On this day in 1620 the Mayflower sailed from Plymouth, England, on the third attempt. The first two failed because her consort, the little Speedwell, leaked: back to Dartmouth, out again, leaking again some three hundred miles past Land's End, back to Plymouth. Passengers were offloaded, the Speedwell abandoned, and about 102 people crammed into one ship of 180-odd tons, 110 feet long and 25 in the beam. Christopher Jones was master. Sixty-six days later she made Cape Cod.

What was actually in her: beer in casks, salt beef and salt cod, hard biscuit, dried peas, oatmeal, butter and cheese, vinegar; tools, muskets, a small cannon; goats, pigs and poultry; and a shallop taken apart and stowed between decks, to be rebuilt on the far shore. The man who kept the barrels sound was John Alden, a cooper hired at Southampton. The navigation leaned on the mates and pilots, John Clarke and Robert Coppin, who had crossed before. On a ship that size, a cooper who lets the beer go is as dangerous as a bad chart.

One passenger and one crewman died at sea; a boy, Oceanus Hopkins, was born on the crossing. The painting below, by W. F. Halsall, shows her at anchor in pale water with a rowing boat pulling away — the calm end of a voyage that took three departures to start.