The Last of the Mayflower - Softcover

Harris, Rendel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1443714372 ISBN 13: 9781443714372

Publisher: Read & Co. History, 2008

Synopsis

The Pilgrim ship did not vanish after 1620. In The Last of the Mayflower, Rendel Harris follows the vessel through English port papers, an East India venture, and a spell as a whaler.

Published in 1920, three hundred years after the crossing, this short study by James Rendel Harris (1852–1941) gathers the scattered evidence for what became of the ship once she had carried the Leyden congregation to Plymouth. Harris prints letters of the missionary John Eliot along with a bill of lading, weighs Marsden's theory that a second ship of the name also carried Pilgrims, and traces her into East India Company service and on to the Coromandel Coast, where she came to grief off Masulipatam.

Harris was an English biblical scholar and Quaker, curator of manuscripts at the John Rylands Library in Manchester and the first director of studies at Woodbrooke, and he brought a manuscript hunter's habits to the question. Issued alongside its companion volume The Finding of the Mayflower, it is a piece of documentary detective work assembled from registers, wills, and port records rather than from local legend.

This edition features:

• The complete 1920 text, first published in the three hundredth anniversary year of the 1620 departure
• Chapters following the ship from the Leyden migration to the East Indies and the whaling trade
• Letters of the missionary John Eliot and a bill of lading of the ship, printed from the original documents
• Marsden's theory of a second Pilgrim ship, set beside the rival claims for the Webber and Vassall vessels

Edition details

• Publisher: Read & Co. History
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1443714372
• ISBN 13: 9781443714372
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 132