Mayflower II and the Living History at Plimoth Patuxent
Near Plymouth, Massachusetts
The Mayflower II arrived in Plymouth harbor on June thirteenth, nineteen fifty seven, and twenty five thousand people came to the waterfront to greet it. The ship is a full-scale reproduction of the original Mayflower, built in Devon, England, in nineteen fifty five and nineteen fifty six through a collaboration between a British writer named Warwick Charlton and the museum then known as Plimoth Plantation. Charlton wanted the project to symbolize the friendship between Britain and the United States in the years after the Second World War.
The builders used traditional methods and consulted old records to reconstruct a vessel close to what the original might have looked like. The ship is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places in its own right, recognized as a historic object separate from its symbolic purpose. It serves as a floating museum where interpreters help visitors understand what the Atlantic crossing was actually like in a vessel roughly the length of a tennis court.
A few miles south, the museum now called Plimoth Patuxent, renamed to acknowledge the Wampanoag people who lived on this land for thousands of years before the Pilgrims arrived, offers both a reconstructed seventeenth-century English village and a Wampanoag homesite staffed by Wampanoag people themselves. Millions of people have stepped aboard the Mayflower II since it arrived in Plymouth.
