The Finding of the "Mayflower"

An old barn in Buckinghamshire, a frame of weathered ship's timbers, and a Quaker scholar determined to find out which vessel they came from.

James Rendel Harris (1852–1941) was a biblical scholar and manuscript hunter who taught at Johns Hopkins and Haverford, became the first director of studies at Woodbrooke, and served as curator of manuscripts at the John Rylands Library in Manchester. In 1920, three hundred years after the sailing, he turned those same habits of evidence on a local story: that the great barn at Jordans, beside one of the oldest Quaker meeting houses in England, had been raised from the timbers of the Mayflower.

The Finding of the "Mayflower" follows the trail through deeds, sale notices, and the judgement of shipwrights, states the objections as squarely as the proofs, and leaves the reader to decide. Harris also asks when the ship was broken up and who carted her away, and the answers he assembles say as much about what the vessel had come to mean by 1920 as about the wood itself. G. K. Chesterton's essay 'The Myth of the "Mayflower"', from Fancies Versus Fads (1923), is printed alongside, asking how much of the popular version of the sailing is record and how much is national myth-making.

This edition features:

• The complete 1920 text, published for the tercentenary of the Pilgrims' crossing to New England
• G. K. Chesterton's essay 'The Myth of the "Mayflower"' from Fancies Versus Fads, in full
• The case for and against the barn at Jordans, weighed by a scholar practised at testing documents
• An account of the ship's last years in England and the question of when she was broken up
• An illustrated volume for readers of maritime history, Quaker history, and the Pilgrim story