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The Mayflower
A documented account of the Mayflower's transatlantic voyage and the establishment of the Plymouth settlement
- GenresHistory
392 pages, Hardcover
First published July 1, 1974
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 28, 2025
The Mayflower, in 1620, left Plymouth harbour in southwestern England, set a course for the coast of North America, and sailed into history. And Kate Caffrey, in her 1974 book The Mayflower, keeps her focus squarely upon that little ship – a Dutch cargo fluyt, strictly speaking – so that the damages suffered by the ship become something of a metaphor for the travails endured by her Pilgrim passengers, both during the voyage and after their arrival at what became the Plymouth Colony.
Caffrey, an English author who wrote a number of British-history works like The Edwardian Lady, emphasizes well the British beginnings of what has come to be considered a quintessentially American story. Her enthusiasm for her subject matter is evident, as when she sets forth her impressions of the contemporary town of Plymouth, England: “[E]ven to one who simply passes through, especially by rail, Plymouth is superb. Not that it is a particularly beautiful town: indeed, in some ways it is frankly ugly. But the setting is tremendous” (pp. 101-02).
After describing the sound, the breakwater, the estuaries, the harbour busy with vessels, Caffrey goes on to focus on what the contemporary visitor to Plymouth, U.K., is probably looking for:
He who explores on foot will find the great artificial frontage of the How impressive from a distance, cluttered with monuments at close quarters: here, after all, Drake apparently played bowls when the Armada was sighted, and his braggadocio statue, bulging with puffed sleeve and breeches and muscle, looks out with upcurled beard toward the slim pencil of the Eddystone lighthouse on the horizon. But it is down at the Barbican that the stone gateway stands, overlooking Sutton Pool, with the words on the pavement carved before it: Mayflower 1620. (p. 102)
Caffrey chronicles the Mayflower’s difficult voyage across the Atlantic, with suitable attention to the highlights that she knows her readers will want her to attend to. One such highlight is the Mayflower Compact, the document that 41 members of the expedition agreed to sign in order to achieve safe self-government once they arrived in the New World. The colonists agreed to “covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic for our better ordering and preservation…and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, and constitutions and offices from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience” (p. 115).
Even if, as Caffrey duly notes, “The rights were not completely equal in practice” (p. 114), the Mayflower Compact is still widely considered to have established an important precedent for Americans agreeing upon terms of orderly and mutually binding terms for self-government – a social compact, with 41 signatures. The reader, and particularly the American reader, inevitably looks ahead 156 years to when 56 other Signers, at Philadelphia, affixed their own signatures to the Declaration of Independence – and then glances 11 years further ahead still, toward that time when 39 other signers, also at Philadelphia, signed the United States Constitution that remains the founding organic law for the U.S.A. To say that Americans today are proud of those two social compacts would be an understatement.
Caffrey also makes sure to include an account of the first Thanksgiving, drawing upon Edward Winslow’s 1621 account, published in a book now known as Mourt’s Relation, of how the colonial governor followed up the gathering of the colony’s autumn harvest by sending four men “on fowling”; a group of Indigenous men, led by their king Massasoit, visited and brought five freshly killed deer, after which everyone feasted together. Caffrey summarizes what is known about the first Thanksgiving thus:
[T]he Pilgrims played games of chance and skill, and the Indians danced for them. They all enjoyed roast duck and goose, eels, clams and other shellfish, leeks, watercress “and other salad herbs,” wild plums, dried berries, white bread and cornbread, white wine and red wine. They certainly ate roast turkey, but not, that first time, cranberry sauce… (p. 153) – all of which is fun to think about and consider, during one’s own Thanksgiving celebration.
If only it could have stayed that way forever – that heart-warming tableau of people sharing the land and its resources, in peace and harmony. It didn’t stay that way, of course. Just three years after the last of those first-Thanksgiving leftovers had been eaten and enjoyed, religious and cultural conflict was already rearing its head in the colony. Dissidents could receive harsh treatment; one John Oldham, a non-Separatist who was nicknamed “Mad Jack” for his contrary ways, quarrelled persistently with the Pilgrim leadership, until Miles Standish lined up his troops in two long rows and made Oldham run the gauntlet, with soldiers striking him with their musket butts all the way along.
Caffrey dryly notes that “This hearty treatment…persuaded many independents to join the church, which seemed naturally to Bradford yet one more example of the providence of God” (p. 207). The paradoxes and contradictions of the Pilgrim experiment at Plymouth Colony become all too apparent here.
We all know, of course, that the Pilgrims’ relatively small Plymouth Colony was eventually absorbed into the Puritans’ much larger and more affluent Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Puritans had an advantage in that regard: as their stated intent was merely to “purify” the Church of England, rather than separating from the church altogether as the Pilgrims sought to do, the Puritans generally had an easier time of it than the Separatists did. Yet Caffrey emphasizes the common factors linking the two groups that settled colonial Massachusetts, and their long-term influence on American society and culture, starting with
…the basic concept common to Puritans and Separatists that work is valuable in itself. Hard-headed if narrow enterprise, piety, industry, thrift, coupled with the belief that idleness is sin and that the New England colonists were the chosen people, elect of God, forged their character, which set its stamp forever on the best, and some of the worst, of American attitudes. The worst was the killjoy intolerance that has made life a misery for many lively souls; the best, far outweighing this, was the heroic strain that gave America its best quality: the New England conscience. (p. 305)
Taking the reader up through the uncertain fate of the Mayflower itself, and emphasizing the undeniable cultural influence of the little ship’s Pilgrim passengers, Caffrey’s The Mayflower makes for a smooth and agreeable voyage.
