20. Mayflower 400: celebration or 'call-out'?

The banner that I designed for Henry Carter FRS

A few weeks ago I happened to mention online an exhibition that I had staged at our local museum back in 2013. It was a bicentennial tribute to East Devon’s only native-born Fellow of the Royal Society: the physician, geologist and naturalist Henry John Carter.

Carter has given his name to a species of gecko, a variety of frankincense tree, a parasitic fungus and many species of sponge. Charles Darwin, a contemporary, praised his research.

A view of Carter's home town of Budleigh Salterton from the sea, and the blue plaque on the wall of his home Umbrella Cottage, on Fore Street Hill

Born in 1813, he spent much of his working life abroad before retiring to his birthplace of Budleigh Salterton where, in 1872, he explained in a letter to one of his former teachers that he was devoting his leisure to scientific studies “in order to follow your precept of making fellow-creatures better and happy.” 

A good and gifted man, therefore. A humanist, as is clear from the anger that he expressed in a diary entry at the inhumanity of the caste system in India. But a Victorian.

The Extent of the British Empire in 1886
Published as a supplement to the 'Graphic' magazine 24 July 1886 with statistical information furnished by Captain J.C.R. Colomb MP, with British territories coloured red 
Artist: Walter Crane (1845-1915)

And that mention of India disturbed one of my readers.  “Not sure I would describe anyone associated with the East India Company in any positive way. A bit baffled as to why that appears on here as if to be celebrated!?” she wrote in a comment on social media. “Colonialist horrors exist in all kinds of places. It is important to call them out for what they are though.”

Left: This painting in All Saints' church, East Budleigh, is a copy of one of the best known portraits of Sir Walter formerly attributed to Zuccaro but now to the monogrammist 'H' (? Hubbard) and dated 1588. It shows Raleigh in court dress at the height of his favour with Queen Elizabeth I. The illustration by an uncredited artist, right, circa 1860, is an impression of the execution of Sir Walter Raleigh (who refused a blindfold).  Included in 'The Popular History of England: An Illustrated History of Society and Government from the Earliest Period to Our Own Times,' by Charles Knight.  

What she had written reminded me of a similarly outraged response – though a bit garbled - by an Exmouth resident when I suggested that our museum should honour local hero Sir Walter Raleigh in 2018 by marking the 400^th anniversary of his death. 

“Celebrate Walter Raleigh no chance he made his money from the slave trade along with Elizabeth a disgrace nothing to celebrate there along with the mayflower ship leaving from Plymouth a boat load of poor innocent men, woman and children set voyage for a disgusting life chained up whipped and beaten and rape defo no and to work day and night poor slaves. America made great through the slaves along with Britain.”

I got the sense of what she was saying of course. I didn't tell her that Raleigh had been dead for two years when the 'Mayflower' sailed from Plymouth in 1620.  

Frontispiece illustration from 'Upper Canada Sketches'  by Thomas Conant  Toronto: William Briggs 1898. It shows the former mill house in East Budleigh, demolished in the early 20th century

I’m wondering now what kind of response there will be to the suggestion that East Budleigh honours its other hero: Roger Conant, born in 1592 at the village’s mill house, who went on become a member of the Salters’ Company in London, took ship for America three years after the Plymouth Pilgrims and in 1626 founded the coastal city of Salem in the state of Massachusetts.

One local resident whom I invited to take part in a commemorative project to honour Conant responded:  “Whilst the historic connection between East Budleigh and Salem, and the importance of the salting industry is a vital part of our heritage, the colonial nature of the subject sits uncomfortably with me howsoever significant. The cost of colonialism to indigenous communities has been so great.”

2020 has a problem which was not there a century ago when the 300^th anniversaries of Raleigh’s death and the sailing of the Mayflower were remembered.

In October 1918, in the midst of the bombardments and the slaughter of the Great War, Britain took time off to celebrate the life of Sir Walter for his tercentenary. Its politicians clearly wanted to show their gratitude to America for its support of the Allies, even if it had come in at a late stage. Germany of course had been desperately hoping to keep the US out of the conflict. 

