Photograph by Battershill, Plymouth
Mayflower Tablet on the Barbican, Plymouth, England
VI
NEW WORLD PILGRIMS TO OLD WORLD SHRINES
pilgrim shrines,
Shrines to no code or creed confined.—Longfellow.
Memories of the Mayflower and the Pilgrim Fathers were actively revived when, in July, 1891, during the Mayoralty of Mr. J. T. Bond, a number of the Pilgrims' descendants and their representatives from the New World visited Old World Plymouth, and with an interest whole-hearted and profound inspected the scene, famous in the annals and traditions of our race, which witnessed their forbears' last brief sojourn on English soil—a place where the Fathers, as they never tired of testifying, in the days when Thomas Townes was Mayor, were "kindly entertained and courteously used by divers friends there dwelling," and whence the sturdy little Mayflower sailed to the West with its precious human freight, to lay the foundation of the New England States.
To commemorate this visit, and the sailing of the Pilgrim Fathers two hundred and seventy years before, the site of the historic embarkation was marked by the Mayflower Stone and Tablet placed on the Barbican at Plymouth, the stone in the pavement of the pier adjacent to the ancient causey trod by the Pilgrims' departing feet and destroyed a few years later, and the tablet on the wall of the Barbican facing it.
The memorial and the circumstances of its erection formed a fitting tribute to the New England pioneers; and the story told by these stones should serve to remind all who behold them of the devoted lives, the splendid achievement, and the romantic history of the Mayflower Pilgrims. They are at once a landmark and a shrine honoured by the English and American peoples.
In June, 1896, another company of New World pilgrims landed at Plymouth, and proceeded to worship in spirit at Old World shrines. During two weeks they wandered about the dear old country—"Our Old Home," as Nathaniel Hawthorne calls it in his book of English reminiscences—lingering on the scenes associated with the lives of their forefathers: quiet villages wherein they were born; quaint, half-forgotten boroughs in which they lived; the metropolis in which they taught; the sombre East Anglia, where many of them died "for the testimony." But chief of all were the places where these sojourners could look on the homes of the grave, brave men who gathered together the people who sailed in the Mayflower, and led the way to the New World.