The gallant Mayflower set sail from Plymouth, Devon, on September the sixth, in the year sixteen hundred and twenty.
Bearing one hundred and thirty souls, seeking a kinder heaven, a haven for puritan pilgrims in a new world of spiritual verity.
No weightier cargo had ever shipped across the Atlantic ocean, beyond the outlaw reach of King James and bishops aplenty.
Genesis of new church, commonwealth and nation no longer a notion, a watercourse of empire and language flowed westerly.
For the first half it was a voyage without fear or trepidation, unblemished skies, calm seas not the vaguest hint of calamity.
Then violent storms blew up from the north east crushing any elation, huge waves battered the ship with ferocious intensity.
Mayflower, a small vessel drifted for days unable to raise a single sail, fearing the loss of her masts through stormy perversity.
Severely damaged ship’s main beam, the colonists’ dream about to fail, saved by a metal jackscrew a homebuilding necessity.
Finally leader William Bradford could bless the God of heaven, for delivering them from all perils of a raging sea of adversity.
For they had sighted the harbour at what is present-day Cape Cod hook on November the ninth, sixteen hundred and twenty.
A.McTiernan
'The Mayflower at Sea' - Library of Congress
'The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth' [Massachusetts] By Jennie Augusta Brownscombe -1914 - Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal