Project Mayflower

The Mayflower II is a replica of the 1620 ship that carried the Pilgrims to America. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and draws about 2.6 million visitors a year to Plymouth. Its story is more involved than it looks. Project Mayflower begins in the 1950s, and not with an American but with Warwick Charlton, a British veteran of World War II. He set himself what seemed an impossible goal: build a historically accurate replica, sail it across the Atlantic, and give it to the United States as Britain's thank-you to its wartime ally.

Charlton did not know that Henry "Harry" Hornblower II, the son of a powerful New England financier, had the same idea. Hornblower wanted a replica as the main attraction of a museum he was building in Massachusetts, soon to be known as Plimoth Plantation, close to where the original Mayflower had landed centuries earlier. Their motives were quite different, but when the two men met by chance in 1955 they agreed to pool their efforts. Charlton would take on financing, construction and the ship's safe crossing of the Atlantic, while Hornblower promised mooring, maintenance and exhibition.

Richard A. Stone follows the project from the origin of the idea through the financial and political pressures that nearly sank it. He also covers the difficulty of building an accurate replica when the only known description of the ship was William Bradford's note in Of Plimoth Plantation that she was "180 tons of burden."

The book then traces the Mayflower II's seven-week voyage from Plymouth, England, to Plymouth, Massachusetts, under the command of Alan Villiers with a crew of thirty-three. It closes with the praise that greeted the achievement, the underhanded attempts to damage the reputation of the project's creator, and the ship's lasting and continuing influence on the United States.