For a long period the red cross had been the colors of English navigators, as well as the badge of English soldiery . . . .  No permanent English settlement in America was made until after the adoption of the ‘King’s Colors.’  Jamestown, Plymouth, Salem, and Boston were settled under the new flag, though the ships bringing over settlers, being English vessels, also carried the red cross as permitted.”  Mr. Barlow Cumberland, of Toronto, Canada, has also given, in a little monograph entitled “The Union Jack” (published by William Briggs of that city, 1898), an admirable account of the history of the British jack, which confirms the foregoing conclusions.  The early English jack was later restored.  Such, roughly sketched, was the Pilgrim ship, the renowned may-Flower, as, drafted from the meagre but fairly trustworthy and suggestive data available, she appears to us of to-day.

HER HISTORY: 

In even the little we know of the later history of the ship, one cannot always be quite sure of her identity in the records of vessels of her name, of which there have been many.  Dr. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, of Boston, says that “a vessel bearing this name was owned in England about fifteen years or more before the voyage of our forefathers, but it would be impossible to prove or disprove its identity with the renowned may-Flower, however great such a probability might be.  It is known, nevertheless, that—­the identical famous vessel afterwards hailed from various English ports, such as London, Yarmouth, and Southampton, and that it was much used in transporting immigrants to this country.  What eventually became of it and what was the end of its career, are equally unknown to history.”  Goodwin says:  “It does not appear that the may-Flower ever revisited Plymouth, but in 1629 she came to Salem,” with a company of the Leyden people for Plymouth, under command of Captain William Peirce, the warm friend of the Pilgrims, and in 1630 was one of the large fleet that attended John Winthrop, under a different master, discharging her passengers at Charlestown.  Nothing is certainly known of her after that time.  In 1648 a ship [hereinafter mentioned by Hunter] named the may-Flower was engaged in the slave trade, and the ill-informed as well as the ill-disposed have sometimes sneeringly alleged that this was our historic ship; but it is ascertained that the slaver was a vessel of three hundred and fifty tons,—­nearly twice the size of our ship of happy memory.  In 1588 the officials of Lynn (England) offered the “May-Flower” (150 tons) to join the fleet against the dreaded Spanish Armada.  In 1657, Samuel Vassall, of London, complained that the government had twice impressed his ship, may-Flower, which he had “fitted out with sixty men, for the Straits.”  Rev. Joseph Hunter, author of “The Founders of New Plymouth,” one