son, of the “Departure of the Pilgrims from Delfshaven,” as reproduced by Dr. W. E. Griffis, as the frontispiece to his little monograph, “The Pilgrims in their Three Homes.”  No reliable description of the pinnace herself is known to exist, and but few facts concerning her have been gleaned.  That she was fairly “roomy” for a small number of passengers, and had decent accommodations, is inferable from the fact that so many as thirty were assigned to her at Southampton, for the Atlantic voyage (while the may-Flower, three times her tonnage, but of greater proportionate capacity, had but ninety), as also from the fact that “the chief [i.e. principal people] of them that came from Leyden went in this ship, to give Master Reynolds content.”  That she mounted at least “three pieces of ordnance” appears by the testimony of Edward Winslow, and they probably comprised her armament.

We have seen that Bradford notes the purchase and refitting of this “smale ship of 60 tune” in Holland.  The story of her several sailings, her “leakiness,” her final return, and her abandonment as unseaworthy, is familiar.  We find, too, that Bradford also states in his “Historie,” that “the leakiness of this ship was partly by her being overmasted and too much pressed with sails.”  It will, however, amaze the readers of Professor Arber’s generally excellent “Story of the Pilgrim Fathers,” so often referred to herein, to find him sharply arraigning “those members of the Leyden church who were responsible for the fitting of the Speedwell,” alleging that “they were the proximate causes of most of the troubles on the voyage [of the may-Flower] out; and of many of the deaths at Plymouth in New England in the course of the following Spring; for they overmasted the vessel, and by so doing strained her hull while sailing.”  To this straining, Arber wholly ascribes the “leakiness” of the Speedwell and the delay in the final departure of the Mayflower, to which last he attributes the disastrous results he specifies.  It would seem that the historian, unduly elated at what he thought the discovery of another “turning-point of modern history,” endeavors to establish it by such assertions and such partial references to Bradford as would support the imaginary “find.”  Briefly stated, this alleged discovery, which he so zealously announces, is that if the Speedwell had not been overmasted, both she and the may-Flower would have arrived early in the fall at the mouth of the Hudson River, and the whole course of New England history would have been entirely different.  Ergo, the “overmasting” of the Speedwell was a “pivotal point in modern history.”  With the idea apparently of giving eclat to this announcement and of attracting attention to it, he surprisingly charges the responsibility for the “overmasting” and its alleged dire results upon the leaders of the Leyden church, “who were,” he repeatedly asserts, “alone responsible.”