Plymouth and the Mayflower II

0:28Hi, I'm Ryan Davis. I'm in heaven. This is my time. It's cold out. I've got a fleece on. The trees have turned. Thanksgiving's a week away. I'm great. Are you also having Thanksgiving at a Hyatt? Oh, so you're going to do a... Well, gosh. So you're not coming home for Thanksgiving is what I'm picking up. No, no. I'm going with friends to the Grand Hyatt. I went last year too and they do like a big, a big traditional spread and we're all like the, um, embassy people go and, uh, that sounds great. Hobnob. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, um, it'll be fun. And, uh, you know, it's my one time to get Turkey all year.

1:14And I, well, I mean, that's, this is the one time I eat Turkey all year or two. And, uh, I like, I'm a, I'm a fan of Hyatt. I think this sounds great. Yeah. It's, uh, it's going to be, uh, it's gonna be fun um do they do they do anything wrong like is the stuff does the stuffing have like plantains in it or anything um oh they definitely have like like stuff you wouldn't have like they have like yucca yucca like uh mash and you know sure instead of mashed potatoes yeah yeah so stuff like that sure that's fun you're like i don't i don't remember like avocado being prominently featured in my my childhood thanksgivings but you know oh it's very traditional And then this, I know, you know, some of the people in our reviews, they just catch up with each other too much.

2:01This is not just pure catch up, people. That's because today's topic, it's a celebration of Thanksgiving and visiting. You know, everybody knows I'm Boston Bates. Just an hour away, Plymouth, Massachusetts is such a great town to visit. And we have a guest on who's an expert in not only Plymouth tourism more broadly, but specifically about the replica Mayflower that has been in Plymouth since the 1950s. You can go visit it today. It's extraordinary. really makes you appreciate how small and relatively poor the pilgrims were. The fact that this thing makes it across the Atlantic, both in the original in 1620, but also the replica also sailed with the same technologies the pilgrims did in 1957 from England to the US.

2:55That must have been a bit of a scary trip. It's extraordinary. The book he wrote is called Project Mayflower. And it's a super interesting story. I don't want to step on the interview too much. But first of all, I didn't realize what an attraction this is. They get 2.6 million visitors see the Mayflower 2 each year. So it's not like a super undersung. But what's interesting to me is that everybody knows the Statue of Liberty gift from France. Mayflower 2, this replica Mayflower, was a gift from England. And there's a whole geopolitical story that I'll let Richard Stone tell in the interview behind it.

3:36Yeah. You know, when I was reading up on this before the episode, I hadn't heard of this story at all. In fact, I didn't actually know there was a replica of the Mayflower in Plymouth because I've never been. But now I'm excited to go. Well, and I grew up, because I grew up right outside New Haven, Connecticut, a visit to Plymouth Plantation wasn't like an every year kind of school trip, but most school children in New England will find their way there. And it's sort of like the... How long was that on the bus, Kiernan? Was that a couple hours? A couple hours, yeah. Why do you ask? No, I like those field trips.

4:13You could probably watch like Toy Story en route. and uh it's like when we went and we went to the uh the baltimore aquarium it would be the same same thing yeah mystic aquarium for us but yeah exactly uh though i will say mark twain's house in hartford which was only like a 30 minute drive was much more popular and uh uh plymouth uh it used to be called plymouth plantation the the same the idea is uh it's like colonial williamsburg where they dress up and they they talk like the like the the pilgrims would have talked and talk about that experience. And they have live fires and they're doing things as it would have been done in New England at that time.

4:54Oh, that's so cool. It's very interesting. It's good. And this interview gets you in the Thanksgiving mood, which was the whole concept. But Ryan, before we jump too far into that, you and I have been deep into 2026 planning for Out of Office Podcast. Yes, we have a lot of great ideas, some really cool interviews, I think, coming up. I know I'm reading a few things right now that I'm excited to feature early next year. And I think we want ideas. Yeah, some of the best pods of 2025 were people who took the time to email us at outofofficepod at gmail.com, outofofficepod at gmail.com, or slipped into the DMs on Instagram.

