Author’s Historical Library

Section One

A Note Before You Read

The story you have just read is fiction, built on a foundation of documented historical facts. Captain Reynolds, Robert Cushman, William Bradford, the Speedwell herself, her three attempts to cross the Atlantic, and her abandonment at Plymouth on September 6, 1620, all belong to history.

William Trevore was there. Bradford recorded his name in Of Plymouth Plantation: “There were also other two seamen hired to stay a year here in the country, William Trevor, and one Ely. But when their time was out they both returned.” The historical record places him on the Speedwell before her abandonment, aboard the Mayflower for the September 1620 crossing, and at Plymouth Colony through the first winter. An island in Boston Harbor once bore his name. It is now called Thompson’s Island. We tip our hat to a man history named and then forgot. His father’s chair, his mother’s Bible, his sixty acres, and the wife he had not yet met belong to the story. The man himself was real.

Bradford spelled the name Trevor. Other period sources record it as Trevore. Both spellings appear in the historical record. The story uses Trevore.

Readers who wanted to know where the fiction ends and the historical record begins inspired the author to create this library. Primary historical sources, chiefly William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, the surviving letters of Robert Cushman, and the maritime and genealogical scholarship built around the Mayflower voyage over the past four centuries, provide the material for everything in these pages. Where the record is silent, this Library says so plainly. Where historians disagree, it presents those disagreements honestly.

---

Section Two

The People Behind the Story

The historical figures whose actions shaped the events of The Speedwell’s Confession are drawn here from primary sources, principally Bradford’s account but also from Cushman’s surviving letters, the genealogical record, and modern scholarship. Where the historical record is silent, that silence is acknowledged.

---

William Trevore

The Man Who Was There

William Trevore appears in the historical record in a single sentence. Bradford wrote in Of Plymouth Plantation: “There were also other two seamen hired to stay a year here in the country, William Trevor, and one Ely. But when their time was out they both returned.”

That sentence is almost everything history preserved of him. An island in Boston Harbor once bore his name. It is now called Thompson’s Island. He later captained a vessel called the William, carrying passengers to New England in the 1630s. Beyond that the record is silent.

What the record does confirm is this. He was on the Speedwell before her abandonment. He transferred to the Mayflower for the September 1620 crossing. He survived the first winter at Plymouth Colony, when nearly half the company died between November 1620 and March 1621. He completed his service and sailed home aboard the Fortune in December 1621. On that return voyage French privateers captured the Fortune and held the crew and passengers on the Ile d’Yeu, Poitou before releasing them. He survived that too.

The Contract

William arrived at Southampton on a one-year seaman’s contract, hired as a laborer for the voyage. But the colonists boarding alongside him carried a different agreement entirely. Seven years of total labor in service of the common stock, with sixty acres of New World land promised at the end. In England, land belonged to the nobility. A carpenter with good hands and a strong back could work his entire life and never own the ground beneath his feet.

Before the Speedwell sailed, William signed a second contract. The Merchant Adventurers needed laborers and craftsmen on the other side of the ocean. They agreed to credit his existing year of service toward the longer term. One year already committed. Six years remaining. Sixty acres waiting at the end of seven.

The one-year agreement went in one pocket. The seven-year agreement went in the other. He carried both through the Atlantic storm. The sea does not honor parchment. It does not distinguish between them either.

What Else He Carried

His father had dreamed of land and died without it. William carried that unfinished dream across the ocean in the same coat as his contracts. His mother died in childbirth. She left him her Geneva Bible. He kept it on his body through the storm. It was the only thing she gave him that the ocean could not take. The sixty acres meant nothing without someone to build them with. The wife he had not yet met was a reason, not yet a person. The crossing was supposed to find her.

What the First Winter Took

William survived what half the company did not. Between November 1620 and March 1621 nearly fifty men, women, and children died at Plymouth. Five of eighteen adult women lived. When his credited year ended he faced a choice the record does not explain. Stay and press his claim on the six remaining years and the sixty acres. Or return to England with one year complete and the winter’s losses carved into his memory. He returned.

Why a man who crossed an ocean for land chose to leave it is the question the record will not answer.

The Fortune and What Came After

He boarded the Fortune in December 1621. Robert Cushman, the same charter agent from the Speedwell’s story, arrived on that same vessel bringing supplies and a new patent. The circle closes on that Plymouth dock in ways neither of them planned.

The Fortune was captured at sea by French privateers. William Trevore survived the Speedwell’s failing hull, the Mayflower’s crossing, Plymouth’s first winter, and a pirate capture at sea. He later became master of his own ship. He captained the William in the 1630s carrying new waves of settlers to the New World he had left behind.

Whether he ever found his sixty acres, or the wife he had not yet met, the record does not say. We hope he did. He earned it.

---

Thomas Blossom

The Man Who Bought the Ship

Thomas Blossom was born around 1580 in the village of Little Shelford in Cambridgeshire, England, the son of Peter and Annabel Blossom. He married Anne Elsdon at St. Clement’s Church in Cambridge on November 10, 1605. By 1609 he had joined the Separatist congregation that had fled England for Holland, and he had settled in Leiden with his wife.

