Desperate Shores - The Mayflower
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Desperate Shores - The Mayflower
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About this listen
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 Tisquantum — enslaved, educated in London, returned home to find his entire people dead — who taught a colony how to survive, then used his position to play both sides of a continent.
This is the episode where two peoples build something together that actually works. And where William Bradford records the deaths of his neighbors with meticulous care — while leaving his own wife's death, in December 1620, without explanation.
The seeds of self-government, planted not in a hall of philosophy, but on a frozen beach by people who were just trying to make it through the winter.