July 3, 2006
The Godspeed Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:25 PM EST I confess to a hopeless weakness for ships. They fire my imagination as few material objects can. If they are historic or reproductions of historic ships, so much the better. There are an ever increasing number of these that are open to the public, and I will endeavor in the near future to make a list of some for the readers of this blog.
Last week I had the opportunity to visit, at New York’s South Street Seaport, the Godspeed, a replica of one of the three ships that carried the first settlers to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 and thus began the American saga. While, not surprisingly, we don’t know exactly what the Godspeed looked like, this is a faithful reproduction of a typical merchant vessel of the early seventeenth century of the same size and doubtless closely resembles the original, as do the replicas of the Susan Constant, now at Jamestown, and the Discovery, now abuilding in Maine.
Although I wasn’t able to go below (the crew that is taking the ship on an East Coast tour lives there), even from the deck I had the same reaction, even more so, that I had had when I visited the Mayflower II, at Plymouth, Massachusetts, a few years ago: “People crossed the Atlantic Ocean in this?”
The Godspeed, 40 tons (a measure of its cargo capacity, not its weight) is far smaller than the Mayflower, which was about 150 tons. It is only 88 feet long on the deck and 17 wide, but the Godspeed carried 39 passengers and 13 crew on a voyage that lasted four and a half months. Only occasionally, in the fairest weather, were the passengers allowed up on deck. The rest of the time they were confined to the stifling, stinking, perpetually damp and often dripping spaces below. There they lived cheek by jowl without the slightest privacy, existing on a diet of salt beef, peas, weevilly biscuits, and water that grew more and more foul as the voyage lengthened.
To be sure, people of the early seventeenth century had far lower expectations with regard to privacy, personal comfort, and diet than we of the early twenty-first—spoiled rotten, thank heavens, by prosperity and technological advance. Still, it must have been a gruesome experience, even by their standards, with the constant danger of death by drowning thrown into the bargain. Undoubtedly, had the passengers had even an inkling of the horrors of starvation, disease, and hostile natives that awaited them in the early years of Virginia, they would never have embarked in the first place.
That is why there is no Virginia equivalent of the Mayflower Society, an organization of descendants of the 54 passengers on the Mayflower who left descendants. There are many millions of Mayflower descendants living today (no fewer than eight presidents have had Mayflower ancestry, including FDR and the Bushes), but few if any can prove descent from the 104 passengers of the brave little fleet that docked in what would be called Jamestown on May 14, 1607. Unlike on the Mayflower, the passengers in that first fleet were all male. Few if any lived long enough to father children.
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