He was, by all available evidence, a man of practical capability and quiet standing in the congregation. The historical record identifies him as the man who chaired the committee that purchased the Speedwell in the summer of 1620 and who supervised her refitting at Delfshaven. He boarded her with one of his sons, leaving Anne and his other children, including an infant daughter named Elizabeth born in Leiden earlier that year, behind in the city. The plan, as it had been for the entire first wave of emigrants, was that he would establish himself in the colony and send for his family afterward.

When the Speedwell was abandoned at Plymouth in September 1620, Blossom did not transfer to the Mayflower. He returned to Leiden with his son.

The historical record offers no direct evidence as to why he made that decision. He had been responsible for the purchase of a ship that had failed the congregation. The failure was not his fault. Reynolds was the captain, and the structural problems with the rigging were the work of the Delfshaven shipwrights. But a man in his position could be forgiven for feeling that the failure was his to carry. Whatever his reasons, he did not board the Mayflower, and he did not see America for nine more years.

His son who had sailed with him on the Speedwell died in Leiden sometime before December 1625. Pastor Robinson died in March of that same year. In December 1625, Blossom wrote a letter to Bradford in Plymouth, which has survived and which is the most revealing document he left behind. In it he described the difficulty the Leiden remnant faced in trying to follow the original wave of emigrants to America, and he asked plainly whether Plymouth Colony could provide the financial means for them to make the voyage. The Leiden congregation by that point had been reduced by death and by departure to a fraction of its former numbers. They could not afford the passage on their own.

Bradford and the Plymouth leadership eventually arranged for the financing. In 1629, Thomas Blossom, his wife Anne, their son Thomas Junior, and their daughter Elizabeth, the infant who had been born in Leiden in 1620 while her father was attempting his first crossing, sailed for Plymouth on a second vessel that bore the same name as the more famous one. They arrived on May 15, 1629, nine years after Blossom had first boarded the Speedwell at Delfshaven.

He lived in Plymouth for less than four years. He died in the summer of 1633, in the epidemic of infectious fever that Bradford recorded in his account of that year. He was approximately fifty-three years old at the time of his death.

His daughter Elizabeth, who had been born in Leiden in 1620 while her father was crossing and recrossing the Atlantic in his attempts to reach the New World, survived. She married, raised a family, and died in old age. Her descendants, traced through generations of careful genealogical work, include Barack Obama, the forty-fourth President of the United States.

Thomas Blossom is buried in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in ground he had spent nine years trying to reach.

---

William Bradford

The Man Who Wrote It Down

William Bradford was born in Austerfield, Yorkshire, on March 19, 1590. His father died when he was one year old. His mother died six years later. He was raised by an uncle, who intended him for farming and discouraged him from the religious interests that had begun to shape his life as a child.

When he was twelve years old, a family friend took him to hear a Separatist preacher named Richard Clyfton at the parish church of Babworth in Nottinghamshire, ten miles from Austerfield. The sermon changed him. He continued to walk the ten miles to hear Clyfton preach despite his uncle’s increasingly forceful objections. By the time he was a teenager he had become a committed member of the Separatist congregation that met at the manor house at Scrooby, where William Brewster was the lay elder.

He was seventeen years old when he fled England for Holland with the rest of the congregation in 1608. He spent the next twelve years in Leiden, supporting himself as a fustian weaver while teaching himself to read Dutch, French, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, the last so that he could read the Old Testament in its original language. He read his way through the library of his mentor William Brewster, and he educated himself in theology, history, and political theory at a level few formally educated Englishmen of his generation could match.

In 1613 he married Dorothy May in Amsterdam. She was approximately sixteen years old at the time of the marriage. They lived in Leiden together for seven years. In 1617 they had a son, John, who was three years old when the time came for the first wave of emigrants to depart for the New World. The Bradfords made the same difficult decision many families made. They left their young son behind in Leiden in the care of relatives, judging the Atlantic crossing and the establishment of a colony from nothing too dangerous for a child of his age.

William and Dorothy Bradford crossed the Atlantic together aboard the Mayflower. He was thirty years old when he first set foot in the New World at Cape Cod in November 1620. On December 7, 1620, while Bradford was ashore with the exploring party, Dorothy Bradford fell from the deck of the Mayflower into the harbor at Provincetown and drowned. He was not aboard when it happened. He returned to find her gone. He never wrote about her death directly. The single mention of it in Of Plymouth Plantation is a dated entry without commentary.

In April 1621, three months after the Mayflower had landed, the first elected governor of Plymouth Colony, John Carver, died of what was probably heat stroke while working in the colony’s fields. The colony elected Bradford to replace him. He was thirty-one years old. He would be re-elected to the governorship roughly thirty times over the next thirty-five years, declining the office only when the work became too much and serving again when the colony asked him to.

In 1623 he married Alice Southworth, the widow of a friend, who had come over from England on the ship Anne. They had three children together.

In 1630, ten years after the Mayflower had landed, Bradford began writing the history of the colony he had helped to build. He worked on the manuscript intermittently for the next twenty-one years, completing it in 1651. He titled it Of Plymouth Plantation. It is the single most important primary source for nearly everything we know about the Mayflower voyage and the early years of Plymouth Colony, including the events that frame the present Library.

He died in Plymouth on May 9, 1657, at the age of sixty-seven. He was buried on the hill that overlooks Plymouth Harbor, where the Mayflower had once anchored.

