Around this time of September in the year 1620, the Mayflower departed for what is now, the United States. It is imperative for us to consider this fact – if a ship departs for another continent in mid-September, those on the ship must anticipate that they won’t arrive until the dead of winter. From this, then, we can understand that the pilgrims really must have wanted to get out of Holland, a place that they had already fled to because they felt uncomfortable with the political and religious environment in Plymouth, England. Consider the fact that over half of the people on the voyage died of famine, disease, and starvation. One has to wonder what was so distasteful about Holland that it would drive a group of religious separatists to a treacherous, cold, disease-ridden, predominantly fatal voyage to a continent that had had only one (partially) successful colonization previously – Jamestown.

Holland essentially served the same purpose in the 17th century as it serves today, that is, a refuge for people who feel persecuted and just want some peace and quiet and privacy, and tolerance. According to historical record, the separatist Pilgrims were worried that if they remained in Holland, their children would somehow be “Hollandized” and that their religious congregation would be subsumed by Dutch customs and beliefs. This, apparently, was the impetus behind departing Holland for New England. Here, then, is the crucial question: why couldn’t the Pilgrims at least wait until spring to go on their momentous voyage? Was the prospect of an evaporating congregation so immediate that it was absolutely necessary to embark at once on one of the most notoriously dangerous voyages of the last five centuries? It is difficult to accept Pilgrim leader William Bradford’s explanation that the colony needed to find “a better and easier place of living,” seeing as America was at that time a barely chartered wilderness and Holland was a well-established European nation.     

Perhaps the best way to explain these actions is to examine our contemporary consciousness. We are, by nature, a highly irrational and impatient people. When we as a people want something, we are going to get it at all costs, and essentially bludgeon any obstacles, living or inanimate, that stand in the way of our ambitions. In the process, though, we usually end up doing some sort of damage to ourselves. A classic example would be the Y2K scare of 2000 (a safer example to use than, say, some of our current events). A panic-stricken populace, convinced that the world would go into disarray and entire industries would automatically shut down on January 1, 2000, spent 300 billion dollars in preventative strategies and, even more bizarrely, freeze-dried food and jugs of water, paying little attention to the very reasonable arguments of experts who were skeptical about the perceived “emergency.” In retrospect, we realized that our panic-stricken behavior had been an extreme oversight. The Pilgrims operated on a remarkably similar thought process, it seems, eschewing rationality for extreme measures, pursuing a steadily treacherous course and ignoring the consequences, and arguably providing the prototype for the Modern American. We can say that the colony could have conducted its journey to the new world with a bit more strategic thought and planning, but if they had, that quintessentially American element of their journey would not have been so strong. Americans do not strategize, or think things through, or utilize rational thought, but they are, and always have been, remarkably passionate about seizing what they feel is rightfully theirs, and, for better or worse, this can at least partially explain the mishmash of thunderous success and colossal failure that we have had as a nation.      

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