Celebrating Mayflower 300 would have been an extension of that celebration to stress the UK-US ‘special relationship’.  You can read more about the Raleigh tercentenary at http://raleigh400.blogspot.com/2018/01/raleigh-300-how-did-they-mark.html

Sir Francis Drake whilst playing bowls on Plymouth Hoe is informed of the approaching Spanish Armada. One of four bronze relief plaques on the base of the Drake statue in Tavistock, Devon. By Joseph Boehm (d.1890), donated by Hastings Russell, 9th Duke of Bedford   Image credit: Lobsterthermidor 

And in 2020 the city made famous by the departure of the 'Mayflower' – even though none of the Plymouth Pilgrims came from Devon – has a difficulty.  The glorious reputation that it enjoyed a century ago – where heroic Sir Francis Drake played bowls on Plymouth Hoe before sailing out to defeat the Spanish Armada and keep England free from the tyranny of the Inquisition – is under attack. Today, Drake is commonly known not just as an English sea captain and explorer but as a slave trader.

Portrait of Admiral Sir John Hawkins, National Maritime Museum, London. Artist unknown.  Right are the arms granted to John Hawkins in 1565, for the massive profits he made in the slave trade. Included is a "demi Moor in his proper colour, bound and captive, with annulets in his arms and ears". Image credit: William Harvey - College of Arms, United Kingdom

Thanks to Drake’s cousin Sir John Hawkins, the city is even more tainted. “Interestingly the English chapter in the history of slavery begins in Plymouth,” reads a BBC report of 2014. “John Hawkins was England’s first slave trader. In 1562 he sailed from the Barbican in Plymouth with three ships and violently kidnapped about 400 Africans in Guinea, later trading them in the West Indies.”

Back in 1994, Plymouth City Council called off plans to celebrate the 400^th anniversary of Hawkins’ death because of his links with the African slave trade.  But the organisers of Plymouth’s Mayflower 400 are well aware that the stain of the supposed Elizabethan origins of slavery has spread wider. To that crime has been added what the website calls the ‘horrific genocide’ of America’s  indigenous peoples, committed over the centuries by those who followed the 1620 Pilgrims.  

For that reason, for four weeks in July and August  2020 in Plymouth’s Central Park,  a group of 20 Native American indigenous and mixed heritage artists will “both present and live in a radical large-scale installation of public art”  in what is described as “a groundbreaking project linking communities across the globe”.  The event, entitled ‘Settlement’ will  “investigate and interpret their lives as the survivors of settler colonialism".

Village of the Secotan Indians in North Carolina, by John White in 1585. British Museum, London. 

It is indeed shocking to learn, from the Mayflower 400 website that the population of Native Americans before contact with Europeans was between 9 and 18 million and that by the latter part of the 19th century it had been reduced to approximately 250,000. “Boarding schools, involuntary sterilisation and mass murder” were among the methods used in what has been called – incidentally by a Conant descendant  elsewhere on this blog – “a holocaust”. 

Adolf Hitler poses for the camera in 1930
Image credit: Bundesarchiv Bild and Wikimedia

The terminology matches all too well what we know of genocide in Europe. An article in 'The New Yorker' magazine of 30 April 2018 noted how Hitler, in his book 'Mein Kampf' had praised America as the one state that has made progress toward a primarily racial conception of citizenship, by “excluding certain races from naturalization.” Three years later, in 1928, he remarked, approvingly, that white settlers in America had “gunned down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand.”

Comparing the official American and British Mayflower 400 websites, Prof Donna Seger, Head of History at State Salem University, commented in a post for 1 January 2020 in her ‘Streets of Salem’ blog on the "sophistication, earnestness, and creativity of the British commemoration of the Mayflower voyage"; the American version in her view was no more than a Chamber of Commerce production.

The Mayflower 400 logo

And yet, for critics, there is no end to the ‘call-out’ for colonialism. With Plymouth’s programme of events well under way in November 2019, writer and local resident Angela Sherlock, in a letter to the 'Guardian' newspaper, was complaining that “Mayflower 400 is commemorating the Mayflower voyage of 1620 without reference to the context and aftermath of that colonising venture”.  The voyage, she wrote, “was an invasion, seeking profit, and part of that process was the construction of a racial categorization”.

I suspect that so far the attention of the British public has been focused on Brexit rather than on Mayflower 400, but surely in the coming year that will change. I am looking forward to experiencing and learning from some of the events in Plymouth that should make us both share in the American dream and reflect on the nightmare.

Some useful links:
https://www.mayflower400uk.org/
https://www.plymouth400inc.org/   
https://streetsofsalem.com/2020/01/01/2020-the-commemorative-year/

You can access other posts on this blog by going to the Blog Archive (under the ‘About Me’ section), and clicking on the appropriate heading.