Packing for Passage on the Mayflower

Many of us struggle to know exactly what to pack when we go on our various travels. The Pilgrims in their voyage to the new world were no different. As Bill Bryson describes in his book Made in America:

It would be difficult to imagine a group of people more ill-suited to a life in the wilderness. They packed as if they had misunderstood the purpose of the trip, They found room for sundials and candle snuffers, a drum, a trumpet, and a complete history of Turkey. One William Mullins packed 126 pairs of shoes and thirteen pairs of boots. Yet they failed to bring a single cow or horse, plow or fishing line.

Among the professions represented on the Mayflower’s manifest were two tailors, a printer, several merchants, a silk worker, a shopkeeper, and a hatter—occupations whose indispensability is not immediately evident when one thinks of surviving in a hostile environment.

Their military commander, Miles Standish, Was so diminutive of stature that he was known to all as “Captain Shrimpe”—hardly a figure to inspire awe in the savage natives, whom they confidently expected to encounter. With the uncertain exception of the little captain, probably none in the party had ever tried to bring down a wild animal. Hunting in seventeenth-century Europe was a sport reserved for the aristocracy.

Even those who labeled themselves farmers generally had scant practical knowledge of husbandry, since farmer in the 1600s, and for some time afterward, signified an owner of land rather than one who worked it.

They were, in short, dangerously unprepared for the rigors ahead, and they demonstrated their incompetence in the most dramatic possible way: by dying in droves. Six expired in the first two weeks, eight the next month, seventeen more in February, a further thirteen in March. By April, when the Mayflower set sail back to England, just fifty-four people, nearly half of them children, were left to begin the long work of turning this tenuous toehold into a self-sustaining colony.

They were, in short, dangerously unprepared for the rigors ahead, and they demonstrated their incompetence in the most dramatic way possible: by dying in droves. Six expired in the first two weeks, eight the next month, 17 more in February, a further 13 in March. By April, when the Mayflower set sail back to England, just 54 people, nearly half of them children, were left to begin the long work of turning this tenuous toehold into a self-sustaining colony.