His manuscript remained in the possession of his family for over a century. During the American Revolution, it disappeared from Boston, where it had been deposited for safekeeping. It was almost certainly carried to England by a British soldier or loyalist who recognized its value. It was rediscovered in 1855, in the library of the Bishop of London at Fulham Palace. After a diplomatic effort that took more than four decades, the manuscript was returned to Massachusetts in 1897. It is now held at the Massachusetts State Archives in Boston.

His descendants include Julia Child the chef and author, William Rehnquist the late Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, and Noah Webster the lexicographer. Every fact in this Library that derives from a primary source derives from William Bradford.

---

Captain Reynolds

The Man Who Walked Away

The captain of the Speedwell on her three failed crossing attempts in the summer and fall of 1620 is identified in the historical record only as Mr. Reynolds. His first name has been given as John in some genealogical sources, but the attribution is uncertain and is not supported by primary documentation. After the abandonment of the Speedwell at Plymouth in September 1620, he disappears from the historical record entirely. There is no court record, no naval record, no merchant register, and no further mention in Bradford’s account that places him anywhere after he collected his wages and departed.

What can be said with documentary confidence is that he commanded the Speedwell from her arrival at Southampton in late July 1620 through her two failed Atlantic attempts and her final return to Plymouth. He declared the ship structurally unsound on each of the failed attempts. He turned her back. After the second failure he refused to attempt a third crossing. The Speedwell was sold and the passengers redistributed onto the Mayflower.

Bradford’s accusation against Reynolds is straightforward and serious. He wrote that Reynolds and his crew had deliberately conspired to make the Speedwell appear unseaworthy in order to escape the year-long contract they had signed to remain in the New World after the colony was established. He wrote that this conspiracy was afterwards confirmed when some of the crew confessed it. The subsequent successful merchant voyages of the same ship under different ownership, after only modest repairs, are the strongest circumstantial evidence in support of Bradford’s account.

Modern historians have examined the question with appropriate caution. The structural problems with the Speedwell’s rigging were real, and Reynolds may not have been responsible for the original refitting decisions made at Delfshaven. The leaking that drove the decisions to turn back may have been genuine even if exaggerated. The ship’s age and the limitations of the refitting work could each, on their own, account for what happened without requiring deliberate sabotage. Whether Reynolds compounded these structural problems with deliberate deception, as Bradford believed, or simply made cautious decisions that happened to coincide with his crew’s reluctance to remain in America, cannot be determined from the surviving evidence.

Reynolds did not stay to defend himself or to be questioned. He took his pay and departed.

---

Robert Cushman

The Man Who Built the Dream on Paper

Robert Cushman was born around 1577 in Rolvenden, Kent, England. He was a wool comber by trade, but his contributions to the Leiden congregation and to the Mayflower expedition were primarily administrative and diplomatic rather than physical. He served as the congregation’s chief negotiator in the years leading up to the 1620 voyage, traveling repeatedly between Leiden and London to argue with the Virginia Company and the Merchant Adventurers over the terms under which the colony would be financed and operated.

The contract he eventually signed on behalf of the congregation, after extended negotiation in London, contained terms that the Leiden leadership considered far worse than what they had authorized him to accept. The disagreement that followed between Cushman and the congregation over what he had agreed to, and over whether he had exceeded his authority in agreeing to it, was severe. It marked his life from that point forward.

His letters from the summer of 1620, written from Southampton and from Dartmouth during the failed attempts to depart, are among the most human documents to survive from this period. They are also among the most painful. Writing from Dartmouth in August 1620, after the first forced return, Cushman compared himself to a fellow passenger named William Ring and observed that the two of them were competing to see which would be the first meat for the fishes. He was not joking. He had become convinced, through the accumulating disasters of the summer, that he was sailing to his death.

When the decision was made at Plymouth in early September 1620 to abandon the Speedwell and to consolidate the passengers onto the Mayflower, Cushman did not board. His nerves had given out. He stood on the dock holding his son Thomas and watched the longboats pull away from the quay toward the Mayflower at anchor in the harbor. Bradford recorded his absence without commentary, perhaps understanding what the previous months had cost him.

Cushman returned to London. A year later, in November 1621, he sailed for Plymouth Colony aboard the Fortune, completing the crossing he had been unable to make a year earlier. He stayed only a month, long enough to preach a sermon called The Danger of Self-Love that Bradford had printed afterward and that survives as one of the few first-generation Plymouth texts beyond Bradford’s and Winslow’s own writings. He returned to England on the Fortune. Cushman continued to work on behalf of the colony from London until his death in 1625.

He was the man who made the Mayflower voyage possible. He chose the ship that failed. He survived the failure. He completed the journey late, alone, and on his own terms.

Section Three

The Ship With Two Names

The ship that would carry the Leiden Separatists out of Holland in the summer of 1620 was forty-three years old when they bought her.

The Royal Navy built her in 1577 at a Royal Navy yard whose specific location is not preserved in the surviving documents. Her builders constructed her as a sixty-ton pinnace, a small, fast auxiliary vessel that the Elizabethan navy used for fleet dispatches, coastal scouting, and the unglamorous logistical work that kept larger warships in fighting condition. She was approximately sixty feet long and twenty feet in the beam, with two masts rigged for square sails, designed to outpace anything she could not outfight. Her original name, given by the shipwright builders, was Swiftsure.

The choice of name was unremarkable in its time. The Royal Navy of the late sixteenth century frequently reused vessel names across different ships, and a 350-ton galleon called Swiftsure had already been in service since 1573. Two ships, one name, different sizes and different fates. Historians and popular writers have spent the four hundred years since confusing them. The distinction matters, and we will return to it shortly.

For the next twenty-eight years the smaller Swiftsure served the Crown in whatever capacity the Elizabethan navy required of a small auxiliary ship. When the Spanish Armada came up the English Channel in the summer of 1588, she was almost certainly part of the fleet that went out to meet it, though her specific assignments during the campaign are not documented in the surviving naval records. A vessel of her size and type would have carried dispatches between fleet commanders, transported powder and supplies, and run scouting missions ahead of the main engagement. The great galleons of the period collected the credit and the paintings and the ballads that followed the Armada’s defeat. Ships of her class did the work that allowed the great galleons to fight.

She is mentioned in the records of subsequent expeditions. Naval historians place a Swiftsure in the 1596 expedition against Cadiz, and again in the 1597 Islands Voyage to the Azores, but the records do not always distinguish between the larger galleon and the smaller pinnace, which is part of why the confusion has persisted.

When England and Spain made formal peace in 1604, the Crown’s need for small auxiliary warships diminished. In 1605, after twenty-eight years of naval service, the Swiftsure was decommissioned. She was stripped of her naval armament and sold into private hands.

Her new owners renamed her Speedwell, after the small blue wildflower that blooms across the English countryside each spring. The name was also a deliberate play on words. Speed well. A wish, a prayer for safe and prosperous voyaging. After a working lifetime in service to the Crown, she was given a name that meant hope.

The Other Swiftsure

Before going further, it is necessary to address an error that appears in nearly every popular account of the Speedwell, and to correct it carefully.

There were two Elizabethan Royal Navy ships named Swiftsure. They are routinely confused with each other in popular histories, in travel writing, and even in some secondary maritime scholarship.

The first Swiftsure was a 350-ton race-built galleon, constructed by the master shipwright Peter Pett at the royal dockyard at Deptford in 1573. She was one of the revolutionary new race-built galleons developed under the direction of Sir John Hawkins. Long, low, fast, designed for gunnery rather than for boarding. A contemporary description of these vessels survives, comparing their lines to those of a fish, with the head of a cod and the tail of a mackerel. This 350-ton Swiftsure was a front-line warship of the Elizabethan navy. She fought in the Spanish Armada campaign of 1588 under the command of Captain Edward Fenner. She was the vessel that secretly carried the twenty-one-year-old Earl of Essex when he defied Queen Elizabeth’s direct order forbidding him to join the counter-armada expedition of 1589. She served with distinction in the Cadiz raid of 1596 under the command of Sir Robert Dudley. She was rebuilt in subsequent decades and continued in Royal Navy service well into the reign of King James I.

The second Swiftsure, built four years later in 1577, was the sixty-ton pinnace that became the Speedwell. She was a different class of vessel entirely from the larger galleon. Not a capital warship but a small auxiliary craft, half the length and less than a fifth the displacement.

The maritime historian Rif Winfield, in his authoritative reference work British Warships in the Age of Sail, distinguishes between the two ships explicitly. The Wikipedia article devoted to the Speedwell, drawing on Winfield and other primary sources, identifies the conflation in popular accounts and explains its origins. Most popular retellings, however, continue to credit the small pinnace with the dramatic exploits that belong properly to the larger galleon. Travel articles describe the Speedwell as having fought against the Armada. Genealogical websites repeat the Earl of Essex story as part of her history. Neither claim is correct.

The truth, when separated from the confusion, is in many ways more interesting than the conflated version. The small pinnace that became the Speedwell did her share of work during the Armada campaign and the wars that followed it, but she did that work in the margins of the great events rather than in their center. She was never a famous ship. She was a working vessel that survived for four decades by being competent rather than by being celebrated. That is a different kind of life, and a different kind of story.

The Earl of Essex stowaway episode, since it has become attached to the Speedwell’s name in popular accounts, deserves a brief retelling here, properly attributed. In 1589, Queen Elizabeth I expressly forbade Robert Devereux, the young Earl of Essex, to join the English counter-armada expedition against Spain. Essex disregarded her command. He concealed himself aboard the 350-ton Swiftsure, then commanded by the Welsh soldier Roger Williams, and the ship sailed before the Queen’s representative, Francis Knollys, could arrive at Plymouth to retrieve him. Essex went on to lead a landing at Peniche beach, leaping into the surf at the head of two thousand men. The episode belongs to the larger Swiftsure and to her commander Williams, not to our ship.

The 350-ton galleon carried a future earl who was hiding from his queen. The 60-ton pinnace would, three decades later, carry English religious dissenters who were hiding from a different kind of authority. Two ships, one name, two stories that history has tangled together for four hundred years. They are now untangled.

The Merchant Years

After her decommissioning in 1605, the Speedwell was sold into private hands and entered the merchant trade. She passed eventually into Dutch ownership and operated out of the port of Delfshaven, the seaport then serving the city of Delft and now absorbed into the southern reaches of Rotterdam. For the next fifteen years she carried cargo across the southern North Sea and the English Channel.

The specific records of her merchant years have not survived in any form accessible to English-language scholarship. No Dutch port books with her name in their ledgers have been found. No cargo manifests from her voyages have been identified. No captains who commanded her during this period have been named in any surviving document. The Dutch port books of the Stadsarchief Rotterdam and the Nationaal Archief in The Hague have not been systematically searched for references to the Speedwell, and any captains’ names or specific cargo records from these fifteen years would require direct archival research at these Dutch repositories.

