I went on a week-long road trip across England to discover the places the Pilgrims would have known ahead of the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower’s sailing to the New World in 2020.
My last stop, quite fittingly, was Plymouth.
Without a doubt, this town in southwest England is the place, fairly or not, most Americans associate with the story of the Pilgrims.
However, anyone with a basic understanding of history knows Plymouth’s connection to the Pilgrims and the Mayflower came about by accident. Call it a fluke of history.
To be clear: Plymouth’s part in the Pilgrim story wasn’t unimportant. Far from it, actually. While it’s impossible to speculate on just how differently the story would be had it not been for that fluke of history, it’s a given that Plymouth wouldn’t have been the namesake of Plymouth Colony in present-day Massachusetts.
Neither the Pilgrims nor the Mayflower were from Plymouth. But they sailed from here after failing on their first attempt to cross the Atlantic in the late summer of 1620.
The Pilgrims, split between the Mayflower and a second ship, were 300 miles off the English coast when leaks on the all-but-forgotten Speedwell were so bad they had to return to port to avoid a disaster on the high seas.
After calling upon nearby Dartmouth, where some repairs on the Speedwell were carried out before their first departure, they arrived in Plymouth, which by then was long-established as a major port and fortification. (It was from Plymouth that Sir…
… Read More
Click Read More to read the rest of the story from our content source/partners – The Christian Post.