Desperate Shores - The Mayflower

American Political History · Mar 26, 2021 · 26m · transcript

September 6th, 1620. The Mayflower leaves England six weeks late, on a companion ship's suspicious leaking, heading into the North Atlantic in autumn with two groups of people who have almost nothing in common. Before they ever set foot on shore, they write a document in the hold of the ship that will help start a revolution a century and a half later.

But the story of the Mayflower is not only the story of the people on it. It is the story of a coast emptied by plague, a sachem calculating how to use fifty starving settlers to end a payment he can no longer afford to make, and a man named…