What can be said with confidence is what cargo ships of her class typically carried on the routes she worked. From English ports to Dutch ports, the principal exports were wool, finished cloth, and English manufactured goods. From Dutch ports to English ports came dried fish from the Baltic and North Sea fisheries, timber from the eastern Baltic that fed English shipbuilding, Rhenish wine carried in casks, and the ordinary commerce of European trade in the early seventeenth century. She was an ordinary trading vessel among the hundreds of pinnaces working the same routes. She did her work and was not noticed.

In the summer of 1620, Captain Thomas Blossom purchased her for the use of his congregation. She was forty-three years old.

Refitting at Delfshaven

Before sailing for England, the Speedwell was refitted at Delfshaven in preparation for the Atlantic crossing. The most consequential change made during this refitting was the replacement of her masts. The Dutch shipwrights who undertook the work fitted her with new masts that were significantly taller than the masts she had been carrying as a Channel trader. Whether this change was made at Captain Reynolds’s recommendation, at the request of Blossom and the congregation, or simply as a matter of standard refitting practice for a vessel about to undertake an ocean crossing is not preserved in the surviving record.

What is documented is that William Bradford, who would observe the Speedwell’s behavior across two failed Atlantic crossings, came to believe that the new masts were the source of the ship’s structural problems. The taller rigging, he argued in Of Plymouth Plantation, exerted leverage on the hull that the forty-three-year-old timbers could not safely bear. Modern maritime analysis has tended to support Bradford’s diagnosis. A small pinnace fitted with rigging too tall for her hull will, under sustained sail in heavy weather, work her seams open from the strain of the leverage transmitted from masts to hull through the deck framing.

Whether Reynolds knew this when the masts were fitted, and whether his subsequent behavior across two voyages was the result of incompetent refitting, deliberate sabotage, or some combination of the two, has been debated by historians for four hundred years. We will return to that question in Section Five.

What Happened to the Speedwell

After her abandonment at Plymouth in early September 1620, the Speedwell was sold at auction in London. Her new owners had her repaired at modest cost and returned her to merchant service. Bradford, writing of these subsequent voyages with the bitterness of a man who had been certain of the captain’s deception and could prove it only by what came afterward, recorded that the ship made many profitable crossings under her new ownership. He noted that the leaks that had defeated her under Reynolds’s command were never serious enough to threaten her again. He attributed this to the confessions of some of her crew after the fact that the leaks had been deliberately induced.

In 1624 the Royal Navy chartered the Speedwell to Captain John Chudleigh, who used her to transport the German mercenary commander Ernst von Mansfeld to London, where Mansfeld met with King James I regarding the recovery of the Palatinate during the Thirty Years’ War.

In 1635, fifteen years after Reynolds declared her incapable of crossing the ocean, the Speedwell sailed from Southampton to Virginia under a master named Captain John Chappell. Her embarkation record was filed at Gravesend on May 28, 1635, and lists her as the Speedwell of London in the official records. The crossing was successful. Fifty-nine passengers reached Virginia safely.

The youngest of those passengers, recorded in the Gravesend register among the others, was a six-month-old infant named Phillipp Biggs, who made the Atlantic crossing his parents had chosen for him before he was old enough to choose anything for himself. The complete passenger list appears in Section Six of this Library.

By the time the Speedwell finally completed the voyage she had been bought to make, the Plymouth Colony had been established for fifteen years. William Bradford, who had been thirty years old and a passenger on the Mayflower when the Speedwell failed her, was now forty-five years old and the long-serving governor of Plymouth Colony. The first terrible winter that had killed nearly half his fellow colonists was a decade and a half in the past. The ship that had failed the Pilgrims and sent them across the ocean alone in the wrong vessel had outlived their despair, made the crossing on her own terms in her own time, and arrived safely at the colony she had once been intended to help establish.

Her further history after 1635 is not documented in the records that have come down to us.

Section Four

The People Who Could Not Stay

The Leiden Separatists who boarded the Speedwell at Delfshaven in July 1620 were not, contrary to the version of their story that has become standard in American popular history, fleeing Holland in search of religious freedom. They had already found religious freedom in Holland. They had been worshipping freely there for eleven years. What they were leaving behind when they boarded the Speedwell was the only home in Europe that had granted them what they had wanted from England.

To understand who they were and why they were on that ship, the story has to begin in England.

Between 1606 and 1608, in the manor house at Scrooby in Nottinghamshire, a small group of English farmers and craftsmen began meeting in secret to worship according to their own conscience. Their conviction, which set them apart from the larger Puritan movement, was that the Church of England was beyond reform. Where the Puritans wished to purify the established Church from within, the Separatists believed the established Church was so corrupted by its compromises with Roman Catholic practice and by its subjection to royal authority that no true Christian could remain within it.

This conviction was a crime under English law. The 1559 Act of Uniformity required attendance at Church of England services and forbade unauthorized religious gatherings. Penalties ranged from fines to imprisonment. The Scrooby congregation knew the risk and accepted it. By 1607, the Archbishop of York’s agents had identified them, and the persecution that followed made remaining in England impossible.