5:42which is, is that out of office pod as well? It's O-O-O. Oh, that's right. Because two marketers were brilliant at aligning these two things. So on Instagram, it's at O-O-O podcast. And you get DM us there. Ryan and I check it there all the time. Or you could place it in reviews. We even get people pitching their ideas in reviews, preferably a five-star review. It's been a tiny bit slow on the reviews in the past four weeks. So I'd love to get a couple more positive reviews in there, especially before our internet troll Cornhusker55 comes around. I feel like holiday time feels like Cornhusker is going to come for us.

6:24Yeah. This episode is Americana, folks. Our conservative listeners should enjoy it. So, you know. Yeah. Maybe I should add Cornhusker55 and be like, give the Plymouth episode a run. You're going to learn. There's a lot of America pride in this Mayflower, too. We talk about the Mayflower Compact and how that was, you know, in a way it was like the first American Constitution. It's very compelling stuff. And you know what? It made me feel like I have a lot to be thankful for this Thanksgiving, Ryan. I'm thankful for our listeners, Kiernan. But, you know, what am I? Chop me? I was going to say I'm thankful for you, Ryan.

7:06But, yeah, I'm thankful for the listeners, too, of course. Thankful for all the wonderful guests we've had. I'm thankful for Zoom where we record this. I'm thankful for the servers and the pod catchers that put us out into the world. And I'd be especially thankful for some more of those five-star reviews. You know, Kieran, I gave us a shout out on the People First, my marketing newsletter this week. Wow. Tens of people are going to be very excited about that. If the conversion rate is above 80%, we're going to get two, three listeners out of that. No, actually, Kieran, it was in a little piece that I wrote on the fact that all these politicians are starting podcasts, but nobody is listening.

7:51And I'm thankful that we have more listeners than Donald Trump Jr. has for his podcast Triggered with John Jr. than Governor Andy Beshear has for his podcast Kentucky with Andy Beshear. we've got more than Marsha Blackburn whoever that is oh that's that crazy lady that other lady from Tennessee yeah so you know I'm thankful for all of our listeners who are not tuning in to Jamie Harrison's podcast at our table with Jamie Harrison which averages 1 ,800 downloads an episode so there you go Kiernan fantastic thank you so much and I appreciate the shout out and you know what else I'm thankful for Ryan And I'm thankful for the interview today with author Richard Stone of Project Mayflower.

8:36I think it's time we take off. Take that Mayflower. Oh, the cabin crew. Yeah, they had a cabin crew. Sure. Flight attendants, prepare for takeoff, please. My guest today is Richard Stone, author of the book Project Mayflower, Building and Sailing a 17th Century Replica. As a lover of obscure history and a great Thanksgiving enthusiast, enthusiast, I'm excited to say, Richard, welcome to Out of Office. Well, thank you for inviting me. It's nice to be. So we've had this idea of a Plymouth-based episode. Listeners know I'm a Somerville, Boston-area-based guy. And so Plymouth is a place that I grew up going on school trips.

9:19And it's on the tourist track, but I don't know that everybody who comes to Boston makes sure that they go take a side trip to Plymouth. And so when I learned about your book and gave it a read, Project Mayflower, I discovered I had seen the Mayflower 2, but I realized a lot of people may not know this great attraction in Plymouth. So let's just start there. What is the Mayflower 2? That's a good question. So most basically, the Mayflower 2, it's a square rigged wooden ship. So what does that mean? I see most sailboats, it's a sailboat. So sailboats have triangular sails and you pull them up. This has square sails and you drop down.

10:02It's made of wood. Most sailboats are made of fiberglass. It has no motor of any kind. It's identical to the one that the pilgrims 400 years ago would have sailed to America. And that's kind of how they came up with that design. But it's identical to that. It was made with tools they would have used 400 years ago. and it's little. So people, when they see it, a lot of people go, wow, is that it? Right, right. It's about 25 feet wide and it's adjacent to Plymouth Rock. So it's a little wooden ship sitting next to Plymouth Rock in Plymouth Heart, which is about 100 miles, an hour south of Boston.

10:48And I've got to ask you about Plymouth Rock, but just to stick with the Mayflower for a moment, What is the capacity? How many pilgrims actually came over on the original Mayflower? And how many can fit on this scale model? Great question. So 102 passengers were on the original one. They had a crew of about 30. So let's say there were 135 people on that ship. When it came over in 1957, there were 33 people on the ship. And the captain at the time, Alan Villiers, he just couldn't imagine how all these people fit in that little boat. But it was 102 people. They had some animals. And, of course, it was very crude.

