Qualla: Mayflower Steps

Mayflower Steps: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Padmaja menon, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Mayflower did not really leave from these steps. Local historians are honest about that: the actual point of departure was probably about a hundred yards away, under what is now a Victorian pub called the Admiral MacBride. But for four centuries Plymouth has needed somewhere to commemorate the moment, and so a small commemorative portico with Doric columns of Portland stone, built in 1934, stands at the water's edge on the Barbican and marks the place where, on 6 September 1620, 102 passengers and 30 crew finally turned their backs on England.

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Image: Padmaja menon | CC BY-SA 3.0

Mayflower Steps: Why Plymouth at All

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lewis Clarke, CC BY-SA 2.0. The passengers had not planned to sail from Plymouth. Most of them came from East Anglia, from the separatist congregation that had spent the previous decade exiled in Leiden, and from London, where the financial backers and recruited tradesmen had joined the venture. They had le...

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Image: Lewis Clarke | CC BY-SA 2.0

Mayflower Steps: The Crossing

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Debbie J, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Atlantic in autumn is no place for a small wooden cargo ship. Sixty-six days of cold, of vomiting, of cramped berths, of a deckbeam splitting and being shored back with an iron screw the passengers had brought for a printing press. Two people died on the way; one baby was bor...

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Image: Debbie J | CC BY-SA 2.0

Mayflower Steps: The First Winter

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lewis Clarke, CC BY-SA 2.0. About half the passengers and a similar fraction of the crew did not live to see spring. The Wikipedia source records the bare arithmetic; the lived reality was small one-room shelters, salt cod, scurvy, pneumonia, the New England cold that 17th-century English clothing was not m...

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Image: Lewis Clarke | CC BY-SA 2.0

Mayflower Steps: The Patuxet Side of the Story

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jabarney, CC BY-SA 3.0. The land the Pilgrims chose to settle was not empty. Patuxet had been a thriving Wampanoag village until 1616-1619, when a series of epidemics — almost certainly introduced by earlier European fishing crews — killed most of its inhabitants. The Pilgrims walked into the cleared fi...

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Image: Jabarney | CC BY-SA 3.0

Mayflower Steps: What the Pier Holds

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rosser1954, CC BY-SA 4.0. Today the Mayflower Steps are a small platform with a brushed-steel rail and a shelf of nautical bronze artwork explaining the history. Boat trips leave from here to circle Plymouth Sound and run up the River Tamar past HM Naval Base Devonport, where the Royal Navy's current subm...

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Image: Rosser1954 | CC BY-SA 4.0