Chapter 1 | The Pilgrims | American Experience | PBS

Summer was rapidly fading and the window for attempting the long and dangerous ocean crossing had already begun to close when on September 6, 1620 an old 180-ton ship called the Mayflower weighed anchor off Plymouth, off the southern coast of England, and set out alone across the North Atlantic on what would prove to be one of the most historic voyages of the millennium, it is worth reminding ourselves that at the time they were a very small group of very extreme people and if we had never heard of them again them, no one would. Surprise and most English thought they were rid of them.

The fact that in the long term they have extraordinary success. That they have discovered that the world's greatest democracy sheds retrospective brilliance. You could say that if you wanted to be critical. madmen who will not settle for anything except the most literal reading of the Bible want to transform a nation-state into something resembling what they consider a divine kingdom they were not the people one would expect to found a new colony they were not soldiers they were not emissaries from a foreign government were not particularly well supplied with supplies at least half of them were separatists i.e. radical protestants who were religious exiles who had been living in leiden, the dutch republic were not the people who would automatically be expected to found a new outpost of the British empire;

In many ways, they were the working groups least likely to establish a permanent English presence in the new world. Less than 50 of the 102 passengers were adult men. many of them were already past their physical prime, at least 30 were children and almost 20 were women, including three pregnant women. When they set sail, England had not yet managed to establish a truly viable colony on the shores of the new world and its chances of survival were diminishing. Success alone is almost non-existent if we look at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1620 they injected about 8,000 settlers there and yet they struggled to keep the numbers above a thousand.

The mortality rate was terrible, so it was a very dangerous step. Even contemplate especially considering the number of people in the mail that don't register numerically at all, it's a small handful of people, many of whom don't survive. We are thinking about migration to the Americas in the 17th and 18th centuries. Speaking of 10 million Africans, for example, compared to this small handful of English men and women, what is fascinating then about the story of the pilgrim is how this small group of people managed to get ahead and manage to tell the story in such a way that it erases that.

Another completely different story, if you ask people where America begins they will say it begins at Plymouth Rock, even though Jamestown was founded in 1607 and Plymouth was founded in 1620, it somehow became our national origin story with the passage of time, the arrival. of this fragile and improbable band would come to be seen as the true founding moment of America and the story of their arrival enshrined as the quintessential myth of American origins commemorated each year on the fourth Thursday of November on Thanksgiving Day and embodied into a handful of iconic and instantly recognizable images including a rock, a boat, and a party that almost certainly never took place as we imagined.

I think we feel that we are such a new country that we need to know how it all started, we need that initial moment and The Pilgrims fulfill that purpose, but what people forget is that not everything vanished: they were normal people in extraordinary circumstances and they invented themselves. as they progressed and it ends up being as much a survival story as it is a story. of origins What no one could have imagined in the fall of 1620, when the autumn winds carried the 102 passengers of the Mayflower westward across the Atlantic was how harrowing, dark and deeply disturbing their pilgrimage to the new world would be or how absolute it would be. his search for a divine world.

The republic would transform the world to which the seekers themselves sailed and the nation that would rise long after their death consecrated to their memory because the

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have been so enshrined in the national imagination because they have meant so much to what we do. We have told ourselves who we are as Americans, we need to go back and ask ourselves questions about why we chose that story, what it was about these people, what it was that we wanted to see of their story reflected in our own national image, there has been a tremendous Se It produces a large amount of memory around the

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, but there have also been many forgotten ones.

You know that memory is very selective, so looking at what has been remembered and letting that shed light on what has been forgotten is an important exercise when we think about something. that has been so central to our national imagination