I saw an old movie last night titled "Plymouth Adventure" about the Pilgrims crossing the Atlantic on the Mayflower.
Christopher Jones, the captain of the Mayflower, was played by Spencer Tracy. Tracy did not have an English accent, which was strange considering he was an Englishman and everybody else had the right accent. (Actually Tracy seemed discomfited in this role, not his best film.)

Movie makers play fast and loose with the facts, so the film was more like a docudrama, with non factual teasers added in, like Capt.Jones and Dorothy Bradford, wife of a Pilgim leader, having a thing for each other, and her comitting suicide by jumping off the ship--all not true. Dorothy Bradford did die in the crossing, but the rest the film maker made up.

But there were enough ligitimate facts to make the film riveting. The Mayflower was a creaky little old bucket of a ship that got a late start leaving England and got hit with a hideous storm, maybe a hurricane. The Mayflower was taking on water, the spars broke and rotten sails tattered. A main ship's beam cracked and was propped up by the crew to support it, otherwise they would have went to the bottom.

The passengers and crew then faced a lack of drinking water, scanty food was almost gone, scurvy was decimating, the cold damp conditions, sickness hunger and deprivation caused "lung fever."
And a baby was born aboard ship--he was named Oceanus Hopkins by his parents.

Weeks turned into months; the crew was ready to mutiny when land was finally sighted, what would become named New England, Cape Cod. Shivering in their thin ragged city clothes, a landing party came ashore in a longboat onto a deserted beach, weak and frail, with guns they didn't know how to use, fearful of encounters with natives.

107 came ashore, by spring, 56 remained. It's heroic, that a handful of sick and dying men and women established a toehold in the New World, and by what a frail thread was this democracy begun. What a legacy we have; a reason for thanks to those who made the perilous journey.

susil