MAYFLOWER ENTHUSIASTS' MANUAL:

The Pilgrim Fathers are often hailed as the founders of the American nation, although the Virginia Company had created a colony a few years earlier and the whole continent was already peopled by native Americans. This comprehensive guide to the voyage of the Mayflower in 1620 puts the Pilgrim Fathers in the context of earlier exploration, for instance Leif Eriksson around the year 1000, Christopher Columbus in 1492 and the French expedition of 1521. Britain's John Cabot and Sir Francis Drake were early transatlantic adventurers, while Sir Walter Raleigh's ill-fated attempt to create an American colony notoriously ended in disaster. The Mayflower Pilgrims were religious exiles voyaging from Leiden in the Netherlands, Separatists who felt the Church of England had retained too many elements of Roman Catholicism at the Reformation. The author describes in detail the 66-day voyage for its 102 migrants and 30 crew, with diagrams of the ship's structure, lists of their dried food and provisions, photos of 17th century navigational instruments and cartography, and details of the huts and wooden-framed houses they built on arrival. The settlers were fortunate that the leader of the Wampanoag Indians, Samoset, was an English speaker who was prepared to co-operate peacefully with them. In 1630, ten years after the Pilgrims' foundation of the Plymouth community, a fleet of 11 ships delivered 800 English Puritan colonists to the Massachusetts Bay colony of Salem and Boston under its governor John Winthrop, and these highly devout settlers spread throughout what we now call New England. The final chapter describes the creation of the Mayflower II, the brainchild of journalist Warwick Charlton, which made the voyage in 1957. 156pp, numerous colour and archive photos, maps.