11:35No electricity, no plumbing, no nothing. But 102 passengers came over on the ship. 102 people on that little boat. So imagine a two-room apartment. it's a hundred small meeting room a large dining hall 100 feet long 25 feet wide and put 130 people in there and leave them there with no water no electricity none of that stuff anyway that was the voyage over oh and by the way it was really cold so figure the window's open and it's November and for those who don't know what year did the pilgrims come over they came over in 1620 And they came from Plymouth, England. And fittingly, they just took that name and applied it to New England.

12:27Right. So let's put it into context. So what is 1620? People are like, it's for me, a date means nothing. I know a lot of people go to church everywhere. So a lot of Americans go into church and they open up a Bible and it happens to be the King James version of the Bible. Well, guess what? Guess who the king was? King James. And a lot of people read plays by this famous English playwright called William Shakespeare. And one of his plays was inspired by one of the people that was on that boat. His play was called The Tempest. So you have William Shakespeare, Will, writing plays about people that were on the Mayflower.

13:07You had King James, whose Bible is still around the world. So that's the time it was going on, 400 and some odd years ago. And who were the pilgrims? Who were the Puritans looking to leave? Why did they come to New England? Well, it's kind of a combination of people on the boat. There was one group who were religious, and religious means that they wanted to think about philosophical issues individually as they might think of them. At the time, the king was very restrictive, and you couldn't do that. So many of these people left England. They went to Holland for 10 years before they then set off to America.

13:50So half the people on the ship were religious people driven by religious freedom and urges to be able to worship as they wish. The other half were filled up with people that were just merchantmen, people thinking, wow, this is a great place to make a fortune, the new world. I'm going to go over and start over again. So there was, you know, roughly half saints and half sinners. Think of it that way, which made for an interesting thing when they got to the, when they finally get there. So they leave and, you know, it's cold and lousy in the middle of early September. They leave, they don't land until November.

14:27They're stuck in this little room with 130 people for 66 days. And guess what? You get pretty antsy by that time. And they really, you know, we're on the verge of duking it out with each other. And they did something pretty remarkable. Before they got off the ship, they said, you know, we're at each other's throats. Before we do this, we need to agree on what's going to happen when our feet touch land. Let's make a contact. Let's agree that we're going to, we might disagree, but we're going to talk things out. And that, you know, we want to have just and equal laws for the general good. We'd like to have that.

15:03And they put it down on a piece of parchment, and it eventually became known as the Mayflower Compact. So that concept of organizing themselves, just and equal laws, was created on the ship. And by the way, when you visit the ship in Plymouth, that little boat, 20 by 25, the back end of it, there's a room, the chart house, and that's where they think people signed the Mayflower Compact. Wow. Wow. And before we get to the Mayflower too, just one more question on the original Mayflower. How did they get this boat? Did they build it custom for this journey? No. So their ship, it was an old merchantman.

15:40So the Mayflower, there were probably about 20 ships named Mayflower at that time. And it was a standard cargo ship. And for 20 years before it set sail, it was just delivering basically wine and things like that to England from France. who knows, whatever, but it was a commercial cargo ship. And it was pretty old and run down. So these pilgrims and business guys who figured we want to go to a new place to start fresh, they hired the cheapest transportation that he did. So it's an old beat up Chevy to drive across the country. So think about that. Think about taking, you want to go to California and you'd rather go on a new car, but you don't have the money.

16:20So you're going to take a beat up old Chevy minivan, jump in it, and head out. And so that's what they did. In fact, they actually had two Chevys, two little minivans. The other one was called the Speedwell. So that minivan, the Speedwell small ship sprung a leak, had to go back. So the people that were on that now crammed into the Mayflower. So you got the minivan with not only its full, and then you took half the passengers from the other minivan, a little ship called Speedwell. So that's... Well, a further connection to Plymouth tourism, there's a great coffee roaster in Plymouth called Speedwell.