Caffrey, an English author who wrote a number of British-history works like The Edwardian Lady, emphasizes well the British beginnings of what has come to be considered a quintessentially American story. Her enthusiasm for her subject matter is evident, as when she sets forth her impressions of the contemporary town of Plymouth, England: “[E]ven to one who simply passes through, especially by rail, Plymouth is superb. Not that it is a particularly beautiful town: indeed, in some ways it is frankly ugly. But the setting is tremendous” (pp. 101-02).
After describing the sound, the breakwater, the estuaries, the harbour busy with vessels, Caffrey goes on to focus on what the contemporary visitor to Plymouth, U.K., is probably looking for:
He who explores on foot will find the great artificial frontage of the How impressive from a distance, cluttered with monuments at close quarters: here, after all, Drake apparently played bowls when the Armada was sighted, and his braggadocio statue, bulging with puffed sleeve and breeches and muscle, looks out with upcurled beard toward the slim pencil of the Eddystone lighthouse on the horizon. But it is down at the Barbican that the stone gateway stands, overlooking Sutton Pool, with the words on the pavement carved before it: Mayflower 1620. (p. 102)
Caffrey chronicles the Mayflower’s difficult voyage across the Atlantic, with suitable attention to the highlights that she knows her readers will want her to attend to. One such highlight is the Mayflower Compact, the document that 41 members of the expedition agreed to sign in order to achieve safe self-government once they arrived in the New World. The colonists agreed to “covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic for our better ordering and preservation…and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, and constitutions and offices from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience” (p. 115).
Even if, as Caffrey duly notes, “The rights were not completely equal in practice” (p. 114), the Mayflower Compact is still widely considered to have established an important precedent for Americans agreeing upon terms of orderly and mutually binding terms for self-government – a social compact, with 41 signatures. The reader, and particularly the American reader, inevitably looks ahead 156 years to when 56 other Signers, at Philadelphia, affixed their own signatures to the Declaration of Independence – and then glances 11 years further ahead still, toward that time when 39 other signers, also at Philadelphia, signed the United States Constitution that remains the founding organic law for the U.S.A. To say that Americans today are proud of those two social compacts would be an understatement.
Caffrey also makes sure to include an account of the first Thanksgiving, drawing upon Edward Winslow’s 1621 account, published in a book now known as Mourt’s Relation, of how the colonial governor followed up the gathering of the colony’s autumn harvest by sending four men “on fowling”; a group of Indigenous men, led by their king Massasoit, visited and brought five freshly killed deer, after which everyone feasted together. Caffrey summarizes what is known about the first Thanksgiving thus:
[T]he Pilgrims played games of chance and skill, and the Indians danced for them. They all enjoyed roast duck and goose, eels, clams and other shellfish, leeks, watercress “and other salad herbs,” wild plums, dried berries, white bread and cornbread, white wine and red wine. They certainly ate roast turkey, but not, that first time, cranberry sauce… (p. 153) – all of which is fun to think about and consider, during one’s own Thanksgiving celebration.
If only it could have stayed that way forever – that heart-warming tableau of people sharing the land and its resources, in peace and harmony. It didn’t stay that way, of course. Just three years after the last of those first-Thanksgiving leftovers had been eaten and enjoyed, religious and cultural conflict was already rearing its head in the colony. Dissidents could receive harsh treatment; one John Oldham, a non-Separatist who was nicknamed “Mad Jack” for his contrary ways, quarrelled persistently with the Pilgrim leadership, until Miles Standish lined up his troops in two long rows and made Oldham run the gauntlet, with soldiers striking him with their musket butts all the way along.
Caffrey dryly notes that “This hearty treatment…persuaded many independents to join the church, which seemed naturally to Bradford yet one more example of the providence of God” (p. 207). The paradoxes and contradictions of the Pilgrim experiment at Plymouth Colony become all too apparent here.
We all know, of course, that the Pilgrims’ relatively small Plymouth Colony was eventually absorbed into the Puritans’ much larger and more affluent Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Puritans had an advantage in that regard: as their stated intent was merely to “purify” the Church of England, rather than separating from the church altogether as the Pilgrims sought to do, the Puritans generally had an easier time of it than the Separatists did. Yet Caffrey emphasizes the common factors linking the two groups that settled colonial Massachusetts, and their long-term influence on American society and culture, starting with
…the basic concept common to Puritans and Separatists that work is valuable in itself. Hard-headed if narrow enterprise, piety, industry, thrift, coupled with the belief that idleness is sin and that the New England colonists were the chosen people, elect of God, forged their character, which set its stamp forever on the best, and some of the worst, of American attitudes. The worst was the killjoy intolerance that has made life a misery for many lively souls; the best, far outweighing this, was the heroic strain that gave America its best quality: the New England conscience. (p. 305)
Taking the reader up through the uncertain fate of the Mayflower itself, and emphasizing the undeniable cultural influence of the little ship’s Pilgrim passengers, Caffrey’s The Mayflower makes for a smooth and agreeable voyage.
November 15, 2019
非常“实在”的一本书，介绍最重要的这艘五月花号跨洋探险的船只以及随船的第一批到达美洲普利茅斯的开拓者的故事。没有花哨的内容和做作的描写，有的只是大量的背景的介绍和史料性的内容，文字朴实无华，内容又细致无比。从中你可以读出很多纸外的意味。
是我很喜欢的写法，读的时候也有很强的代入感。
是我很喜欢的写法，读的时候也有很强的代入感。
December 6, 2015
Did a good job of describing the different factions of pilgrims. Separates the religious from the non-church faction. May be outdone elsewhere by other works, but I really liked this one. Very readable.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews