Robert Cushman - Attempts To Leave On The Speedwell

Attempts To Leave On The Speedwell

When it came time to leave Southampton, Cushman made sure he joined his friends aboard the Speedwell. But the ship was not seaworthy. Cushman wrote: "(S)he is as open and leaky as a sieve". Soon after Mayflower and Speedwell cleared the coast, they made to put in for repairs to Dartmouth, a port seventy-five miles west of Southampton. The repairs were completed on August 17, but they were forced to remain in Dartmouth due to lack of wind and by then half their food had been eaten. In his writings Cushman was very concerned about this. Many of the passengers wanted to abandon the voyage, even though, to many, it meant losing everything they possessed. As Cushman states, the Mayflower captain refused to let them off. (H)e will not hear them, nor suffer them to go ashore, Cushman wrote, "lest they should run away." The months of tension had caught up with Cushman and he began to suffer a searing pain in his chest - "a bundle of lead as it were, crushing my heart." He felt he was going to die. The two ships left Darmouth and traveled more than three hundred miles when they again had to turn back because of trouble on the Speedwell and this time to Plymouth in Devon. The Speedwell had to be abandoned because would never survive the trip. The trade-off for a safer passage was the reduction of the 120 passengers to about 100, who then had to be squeezed aboard a single ship. Of those from the Speedwell who did not board the Mayflower was the Cushman family, he stricken with a grave illness and stated he expected at any moment to become meate for ye fishes. After the decision to abandon the Speedwell, Cushman and his family had priority to sail on the Mayflower but they declined - probably because of Robert's illness.

The Mayflower left England on September 1620 and was a grueling 66-day journey marked by disease, which claimed two lives. The weather and the seas forced the ship to drop anchor inside the hook tip of Cape Cod Harbor.