Mayflower 400: the science of sailing across the ocean in 1620 | Hacker News Reader

Mayflower 400: the science of sailing across the ocean in 1620

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Apparently 2 million Americans can trace their lineage to a passenger on the Mayflower who fell overboard and survived by grabbing a rope trailing behind.

They include FDR, H.W. And W Bush.[1]

[1] https://accesswdun.com/print/2015/11/352412

I've always been amazed by this ability to track your ancestors hundreds of years back. Were the records that good back then?

I had lots of trouble getting birth records for my great-grandparents. The system in my country was terrible, if I didn't have the exact name and date of birth, they couldn't find anything. Nothing was digitized, maybe that changed but I doubt it.

In fact, I did have the wrong day but fortunately the right month and year for my great-grandfather, and it took them a month to find the information. It was expensive, too.

My grandmother traced her family back to the 30 years war. No records after that. Churches are a very good source for that in Europe. That being said, I never understood the obsession with lineage.

why not? What's the harm in knowing.

No harm, I'm just not that interested in that kind of stuff it seems.

I understand your sentiment, but I gain humility and inspiration knowing how my ancestors lived and the sacrifices they made to have a better life.

To each his own.

There's also the reciprocal promise: we try to remember our ancestors and hope our descendants will remember us.

No harm, it's more that after a certain amount of generations the information becomes pretty irrelevant. You arbitrarily choose to follow certain lines (for prestige or historical significance) and necessarily disregard others. Going back to the 1600s, you descend in equal part from one lineage you mention and many thousand others which remain entirely unknown.

This is like the Christian version of tracing your lineage back to when your lineage was a liability. If you're Jewish or have ancestry in the Balkans the dead end when all the old records were burned might be far more recent. It just happens that the wars of the 1500s and 1600s was the last time being the wrong kind of Christian was a big problem.

My wife has managed to track one line of her ancestry (the Swiss line) back to 985. Swiss church records (Kirchenbücher) are online and extremely good.

Wow, that's amazing. Come to think of it, many people were simply born at home and not registered with the state in the 1900's, but they would get baptised, so the Church should hold the record of that.

I think the Soviet Union's laws against the Church might've player a role in the loss of records.

Because Switzerland has been so stable. Records tend to get "lost" en-masse only when there's a genocidal army bearing down.

> I've always been amazed by this ability to track your ancestors hundreds of years back. Were the records that good back then?

"... between 1640 and 1700, the literacy rate for men in Massachusetts and Connecticut was somewhere between 89 percent and 95 percent, quite probably the highest concentration of literate males to be found anywhere in the world at that time. The literacy rate for women in those colonies is estimated to have run as high as 62 percent in the years 1681-1697.

"... Since the male literacy rate in seventeenth-century England did not exceed 40 percent, we may assume, first of all, that the migrants to New England came from more literate areas of England or from more literate segments of the population, or both. In other words, they came here as readers and were certain to believe that reading was as important in the New World as it was in the Old. Second, from 1650 onwards almost all New England towns passed laws requiring the maintenance of a "reading and writing" school, the large communities being required to maintain a grammar school as well."

-- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Would the group of literate people contain enough people also concerned with accurate record keeping? They seem to be relatively distinct and not necessarily overlapping skills or interests. And plenty of record get lost no matter how well they're kept. Fires, floods, disinterest, etc.

But for some people such a lineage is like a vanity address. And they will go out of their way to dig up a connection like this and absent that they will create one. Throughout the world it's pure gold especially for politicians, it establishes the kind of historical legitimacy and connection to land and country that's far more exclusive than "just" joining the military (the other common vehicle for populist patriotism, even if one would never be exposed to any real danger).

> They seem to be relatively distinct and not necessarily overlapping skills or interests.

Actually, literacy is a prerequisite for record keeping.

I think what they meant was that having an interest in literacy doesn't mean someone is also interested in record keeping.

My family is descended from Rev. John Lothrop[0], who came across on the Griffin in 1634. The high literacy rate among Puritans and their subsequent notability through the colonial years left many, many records of them and their progeny.

He is also an ancestor of the Bush clan - among many others. At some point, everyone is related to everyone. :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lothropp

> At some point, everyone is related to everyone. :)

Good video from numberphile: https://youtu.be/Fm0hOex4psA

In the USA, 10-year census records since 1790 and immigration records are great resources. The LDS church has done a lot of work microfilming many church and government records that remain available, and has had volunteers transcribing and indexing them. For the British Isles, property records are a good resource - if the people being researched owned or bequeathed property. Research-sharing sites such as ancestry.com can help connect Nth cousins who may be looking for the same remote ancestors.

Yep! I’m descended from one of his brothers who came over a bit later. That so many Americans are descended from the Howland boys shows how important it can be to get in on the ground floor of a new enterprise.

I bet any one of your ancestor's from that time would swap their series A stock for your boring index fund portfolio that you hold by living today.

Not Auntie Hetty Green.

howdy cousin!

H.W. and W Bush? What are the odds?

small world

How do they trace their lineage to this guy? Word of mouth?

It was the tradition of New England churches to keep pretty good birth, death, and marriage records. Plus, the Mayflower gang and other early arrivals have been fairly extensively documented. Once you can hook your limb of the tree into the existing documents, the rest of the database is just there.

