History of MAYFLOWER Ship
In 1588, a ship named Mayflower of 200 tons, commanded by one Edward Banks, took part in chasing the Spanish Armada up the Channel. She was commissioned and financed on that occasion by the City of London. One of her owners, John Vassall, of Stepney, moved in 1591 to Leigh-on-Sea, near Southend at the mouth of the Thames. A Mayflower of Leigh appears in the London port books of 1606, taking on a cargo of cloth for Middelburg in Holland; her master was Robert Bonner of Leigh. A year later, Robert Bonner was listed as master of the Mayflower of London, unloading a cargo of wine from Bordeaux. In 1608 Bonner was listed as master of the Josian, whose master in 1606 and 1607 was Christopher Jones. In 1609 Jones appeared as master and quarter owner of the Mayflower of London.
From then on, this Mayflower sailed fairly regularly to the French ports of La Rochelle and Bordeaux, carrying cloth, hose, and rabbit skins, and bringing back wine and brandy. In 1609 she brought furs from Norway, and twice in 1614 she fetched home silks from Hamburg. On Tuesday, May 23, 1620, she docked in the Port of London from La Rochelle, the second voyage to France that year. Something more than two weeks later, Weston chartered her for the crossing to New England.
The ship on which Weston and Cushman, the English agents of the Pilgrims, had taken an option over the weekend of June 10-12, 1620, was considerably smaller.
Available records indicate that by 1624 the Mayflower of Pilgrim fame had three joint owners, Robert Child, John Moore, and Mrs. Josian Jones, widow of the captain. These three applied in that year to the Admiralty for an appraisal. It was carried out by four mariners and shipwrights of Rotherhithe, who valued the vessel at the unpretentious total of one hundred and twenty-eight pounds, eight shillings, and fourpence. One eminent historical researcher, Dr. Rendel Harris, was so convinced that that figure was preposterously low that he wrote in 1920 that it must have represented only the widow's share.
Some historians suggest the Mayflower was broken up after the 1624 appraisal.
But looking further into historical records unearths the will of one Robert Sheffield of Stepney, dated September 10, 1625, in which his share of a ship named Mayflower was bequeathed to his wife Joan or Josian. Some think the legatee was the widow of Captain Jones. If it was, she had married three times and went on to make it four, for Robert Sheffield's widow married Simon Jefferson of Blackfriars in 1630, and thereafter Sheffield's other heirs commenced a lawsuit against Jefferson in 1636 concerning "the Mayflower and other property."
Confusing things further is the fact that in 1621 Captain Richard Swan sailed in the Hart to the Arabian coast, a voyage listed in the marine records of the East India Company. Swan joined a fleet which set out from the port of Surat in the Punjab on April 6. The fleet, heading for the Persian Gulf, captured on May 1 a two-hundred-ton Portuguese vessel, the San Antonio, bound for Goa with a cargo of rice. This prize was renamed Mayflower. She sailed so badly (Swan called her "that leeward cart") that she delayed the fleet, but on June 7 four ships, London, Andrews, Primrose, and Mayflower, anchored beyond Ras-al-Hadd, referred to by the English as Cape Rosalgate. Here they enjoyed "all sorts of refreshments" until a guerrilla force of "certain Portingals" arrived to defend the port and drive the English out. The English counter-attacked, defeated the Portuguese, and "for their dishonesty burned the town and spoiled many of their date trees." Then the fleet went on to the Persian Gulf where the newly named Mayflower, which had been leaking badly, was broken up for firewood. The account of the whole affair was written by Richard Jefferies on October 5, 1621.