The full story of how the congregation tried to flee England in 1607, was betrayed by a hired captain in Boston, Lincolnshire, and was imprisoned in the cells of the Boston Guildhall on September 23 of that year, is told in the companion prequel volume to this Library, The Pilgrim’s Origin Story. The story of their second attempt, the following spring, which nearly ended in a shipwreck on the coast of Norway, is also told there. By the autumn of 1608, after great hardship, most of the congregation had succeeded in reaching Holland.

They settled first in Amsterdam and, by 1609, in Leiden. There they remained for eleven years.

What Leiden gave them was freedom to worship as they chose. What it took from them, slowly across those eleven years, was nearly everything else.

The Separatists were farmers by background, agricultural people from the English Midlands. Leiden was a textile manufacturing city. The congregation found employment in the cloth trade, working long hours at looms for wages that barely met the cost of living in a city where everything was more expensive than what they had known in England. Bradford recorded the conditions plainly in Of Plymouth Plantation, calling it great labor and hard fare. The older members of the congregation wore out early. The younger members, particularly the children, began to drift away from the congregation’s English-speaking community toward the Dutch culture around them. Children who had left England as English were becoming Dutch, and the elders watched it happen with growing alarm.

There was also the question of political stability. The Twelve-Year Truce between Holland and Spain, signed in 1609, was set to expire in 1621. When the war resumed, as the elders fully expected it would, England’s military protection of Holland would come at a price that King James was certain to demand. That price would almost certainly include greater control over the English religious congregations operating on Dutch soil. The freedom the congregation had built in Leiden was real but conditional, and the conditions under which it had been granted were not permanent.

By 1617, after extensive debate, the congregation had reached a decision. They would emigrate again, this time to the New World. They would establish a colony where they could remain English and remain free at the same time, where their children would not become Dutch, and where their faith would not depend on the political calculations of European princes.

The negotiations that followed were difficult. Robert Cushman and John Carver were sent to London to negotiate terms with the Virginia Company and with the group of London merchant investors known as the Merchant Adventurers, led by Thomas Weston. The contract that emerged from those negotiations was less favorable than the congregation had hoped. Seven years of total labor in service of the common stock. All accumulated property at the end of seven years is to be divided between investors and colonists. Cushman, under pressure in London and uncertain whether any agreement could be reached at all, signed terms that the Leiden congregation considered unacceptable. The disagreement between Cushman and the Leiden leadership over what he had agreed to on their behalf would mark his life from that point forward.

When the time came to depart, the congregation was unable to send everyone. Money was short, the available shipping was limited, and the practical demands of establishing a settlement from nothing required that the strongest and youngest go first. The decision was made deliberately. The first wave would build the colony. Those who remained in Leiden would follow on subsequent voyages, once a place had been prepared for them.

Pastor John Robinson would remain in Leiden with the larger portion of the congregation. He intended to follow on the second voyage. He never did. Robinson died in Leiden on March 1, 1625, of an illness that historians have not definitively identified but that some scholars have attributed to the plague that visited the city that year. His age at death was forty-nine. His grave is in the Pieterskerk, the great Gothic church that had stood across the street from his house throughout his eleven years of ministry to the Leiden congregation. He never saw America. The congregation he had led from a manor house in Nottinghamshire to a refugee community in Leiden, and then to the edge of the Atlantic, completed its journey to the New World without him.

On the evening before the first wave of the congregation departed Leiden, Robinson gathered them at his house on the Pieterskerkhof for a final meeting. The substance of what he said that evening has been preserved through two independent sources, Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation and Edward Winslow’s Hypocrisie Unmasked, published in 1646. Robinson preached from the eighth chapter of Ezra, on the river of Ahava, where the Israelites afflicted themselves before God before beginning their own perilous journey home from exile. He told the congregation that God had more light and truth yet to break forth from his holy Word, and that they should follow truth wherever it led, regardless of which man had spoken it. He told them to go.

The next morning, July 21, 1620, the first wave of the congregation boarded canal boats on the Rapenburg in Leiden and traveled by water through the Dutch waterways to Delfshaven, a journey of approximately seven hours. Friends and neighbors walked along the towpaths beside the boats. Bradford, writing of the parting decades later, recorded that they could not well speak one to another for the abundance of sorrow, and that with mutual embraces and many tears they took their leaves of one another, and that this proved to be the last leave to many of them.

The Speedwell was waiting at the Delfshaven dock. The next morning, July 22, 1620, by the Old Style calendar, she sailed for England with the first wave of the Leiden congregation aboard.

Who Sailed and Who Stayed

Of the approximately three hundred members of the Leiden congregation in 1620, fewer than fifty boarded the Speedwell at Delfshaven. The names of those who sailed in that first wave include William Bradford and his wife Dorothy, William Brewster, Edward Winslow, Isaac Allerton and his family, Samuel Fuller, Thomas Rogers, Francis Cooke, James Chilton, and Thomas Blossom, who had organized the purchase of the ship.

At Southampton, the Speedwell rendezvoused with the Mayflower, which carried the Strangers. These were the hired workers, soldiers, and craftsmen recruited by the Merchant Adventurers to ensure the colony had the practical skills required for survival. Together, the two ships carried approximately one hundred and twenty people.

Not all of them reached America.

Robert Cushman, broken by the negotiations and by the failed crossings, stood on the Plymouth dock when the decision was made to abandon the Speedwell, and he could not bring himself to board the Mayflower. He returned to London. A year later he sailed to Plymouth Colony on the ship Fortune, in November 1621, completing the crossing he had been unable to make in 1620.

