Mr.
Blaxland, the able author of the "Mayflower Essays," should have asked
for the authority for the names assigned to the two Pilgrim ships of
1620.
It seems to be the fact, as noted by Arber, that the earliest authentic
evidence that the bark which bore the Pilgrims across the North Atlantic
in the late autumn of 1620 was the MAY-FLOWER, is the "heading" of the
"Allotment of Lands" - happily an "official" document - made at New
Plymouth, New England, in March, 1623 - It is not a little remarkable
that, with the constantly recurring references to "the ship," - the
all-important factor in Pilgrim history, - her name should nowhere have
found mention in the earliest Pilgrim literature. Bradford uses the
terms, the "biger ship," or the "larger ship," and Winslow, Cushman,
Captain John Smith, and others mention simply the "vessel," or the
"ship," when speaking of the MAY-FLOWER, but in no case give her a name.
It is somewhat startling to find so thorough-paced an Englishman as
Thomas Carlyle calling her the MAY-FLOWER "of Delft-Haven," as in the
quotation from him on a preceding page. That he knew better cannot be
doubted, and it must be accounted one of those 'lapsus calami' readily
forgiven to genius, - proverbially indifferent to detail.
Sir Ferdinando Gorges makes the curious misstatement that the Pilgrims
had three ships, and says of them: "Of the three ships (such as their
weak fortunes were able to provide), whereof two proved unserviceable and
so were left behind, the third with great difficulty reached the coast of
New England," etc.
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