The Mayflower cleared Plymouth Harbor on September 16, 1620, five weeks late and one ship short, after its intended partner vessel proved too leaky to trust with the crossing at all; it sailed the Atlantic alone instead.

The Mayflower is supposed to have sailed from England to Massachusetts in one clean line: a ship, a crossing, a landing. It did not. It sailed twice before that and was turned back both times, then finally left port a third time without the vessel it was supposed to share the crossing with.

What was the Mayflower even doing with a second ship?

The Pilgrims who boarded at Southampton in early August 1620 were not one group but two. Passengers from the English Separatist congregation in Leiden had crossed from the Netherlands aboard a smaller ship called the Speedwell, purchased for the venture and meant to stay in America afterward as a fishing vessel for the new colony. The Mayflower, chartered out of London, was the larger of the pair: a cargo ship of about 180 tons (a measure of the hold's capacity, not the ship's weight) that had spent its working life hauling wine and, some years, timber and cloth, under a master named Christopher Jones, who also held a share in the ship.

Both vessels left Southampton together on August 5. Within days the Speedwell was taking on water badly enough that the pair put in at Dartmouth for repairs. They tried again, got roughly 300 miles out into the Atlantic, and the Speedwell started leaking a second time. Both ships turned back once more, this time to Plymouth, where the passengers and captains finally gave up on it.

The Speedwell's crew judged the hull unsound for an ocean crossing; some Pilgrim leaders suspected the ship's own sailors had sabotaged the pumps to get out of a year in an unfamiliar colony, though no one proved it. Either way, the decision was the same: leave the Speedwell in England, cram as many of its passengers as the Mayflower could hold, and go on with one ship instead of two.

Why did the Mayflower sail alone, five weeks behind schedule?

By the time the Mayflower left Plymouth for good, on September 16, 1620 by the calendar in use in England today, it was carrying 102 passengers, nearly double what its owners had likely planned for, plus a crew of roughly two dozen. The delay had already cost the expedition the better part of a month and a favorable stretch of the sailing season; late summer weather in the North Atlantic was the safer window, and it was gone.

The crossing took 66 days. The first half went reasonably well, with seasickness the main complaint recorded. By October the ship was running into the Atlantic storms that stretch of ocean produces every autumn, and conditions turned dangerous enough that the crew sometimes let the ship drift under bare poles rather than fight the wind with sail up.

One of those storms cracked a main deck beam. William Bradford, who sailed on the ship and later governed the colony it delivered, wrote that the passengers braced the beam back into place using "a great iron screw" one of them had brought along, probably meant for a printing press rather than ship repair. It held for the rest of the crossing.

The same stretch of weather swept a passenger named John Howland overboard. He caught hold of a trailing halyard rope in the water, held on, and was hauled back aboard with a boat hook: a detail that would matter far beyond that afternoon, since Howland survived to become one of Plymouth Colony's more prominent settlers and the ancestor of a large share of Americans who trace their line back to the ship. Partway across, a passenger named Elizabeth Hopkins gave birth to a son; the passengers named him Oceanus, for the water he was born on.

Did they even land where they meant to?

No. The Mayflower's passengers were sailing under a patent for land near the mouth of the Hudson River, inside territory the Virginia Company controlled. Instead they sighted Cape Cod on November 9, well north of that grant, and when the ship tried to work its way south along the coast it ran into the shoals off what is now Chatham, Massachusetts, and turned back rather than risk the hull a second time in one voyage.

That left the passengers outside any patent's authority, on land nobody aboard had a legal claim to. On November 11, 41 of the adult men signed an agreement, now known as the Mayflower Compact, pledging to form a "civil body politic" and abide by whatever laws it passed, an improvised piece of self-government written to cover the gap the wrong landfall had opened up. The colonists spent weeks scouting the harbor before settling at the site they named Plymouth, after the English port they had left.

The winter that followed was brutal. About half the people who had crossed on the Mayflower, passengers and crew both, were dead by spring, mostly from disease and exposure while the ship sat anchored offshore as makeshift housing. Christopher Jones stayed with his vessel through it and sailed it back to England in April 1621, reaching his home port of Rotherhithe that May. He died there less than a year later, worn down, by most accounts, by the two Atlantic crossings; he was buried at St Mary's Church, not far from the river.

Where is the actual ship now?

Nobody knows for certain. No record survives of the Mayflower's fate after Jones's death, and the likeliest explanation, one shared by most maritime historians, is the least romantic: an aging cargo ship, no longer profitable to insure or crew, was probably broken up for scrap timber in England sometime in the 1620s. A long-standing local story in Buckinghamshire claims that beams in a barn at Old Jordans came from the dismantled Mayflower; the claim has circulated for generations and has never been verified, and the barn's owners themselves now present it as tradition rather than established fact.

What exists today is a replica. Mayflower II, built in England and sailed across the Atlantic in 1957 to retrace the route, sits at the Plimoth Patuxet Museums in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and underwent a multiyear restoration finished in time for the 400th anniversary of the crossing in 2020. It draws visitors who want to stand on a deck built to the same lines as the one that Bradford, Howland, and the rest actually crossed on, even though it is not, and was never claimed to be, the same timber.

The Speedwell's fate is simpler and less dignified: sold off in England not long after the Pilgrims gave up on it, and never mentioned again in any record that survives. The ship that should have shared the voyage instead became the reason a single vessel, overcrowded and a month behind schedule, ended up carrying the whole story on its own.

Sources

• Pilgrim Hall Museum, "The Voyage of the Mayflower & Speedwell"
• MayflowerHistory.com, "Voyage"
• Mayflower400UK.org, "The Mayflower Story" and "Captain Christopher Jones"
• HISTORY.com, "Mayflower departs England"
• Wikipedia, "Christopher Jones (Mayflower captain)" and "Oceanus Hopkins"