Thomas Blossom returned to Leiden with his young son after the Speedwell was abandoned. He waited nine years before he was finally able to make the crossing. In 1629 he arrived at Plymouth on a second ship called the Mayflower, with his wife Anne and their surviving children. He died at Plymouth in the summer of 1633, in an epidemic that took several other colonists.

Dorothy Bradford did reach Cape Cod. She did not survive the days that followed. She drowned in Provincetown Harbor on December 7, 1620, while her husband was ashore with the exploring party and unable to reach her. Bradford recorded her death in a single sentence and never returned to it in his writings. The full story of who Dorothy Bradford was, and what she chose, and what it cost her, is told in Book Three of this series.

James Chilton, who had been sixty-four years old when he boarded the Speedwell at Delfshaven, died in the first winter of 1620 to 1621. He was one of nearly half the Mayflower’s passengers who did not survive that winter.

John Robinson, as already noted, remained in Leiden and never made the crossing. He died there in 1625, five years after watching his congregation board the canal boats on the Rapenburg.

The full story of the Scrooby congregation, their persecution in England, their desperate escape to Holland, and the eleven years in Leiden that prepared them for what was to come, is told in The Pilgrim’s Origin Story, the companion prequel to this volume. Read it first if you wish to understand fully who these people were before they stood on the Delfshaven dock and watched the Speedwell prepare to sail.

Section Five

The Three Attempts

The Speedwell arrived at Southampton in late July 1620 already showing the signs of the structural problems that would defeat her across the next six weeks. She lay in Southampton Water alongside the Mayflower while Cushman, Bradford, and the leadership of both ships negotiated last details with the Merchant Adventurers, took on additional provisions, and addressed the immediate leaking that had been visible from Delfshaven.

Cushman’s letters from this period are, as already noted, the most revealing single documentary source for the human texture of these weeks. He wrote of the negotiations as having gone badly. He wrote of the provisions as inadequate to the voyage ahead. He wrote of his own physical and mental condition with a candor that is rare in the documents of the period. He believed, as he wrote, that he was sailing to his death, and the certainty of this belief grew stronger with every day the ships remained in port.

On August 5, 1620, the Speedwell and the Mayflower departed Southampton together on the first attempt at the Atlantic crossing.

They had not gone far. Some accounts place them still within sight of the English coast when Reynolds reported that the Speedwell was taking on water faster than her pumps could discharge it. Both ships turned back. They put into Dartmouth on the Devon coast on approximately August 12. The Dartmouth shipwrights spent the better part of two weeks examining the Speedwell, caulking her seams, checking her rigging, and assessing her general condition. They eventually pronounced her sound and fit for the crossing.

Bradford recorded their verdict without commentary. He had begun to learn the value of waiting before drawing conclusions.

Both ships departed Dartmouth on the second attempt. They sailed southwest along the English coast, past Plymouth, past the Lizard Peninsula, past Land’s End at the western tip of Cornwall, and out into the open Atlantic. The last piece of England fell behind them, and the open ocean stretched ahead.

Three hundred miles out, by the measurement Bradford carefully recorded in his account, one hundred leagues beyond Land’s End, Reynolds called his mate to the quarterdeck and showed him the water rising in the Speedwell’s hold. It was not the slow seepage of an old ship working in heavy weather. It was, Bradford wrote, faster than that. Faster than could be accounted for by the ordinary stresses of an Atlantic crossing in August.

Both ships hove to in open water. The captains conferred. Reynolds was unmovable. The Speedwell, he insisted, would sink before she could reach Virginia. He would not proceed.

They turned back.

Bradford’s account of this moment carries the controlled fury of a man who had become certain that he was being deceived but who could not, at the moment of the decision, prove it. He recorded his observations with the discipline of a writer who knew that the proof would come later. He noted that after the Speedwell was sold in London and repaired at modest cost, she made many profitable voyages for her new owners. He noted that the leaks were afterwards confessed by some of the crew to have been caused by the cunning and deceit of Reynolds and his men, who were unwilling to make the year-long commitment to remain in America that their original contracts had required.

Whether this confession was a genuine acknowledgment of deliberate sabotage, or whether it was a face-saving explanation offered after the fact, Bradford could not say with certainty. What he could say, and what he did say, was that the Speedwell never leaked under her subsequent owners the way she had leaked under Reynolds. The ship that had been pronounced unfit to cross the Atlantic in 1620 crossed it successfully in 1635 with fifty-nine passengers aboard, and she had made many profitable Channel and North Sea voyages in the intervening years. The pattern, Bradford observed, was difficult to reconcile with the official explanation.

The Speedwell and the Mayflower arrived at Plymouth in early September 1620. The decision to abandon the Speedwell was made quickly because the late season made any other decision impossible. The crossing season was ending. Every additional week consumed provisions that the colonists would need on the other side of the ocean.

The sorting at the Plymouth dock was, Bradford recorded, one of the most difficult experiences of the entire summer. The Mayflower was already full. She could not accommodate everyone. Twenty passengers had to be removed from the rolls. Their belongings came back ashore. They watched the longboats pull away toward the Mayflower at anchor in the harbor and they remained on the cobblestones of the dock and many of them never tried again.

Robert Cushman was among those who did not board. The full account of his decision is given in his profile in Section Two.

