mariner with a bright red beard was an excellent role model for novice crewmen.
The Joseph Conrad was then tapped again, this time for the third mate, Danish captain Jan Junker, a forty-year-old Inuit-speaking ice pilot who had been working Greenland routes since the end of World War II. During that conflict, Junker spent a year in the hell of a Nazi concentration camp. Trained as a saboteur, he had parachuted behind enemy lines from an RAF bomber, his mission to teach those dark arts to resistance fighters. Unfortunately, the Germans arrested him along with ten others, nine of whom were shot before Junker was imprisoned. After the war he returned to the sea, and this voyage looked too exciting to pass up. Alan considered him “a steadfast and supremely competent sailing-ship seaman both before the mast and abaft it, and I regarded his presence aboard as a major asset to the vessel.” The crew agreed, particularly when Junker gave salty sage advice to some of the younger men. Just prior to leaving Plymouth he told them that everyone was destined to get seasick at least once during the voyage, and some more often than others. His recommendation? “In bad weather, always eat apricots—they taste the same coming up or going down.”
Mayflower’s boatswain, generally shortened to bos’n, was Alan’s most important all-purpose sailor, who oversaw the crew and the ship’s equipment. For this daunting and essential position, another North Sea Pequod veteran was chosen, Isaac “Ike” Marsh. The skillful Welshman had been working at the Barry Docks near Cardiff most recently, and he had deep knowledge and experience of mariners and materials—plus he was a fast and fearless ratline climber, a human spider who could race about the ship’s hemp webs in any kind of weather, day or night. He was perfect for the job, and he told Alan, “I’ve looked forward to an experience like this all my life.”
These four men gave the man from Down Under great confidence and eased his task of assembling the rest of his crew in accordance with the rules. While the first Mayflower sailed under the watchful eye of God alone, its namesake was required to go forth under the glaring gaze of bespectacled bureaucrats at the Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation. Lifesaving gear was required for sixty-six men, twice the size of the actual crew, plus five inflatable life rafts that could each hold twelve sailors, just in case they had to abandon ship. A two-way radio was also mandated. However, no special rules were issued for the ship’s cook, carpenter, and doctor, which was fine with the captain because he knew what he needed.
About the Author
Richard A. Stone is the founder of Mayflower Event News, an information platform devoted to stories related to the Mayflower and Mayflower II. A graduate of Harvard (BA in economics) and the University of California, Los Angeles (MA in journalism), he worked for decades with America’s premier media groups, including NBC, HBO, Time Inc., and ESPN/Disney. He has additionally provided expertise to the Canadian Football League, advised Panasonic Avionics on in-flight entertainment, and worked as a consultant to the Plimoth Patuxet Museums. Originally from Southern California, he now lives in Cos Cob, Connecticut.