What led a person in 17th-century England to get on a ship bound for the Americas? James Evans attempts to answer that question by exploring both the push and pull factors involved.
His descriptions are vivid, so the reader can imagine the life choices that would lead to one finding oneself heaving up over the side of a small ship somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, or watching the burial at sea of a fellow passenger, and hoping to God one had made the right choice. God, of course, was a big part of the choice for many of them.
The Mayflower pilgrims, who landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620, are the quintessential ‘religious liberty’ seekers, so many of whom headed across the Atlantic. They had already been in exile in Holland for 12 years, when the arrival of Spanish authority was likely to put them in danger again.
It is easy to imagine their desire to be free from persecution. What is harder for us to imagine is the depth of their faith: today, when Anglican is almost a synonym for agnostic, the absolute belief in the providence of the Lord that led this group to take such risks is hard for us to grasp.
The emergence of the Pilgrims, a small separatist group mostly from Lincolnshire, at just a time when settling in the Americas became a viable option, was one of history’s coincidences. They did not seem destined for historical importance. Their settlement in Plymouth was tiny, and within 50 years it would be surrounded, swallowed up by the Puritan great migration that followed (the Pilgrims and the Puritans were not the same group, although Evans seems to think they were).
But by another twist of history, during the Protestant revival in the 19th century, the historical reputation of the Pilgrims got the wind behind it.
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