The Speedwell, now without passengers and without purpose, was sold in London at modest cost. The further course of her life is described in Section Three of this Library.

On September 6, 1620, the Mayflower departed Plymouth alone, carrying one hundred and two passengers and a crew of approximately thirty. She made landfall at Cape Cod sixty-six days later, on November 11, 1620. The Mayflower Compact was drafted and signed in the great cabin on the day of arrival. Forty-one men, both Saints and Strangers, bound themselves to each other under a civil body politic because the patent under which they had sailed was for Virginia and was not legally valid for the territory at which they had actually arrived. The full story of the Compact and the men who signed it is the subject of Book Three of this series, Lantern at the Table.

Half of the Mayflower’s passengers were dead by the following spring.

The other half built Plymouth Colony.

Section Six

The 1635 Passenger List of the Speedwell

On May 28, 1635, the Speedwell of London, under the command of Captain John Chappell, departed Gravesend on the River Thames, bound for the Virginia Colony. The embarkation register filed at Gravesend lists fifty-nine passengers. The list survives in the Port Books held at The National Archives, Kew, and was transcribed and published in the genealogical literature in the nineteenth century by H. G. Somerby for the New England Historic Genealogical Society. The passengers were required to affirm conformity with the Church of England and to take the oath of allegiance to the Crown before their names were entered into the register.

The full list follows. Ages are given as recorded.

The Speedwell of London, 28 May 1635
Captain John Chappell, Master
Bound for Virginia

Name	Age
Henry Beere	24
Jo. West	30
Richard Morris	19
Nico. Tetloe	35
Wm. Shipman	22
Nathaniell Faierbother	21
Richard Baylie	22
Wm. Spencer	17
James Lowder	20
Chri. Metcalf	19
Jeremy Burr	20
Willm. Basford	19
Jo. Watson	22
Jo. Gilgate	22
Robt. Spynk	20
Richard Rowland	20
Tho. Childs	30
Jo. Curden	22
Tho. Romney	19
Jo. Harris	20
Christopher Piddington	18
Edmond Clark	16
Jonas Smith	22
Wm. Hynton	25
Jo. Mowser	22
Samuell Tyres	21
Wm. Steebens	22
Tho. Busby	19
Richard Harvy	32
Tho. Robins	17
Jo. Beeby	17
Jo. Turner	19
Samuell Holmes	20
Jo. Bever	24
Jo. Talbott	27
Edward Austin	26
Tho. Greene	24
Richard Browne	19
Wm. Appleby	32
Robert Parker	21
Wm. Cunningham	21
Tho. Willis	19
Wm. Straughan	22
Geo. Sympson	19
Richard Phillips	20
Arthur Saidwell	25
Melashus McKay	22
Richard Thomas	20
Katherin Richards	19
Marie Sedgwick	20
Elizabeth Biggs	10
Dorothie Wyncott	40
Ann Wyncott	16
Phillipp Biggs	6 months
Elizabeth Pew	20
Francis Langworth	25
Chr. Reinolds	24
Abram Poore	20
Elizabeth Tuttell	25

The youngest passenger on this crossing was Phillipp Biggs, six months old. The oldest was Dorothie Wyncott, forty years old. Most of the passengers were young men in their late teens and twenties, traveling without family connections. Several women and girls appear in the list. Two family groupings are visible in the entries. Dorothy Wyncott traveled with her sixteen-year-old daughter Ann. Elizabeth Biggs, whose age is given as ten, was almost certainly the older sister of the infant Phillipp. The mother of these two children does not appear on the list.

The Speedwell that carried these fifty-nine passengers across the Atlantic in 1635 was the same ship that had failed to carry the Pilgrims in 1620, fifteen years earlier. She had been forty-three years old when Thomas Blossom purchased her for the Leiden congregation in 1620. By the time she landed her fifty-nine passengers safely in Virginia in the summer of 1635, she was fifty-eight years old. Her further history after this voyage is not preserved in records that have come down to us.

Section Seven

A Note on Sources

The principal source for this Library is William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, written between 1630 and 1651. Bradford was a passenger on both the Speedwell and the Mayflower in 1620 and was a direct witness to nearly every event described in these pages.

The letters of Robert Cushman, particularly those written from Southampton and Dartmouth in the summer of 1620, provide the most vivid first-person account of any participant during the critical weeks before the Mayflower sailed alone. Cushman’s letters survive in archival collections in England and the United States.

The distinction between the 1573 Swiftsure galleon and the 1577 Swiftsure pinnace draws on Rif Winfield’s British Warships in the Age of Sail, the standard reference work on Royal Navy vessels of the period.

The 1635 passenger list of the Speedwell of London is preserved in the Port Books of Gravesend held in the Exchequer records at The National Archives, Kew. The transcription used here derives from H. G. Somerby’s mid-nineteenth-century work for the New England Historic Genealogical Society.

The genealogical details concerning Thomas Blossom and his daughter Elizabeth, including the descent of Barack Obama from the Blossom line, are documented in standard genealogical references and on the Find A Grave memorial page for Thomas Blossom.

Where the documentary record is silent, particularly regarding the Speedwell’s merchant years between 1605 and 1620, the specific actions of the 60-ton Swiftsure during the Armada campaign, and the personal motivations of Captain Reynolds, this Library has acknowledged the silence rather than filled it with invention.