My wife is into genealogy as a hobby. Chasing my New England roots was an easy warm-up exercise. Chasing her Nordic roots through revolving patronymics, now that gets mind-bending, and actually the trail goes cold pretty fast unless you get lucky.

> To think, if he hadn't made it, I wouldn't even be here

Isn’t that the case for literally every one of our ancestors? Any one of them was one accident, disease, etc. away from not having the child that became the next link in the chain between them and me.

“These would have been on a cramped gun-deck (where the passengers would also live) with gun-ports”

Was that really the case? It seems far more likely for the crew to have lived on the gun-decks since presumably they would have been trained to use the cannons, instead of the passengers.

The crew (other than the captain who probably had his own cabin) probably stayed at the lower deck because the gun deck had better ventilation for the passengers. It took a long time after a ship first became visible for a gun battle to occur so the crew had enough time to get ready.

Most likely the crew used the forecastle for accommodations [0] (as they always do). I don't think the well being of passengers was a big concern for the crew.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forecastle

Side note: anyone know when passenger vessels stopped being armed?

I found out today that the first university (!) in the continent dates back to the 1550s [0]. What made the Spaniards so successful that they were able not only to defeat a full blown civilization (as opposed to the weaker natives in the north) and were able to fully bootstrap their territories where the English took many attempts and failures? Was it the technology? Or just the nature of the northern territories?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colonial_universities_...

>Was it the technology? Or just the nature of the northern territories?

The English were the poors of Europe at the time. They couldn't afford well funded settlement expeditions. Jamestown barely survived. The Pilgrims were basically shown the door and had no better options. Then everyone on the wrong side of the English civil war came over shortly thereafter.

English were not the poors of Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(P...

That list starts after 1800, so 200 years after the events otherwise discussed in this thread. Though absent other evidence I'm inclined to believe you.

This is a gross oversimplification but the purpose and goals of their expeditions were just completely different. Even the earliest Spanish expeditions were (in part) state-approved, armed and essentially get-rich-quick plundering schemes. The existence of advanced (but less well armed) urban civilizations just encouraged them since it meant potential for gold.

A lot of now-famous early British colonizers were basically groups of funky religious malcontents hoping to establish their own little theocracies. Their state approval was more along the lines of 'good riddance'.

> Even the earliest Spanish expeditions were (in part) state-approved, armed and essentially get-rich-quick plundering schemes.

Maybe I’m not getting your point, but how does that fit with building up universities? What were they expecting to get out of them? Student debt?

A 16th century university is primarily a religious institution and Spain had a strongly enforced state religion. Pizarro - one of the adventuring/plundering types - founded Lima in 1535, 20 years before the university and after taking out the core of the Inca empire.

To go back to your original question - I don't think this had much to do with technology but just with the different approaches the empires in question took. To Spain, a minor bet paid off spectacularly and the state fairly quickly moved to establish control (not without some trouble - just scrolling through the Wikipedia pages of Pizarro or Cortés is full of stories of Spanish leaders and officials in the New World murdering each other).

It was many decades after all of this, though, that England got around to considering, maybe, the American North Atlantic coast as a decent dumping ground for some irritating Jesus freaks.

I remember the Mayflower Compact vaguely from school, but didn't really understand its significance until I read this article.

https://www.mayflowerpub.co.uk/

One of the best pubs in London if you are in the area. Never disappoints.

Used to live around the corner. Nice owner, good food and a great beer selection. I now [Ironically?] live in the states and miss that pub quite a lot.

I've been reading a lot about the 1600-1700 period recently and it always amazes me how quickly these people went from "our first goal is to not starve and our second goal live as good Christians" to "let's attack anyone and anything that doesn't share our view of what good a good Christian is"

On one hand humanity doesn't change much so it's not that surprising but 400yr later you can still see the scars the backwards ideologies of various groups of early settlers left on New England.

I just read a recent biography of Dr. Benjamin Rush and it’s clear that even before the American revolution there were some strongly opposing views of how to treat native Americans and whether or not it was morally defensible to enslave Africans. So some who called themselves Christians would accept these practices and many others, like Rush, loudly opposed them (just like the disagreements that happen within groups today).

It's amazing how many parallels there are between the issues of 1620-1760 and the issues of the modern day (like 2020 modern, not just the current century). The issues have changed but humanity hasn't.

The thing that really hit home for me was the rhetoric they sued to go after Morton, Williams and the other RI guy who had no issue with the natives (the name escapes me). It's like a straight copypasta from today.

The eternal themes that recur throughout history:

Master or slave

Have or have not

Home or exile

I'm amazed they were only off by 63 miles, given the article claims dead reckoning was so inaccurate. I'm even more amazed they knew where they were relative to their destination after 66 days of dead reckoning.

The east coast had been mapped by that point. They knew where they were even if they were unhappy about it.

Crucially, that's 63 miles North of Virginia. Latitude is relatively straightforward to measure. It's pretty well given that if you sail west from Northern Europe, you'll hit North America. Hitting it at your intended latitude might depend on the winds, but one you bump into it, it should be pretty easy for a competent navigator to tell you how far off your target you were in latitude. Given decent maps, figuring out longitude is probably not a tall order either if you know your latitude and you're on the coast.

Ah great point! Since the east coast is mostly north-south, it was possible to check distance relative to the destination easily. Thanks!

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