16:58And that's the reason. Uh-huh. Exactly. It's remarkable. So it's a pretty interesting, that bit of story, but it goes way back. And what happened to the ship after they reached America and disembarked? So they got here. They finally landed. It's the beginning of winter. They docked. It's sitting in the water. The following spring, it returned. So Captain Christopher Jones and his crew went back to England. So that would have been the spring of 21. It stayed around for a couple more years. And by 1624, it was declared in ruins and sold for scrap. So they just tore it apart to pay debts and get the wood to build another ship.

17:39Sure. So let's now get into the story of the Mayflower to this replica that can be visited today in Plymouth. Most people don't know, and you you're sort of the first to really tell comprehensively the the history behind what was actually a gift to America. And so where did this idea start of creating a new Mayflower? On the battlefields of North Africa. Of course.

18:38Before Patton beat the Germans, Monty beat the Germans. So they were in a big... Anyway, at that point, America sent tanks to kind of save my company. After that, this young guy, Charlton, was sent off to Asia, and he worked with another famous general, a guy named Lord Louis Monckton, Queen Elizabeth II's Uncle Dickie. And so during that, you saw that America played a pivotal role in defeating the forces of tyranny, Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. After the war, he now comes back to England and he's thinking, well, you know, why not the Americans? We would have been in a peril. They saved our bacon.

19:20What has the Brits ever done for America? I mean, look at the French. The French gave America the Statue of Liberty. What have we done? We've given them a briar pipe, maybe a tweed coat. And by the way, what do you give the richest country on earth? I mean, America has everything. They can buy anything they want. I know what I'll do. I'll give them something she can't buy. I'm going to give her a piece of her lost history. I'm going to rebuild the Mayfell just as she was in 1620 and sail across the Atlantic and give it to America. And that's what he did. So he decided to do that. So this is now in the early 50s.

19:56He gets this idea. And at the same time in the U.S., there's a wealthy New Englander named Harry Hornblower. One of the great names in history, Harry Hornblower. Harry Hornblower. Well, it's very funny. So when they put the Mayflower II finally launched in England, in Devon. And what year was that? They went into the water in 1956. So in 1956, they launched a ship and they're reading letters from people in the U.S. And one of them is from Hornblower. And of course, the audience breaks into laughter. They were thinking of Horatio Hornblower, the famous, you know, man from novels who was a heroic sea captain, Horatio Hornblower.

20:43They weren't thinking of a wealthy New Englander needing a boat for a museum. But Harry wanted to have a boat. So since childhood, Harry Hornblower had a vision of creating a museum to tell the story of early America. And he was inspired by other museums, Williamsburg down in Virginia and elsewhere. And he wanted to do that. So he started putting this together. He hired a very famous architect demanding William Baker to do plans for a second Mayflower because there were no plans back then. And serendipitously, just by chance, he hears about a guy in England who's also trying to build a replica.

21:24And the two of them meet. They decide to join forces. And together, they made this thing a reality. But it wasn't a walk in the park. And that alone was quite a story. There were many obstacles along the way. Well, and it continues on today. I was sharing before we started recording that I grew up going to what was then called Plymouth Plantation. So can you talk about what was Hornblower's original vision and what's still there today for us to visit? What you would have visited, you would have seen the ship, Mayflower 2. You would have seen Plymouth Plantation. So Plymouth Plantation is a recreation of a 1627 English colony in Massachusetts.

22:11So it has a little wall, you know, a wooden fence around it. You can see crops, see buildings, how they did things. So it describes life as it would have been in 1620s. And there's an Indian village area where you learn about the Wampanoag. The people that made it possible for the pilgrims to survive. So you learn both about Native American history, you learn about early American history. And it's at this, and you enter through the Henry Wormleur II Welcome Center. It's still there. So it's as you originally saw it, and as people have been seeing it for the last 50 years, except that it's gotten bigger.

22:50The only thing that hasn't gotten bigger is the boat. So Plymouth Plantation, the museum, five miles out of town, that has expanded a little bit. It's updated. It's gotten bigger, more elaborate. But the ship itself has remained unchanged. And in the recreated town, it's period dress, it's actors and docents trying to evoke what it's like in that town. So I think the comparison to Williamsburg is probably the closest. It's sort of the New England version of that. It's a New England version of that. And that was his idea. So you think about a couple of, you know, it's hard to imagine what life was like back then.

