By the time the English arrived, the Wampanoag would have been familiar with Europeans, including the terrible diseases they brought. Photograph: The Box/PAīut religious freedom and economic opportunity for the English would come at a heavy price for the Wampanoag. Wampanoag artist Ramona Peters with her ceramic cooking pot, on display at Mayflower 400: Legend & Legacy exhibition. Economic factors fuelled the Separatists’ decision to obtain permission from the London Company of Virginia to establish a colony, and for funding from the Company of Merchant Adventurers. “It’s just not the story we think it is,” said Loosemore. What drove them onwards was the lack of economic opportunity.
Although the mythology presents them as fierce critics of the Church of England seeking religious freedom, they had already found that in the Dutch city of Leiden, where they lived for a decade before crossing the Atlantic. This was also the case for the Separatists. “There were the Mayflower passengers, but more importantly the institutions that have roots in Plymouth that were playing a part in encouraging settlements taking place on the eastern part of the US.”
“People living and working in Plymouth might be surprised about the importance that the city has played in that part of history,” said Nicola Moyle, head of heritage, art and film for the Box. Part of the exhibition looks at these failed attempts at colonisation. As well as these early settlers, Europeans came to trade – and often to kidnap and enslave Native Americans – well before the arrival of the Pilgrims. Eventually, in 1607, the English had success with the colony of Jamestown, Virginia, which managed to survive. Some 35 years before the Mayflower, two ships set sail from Plymouth to explore the North Carolina coast, and the following year the colony of Roanoke was established, but by 1590 all the settlers had disappeared. Juan Ponce de León explored Florida as early as 1513, and the Spanish had a settlement in St Augustine by 1565, while French Huguenots tried and failed to establish a colony on the coast of what is now South Carolina in 1562. They came for religious freedom but did not have the same tolerance for the people they met Paula Peters, tribal memberĪlthough the Pilgrims are often used as an origin myth for the US, the English were late arrivals to North America. The reality, as this exhibition shows, was far more complicated – and violent.
Their help enabled the English to survive, and also became the basis for the much-mythologised first Thanksgiving feast, still celebrated in the US as a national holiday, though not without controversy. They had an estimated population of at least 15,000 in the early 1600s, and lived in villages on the Massachusetts coast and inland. They endured a treacherous 66-day voyage and were blown off course, landing on the tip of what is now Massachusetts, before crossing the bay to set up a colony on land belonging to the Wampanoag, whose name means “people of the first light” and who had inhabited the area for some 12,000 years. The general story is well known: the Mayflower took its 102 men, women, and children – the majority of whom were Puritan religious dissenters known as Separatists, but also called Pilgrims – from Plymouth to what they hoped would be the Hudson river. The omission in the port book is one of many gaps surrounding the voyage of the Mayflower that the exhibition tries to fill. If anything, it was an act of madness because they were going at the wrong time of year into an incredibly dangerous Atlantic,” said the exhibition’s curator, Jo Loosemore. “This wasn’t a huge historic voyage in 1620.
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