For us today, it is clear that the ill-fated San Antonio had not the remotest connection with the Mayflower of Plymouth fame. But what has really muddled historians is the Mayflower of 1629 and 1630. Thomas Prence wrote in his journal in August 1629: "Thirty-five of our friends with their families arrived at Plymouth. They shipped at London in May, with the ships that came to Salem, which brings over many pious persons to begin the churches there. So that their being long kept back is now accomplished by Heaven with a double blessing.... The charge is reckoned on the several families, some fifty pounds, some forty, some thirty, as their numbers and expenses were, which our undertakers pay for gratis, besides giving them houses, preparing them grounds to plant on, and maintain them with corn, etc., above thirteen or fourteen months, before they have a harvest of their own production."
James Sherley sent a letter with the new arrivals, dated March 25, 1629, which said in part: "Here are now many of yours and our friends from Leyden, coming over who though for the most part be but a weak company, yet herein is a good part of that end ordained, which was aimed at, and which hath been so strongly opposed, by some of our former Adventurers. But God hath His working in these things, which man cannot frustrate. With them we have also sent some servants in the ship called the Talbot that went hence lately; but these come in the Mayflower."
And Captain John Smith wrote under the date 1629: "In this year a great company of people of good rank, zeal, means, and quality, have made a great stock, and with six good ships in the months of April and May they set sail from Thames for the Bay of Massachusetts, otherwise called Charles River; viz. the George Bonaventure of twenty pieces of ordnance, the Talbot nineteen, the Lions Whelp eight, the Mayflower fourteen, the Four Sisters fourteen, the Pilgrim four, with three hundred and fifty men, women and children."
The master of the Mayflower was William Peirce. Roger Harman commanded the Four Sisters and William Wobridge the Pilgrim. (note the use of "Pilgrim" as a ship's name)
In 1630 the Mayflower sailed from Southampton with the Whale. She was listed as "Mayflower of Yarmouth." William Peirce was by then master of the Lion.
A Mayflower of Yarmouth, tonnage between 240 and 250, owner Thomas Howarth, is registered as sailing under letters of marque to the fishing grounds off Greenland on July 23, 1626, October 3, 1627, and June 29, 1631.
Then there is the Mayflower commanded by Thomas Webber of Boston, the ship that brought an order of canvas to America from England in 1654 for one John Eliot. This Mayflower is described as being about two hundred tons , and when she was riding at anchor in Boston Harbor on October 6, 1652, Webber sold one sixteenth of her "for good and valuable considerations" to one John Pinchon of Springfield, Massachusetts. Next day he sold another sixteenth to Theodore Atkinson, a Boston felt maker, "as well as of said ship as of all and singular her masts, sails, sailyards, etc."
A British scholar, Sir Edwin Arnold, speaking in 1889 at Harvard on the subject of Sanskrit studies, told his audience about a Mayflower that had been sunk off the coast of Coromandel in 1659. He mentioned Masulipatam and Malabar. This Mayflower, he said, was 240 tons burden, carried twenty-four guns and a crew of fifty-five, and had sailed to Coromandel with the Eagle and the Endymion in 1655. The three ships had arranged to rendezvous at St. Helena on the way home if they happened to get separated at sea. This Mayflower had arrived at Plymouth, Devon, on August 26, 1657, and had set out for Coromandel again on February 22, 1658, with a cargo of bullion worth £7500. She had sunk the following year, apparently in shallow water, for the wreck passed into the hands of an Indian broker in Surat on February 16, 1660, and he managed to repair the vessel sufficiently to use her afterward for local trading, though she was never again capable of navigating the open sea.
Dr. Rendel Harris patiently worked out the comings and goings of every Mayflower recorded in the English port books for the first two thirds of the seventeenth century. What he found out includes specific information about Christopher Jones's (and the Pilgrim's) Mayflower.
On January 28, 1620, Jones brought the Mayflower in to London and landed a cargo of 113 1/4 tons of French wine in eight lots, the biggest 30 1/4 tons, the smallest 8 tons. During the next three days Jones unloaded a further 37 3/4 tons in four consignments. On May 15, 1620, the Mayflower brought in another wine cargo, 50 1/4 tons of ordinary wine and 19 of "conyacks wine" (cognac).
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发表于 2008-4-29 01:43
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