23:35So the ideal docent, who you'll see at Clement, they won't talk about anything in this modern era. It's though you walk through a time capsule and what was going on in England. And they'd never heard of television. I mean, they don't know anything about it. They're just describing life as it was. they're dressed as they would have been. They're very knowledgeable. And it's a, in a sense, in the world of AI, it's almost like imagining a person from 400 years ago being reincarnated. They come back, they're here. And yet, and so that's what it is. It's supposed to give you a very different perspective on what life may have been like.

24:12And do they, is there the same theatrical element on the boat today? A little bit, but not as much. Yeah. For one thing, it's smaller. So there's not a, you know, people maybe dressed as a nautical gear, but they're really going to describe to you the history and how the ship works. So you can go below deck and see what it's like below deck, the captain in the back and the mass, sails, things like that. They'll describe those things to you. For Hornblower's original vision, I'm just curious, where did he make his wealth? What was his biography? So Harry was the son, his father, grandfather was the founder of a financial house called Hornblower and Weeks.

25:02Hornblower and Weeks, by the mid-1950s, was one of the top financial firms on Wall Street. It eventually evolved into American Express and has gone on to a lot of things. but they were a family in the securities business. And so he went into that business. That was his main job. The museum was his hobby. So what's interesting, Harry wasn't a great writer. So he had this vision of the museum and he did things. But as I was writing the book, you say, well, let's find out about this person from the past. I mean, Wormick Charlton would write things. Murray was not a writer. So I had the good fortune to speak with his daughter, Nancy.

25:44That was great. But the best resource turned out to be the letters he would write to his Harvard classmates every five years for what they called the class report. So starting in 1946, 45, every five years, he would write a lengthy letter that would be in his class report. at Harvard. And so I found out about his dreams for this stuff by reading that. So he was a Wall Street guy in the securities business. He had cranberry bogs, but his hobby, as he liked to say, my hobby gone wild was plantation. That's this podcast for me. So I understand. It was the hobby gone wild. And that was him. And this book for you, I think is the hobby gone wild.

26:32But if we Harvard out too much, my co-host Ryan will never let me forget it. So. So an interesting thing here. So how did I get involved with this? Yeah. You know, for all your listeners, how does anybody decide to dig into more of a topic? I want to know more. So I had done some, some marketing, some work with Clement a few years ago. And in the late teens, the ship had to go to Mystic Seaboard and have it totally rebuilt because because it was made of wood, wood rots. So in 2019, some folks up there said, well, you should go visit this guy named Randall Charlton. He's in Mystic. He'll tell you something about the ship they may not know.

27:17So I drove up to Mystic. And I introduced myself to Randall. And I said, so Randall, the people at the Plymouth say you know something about the Mayflower tube. What's that? They said, well, not much. My dad's the one that built it. Gave it to America. I said, yeah. that. Your dad didn't build this ship. It was a gift of the British government. He said, no, just my dad and a group of vets, they decided to do this, to thank his wartime colleagues, comrades in arms, for their sacrifice in World War II. He did it. And I thought, wow, this is unbelievable. This is like the guy that catches the winning pass at the championship game and is never mentioned.

27:59You hear the quarterback, the guy that threw the ball, but who caught the ball? I thought, this is an underdog story. So that's what got me looking into it. And then I discovered that during the course of his endeavor to build this ship, he ran afoul in the British government. How's that possible? So back in the 50s, the US and Britain, and pretty much Eisenhower, They started thinking about this concept of soft power. We need to get our countries aligned more culturally because it's harder to keep the peace and war sometimes and winning a war. And the British Foreign Office had an idea that they were going to strengthen Anglo-American ties by strengthening the bonds with wealthy English people in America.

28:46have the elites, the rich guys in both countries get close. And that was it. Well, of course, Charlton was not that. He was just a common man, nothing like that. So they did their darndest to dissuade people from supporting his effort. Nonetheless, the ship gets in the water. Harry Hornblower sends a note to people, you know, chuckle about how Horatio Hornblower is even here. It was December of 1956. They're thinking, this is great. We've got it made. A month later, though, the world got turned upside down. England, with France, joined with Israel and started a war in the Middle East called the Suez Crisis.