Today, I am thankful for those reminders that my life is really not so bad.
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we all struggled to some extent with public health mandates to ‘stay at home’ and the numerous gubernatorial pleas to maintain social distancing. As many of us were cooped up in our homes, feeling immense hopelessness and abject frustration, we all lamented to our families, friends, and colleagues.
Today, we have the means to quickly identify whatever pandemic is inflicting us. In a span of only a few weeks after its initial discovery, the COVID-19 pandemic was identified as being caused by a specific coronavirus. Within days, scientists in China had fully sequenced the viral genome, allowing for vaccine development to rapidly commence. The time being when the virus was identified and a vaccine was deployed for initial clinical testing in the clinic was less than 2 months – a miraculous achievement of modern science. Yet, the pandemic was still devastating, owning to the sheer fact that the infectivity and severity of the infection was so profound.
The truth be told, we still have it so much better than our predecessors of old. As I think about our current predicament, I’ve come to appreciate how it must have felt a century ago, in 1920, to be inflicted with a serious bacterial infection knowing it might lead to your own demise, especially since the society of that time lacked any antibiotics to tackle it (penicillin was not discovered until 1928). Or how it must have felt 2 centuries ago, in 1820, to witness outbreaks of plague, diphtheria, and typhoid fever cripple the nation. Or even 3 centuries ago, in 1720, to know that you life expectancy was less than 40 years, all because small pox often decimated nearly 10-15 percent of the entire population.
So, you can only imagine how it must have felt exactly 400 years ago on this day (Aug 15) for 102 passengers on a small merchant ship to set sail across the Atlantic for life in the New World. The Mayflower set sail with individuals risking their lives in search of a world without religious persecution. The funny thing is how little we truly know about the Mayflower. Today, I thought I’d share some of the hardships from that experience in an effort to help put your own life into better perspective.
The congregation that sailed off on Mayflower in 1620 were already accustomed to heartache and despair. Deciding they did not want to pledge their allegiance to the Protestant Church of England, these ‘Pilgrims’, as we call them, had already tried to live in The Netherlands, where they had moved to in 1608 to flee from religious persecution in Britain. The secular life in Holland, was not what they had anticipated; their religious beliefs casted them as outsiders, and, in turn, high-paying jobs were hard to find. Moreover, the Puritans found the more secular leanings of the Dutch to be the antithesis of their own religious teachings.
So, the Pilgrims, led by their stalwart leader, William Bradford, eventually returned to London with the intent of establishing a new ‘plantation’ in the New World. After some regal negotiation, the English throne granted the Pilgrims permission to settle in ‘America’ somewhere between New York and the Chesapeake Bay, provided they carried themselves ‘peacefully’ and without public reproach of others. So, on this day in August 1620, they left Southampton, England, for the New World on two ships, the notorious Mayflower and the less known counterpart, the Speedwell.
Why don’t you know about the latter ship?
Well, it sprung a leak soon after its departure. Both vessels eventually returned to harbor in Plymouth, England, where all the passengers from both ships crammed together into the Mayflower to make the arduous journey across the high seas. In other words, a small ship intended for less than 50 passengers was now significantly overcrowded with 102 on board.
Sadly, the unfortunate delay led to the ship having to cross the Atlantic at the height of storm season. After 66 days of deplorable weather leading to cramped conditions, the spread of a plethora of infectious ailments, along with seasickness, became comminplace, as they reached the New World. To their dismay, the inclement weather had steered the ship off course and a bit northward, towards a small spit of land in what is now known as Massachusetts. They did not land on some mythical rock, as the legend would have you believe, but they did hit rock bottom for sure.
We’ll come back to what happened to these castaways sometime in late November. Until that time, keep in mind that your social isolation and ‘stay at home’ orders were really small infringements on your lives, as compared to what those Pilgrim migrants encountered four centuries ago.
Sometimes, a modicum of perspective goes a long way.
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