 So good afternoon everybody. My name is Cara Rodway. I'm the interim head of the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library. And welcome to the third in our series of lunchtime talks reflecting on the place of the Mayflower ship and the Mayflower myth in British culture. I'm very excited too to welcome our final speaker today, Dr Martha Van Dry, and she is a historian of British cultural and intellectual history and historical culture for about 1600. She's the co-investigator on the AHRC funded project Voyaging Through History, the Mayflower in Britain 1620 to 2020. She's a senior lecturer at the University of Exeter, where she's joining us from today and is the author of Queen Boudica and Historical Culture in Britain and Image of Truth, which came up with Oxford University Press in 2018. So the structure for our session today is I'm going to invite Martha to speak and give us her talk, which is illustrated and looks really, really wonderful. As Martha's talking, you're very welcome to put questions. You'll see on your screen, there's a Q&A box. You can type your questions into that. And then at the end, I'll then reappear and we'll ask some of your questions to Martha and then obviously if more questions occur to you, you can add them in in that and obviously we can read them in real time. So I hope that's all self-explanatory and I'm going to go over to Martha and invite her to share her screen and take it away, Martha. Thank you Cara and thank you everyone for coming today. Let me just do this sharing of screen thing. Okay, and from beginning. Yes. Okay. Yes, thank you everyone for coming today. Today I'm going to talk to you about, well, what became of the Mayflower, the actual ship. And I'm going to talk mostly about the work of James Randall Harris, and I'll introduce him in greater detail in the talk. But so tucked away on the edge of the picturesque village of Jordan's in the verdant English county of Buckinghamshire, there stands a handsome Quaker meeting house. Since it was built in 1688, the meeting house has served as a center of worship for the Quaker community and it still serves that purpose today. And as the burial place of William Penn, Quaker founder of the state of Pennsylvania, along with his wife and five of its children, it was and remains a destination for transatlantic pilgrimage in particular. But in the early decades of the 20th century, this sleepy corner of Buckinghamshire held another attraction for tourists from across the ocean. The object of their pilgrimage was this large and imposing barn, made of weather darkened timbers and situated only a short walk from the meeting house. The reason they came to see it was that a great many people in both Britain and America believe that this barn had been built from the timbers of the famous ship, the Mayflower, which had carried the pilgrims across the Atlantic in 1620. I'll explain why people believe this in a moment. However, I have another aim in bringing up the old case of the so-called Mayflower barn and it is still called that at Jordan's. The story of an old barn built from one of the most famous ships in history is very much in the realm of tradition, not what we might term proper history. Most historians today would shy away from any suggestion that the work they produce or the evidence they employ bears any relation to tradition or its sources. This is because the general view is that to heed to tradition is to give in to uncritical acceptance of an untested or untestable narrative. Traditions bear unhappy undertones of unsophisticated conservatism and authority, even Philistine authoritarianism. After all, with no rational foundation, what else can explain the persistence of unverifiable narratives than the power of authority or reluctance to progress towards enlightened modernity. I also generally accepted that by the end of the 19th century historical practice, which is basically the sort of thing I do, had become a rational professional exercise. The start of the 20th century saw the rise of what we would today call recognize as the historical profession, whose job it was to rationally sift and assess evidence and present the past as it really happened. This sophisticated new modern historical work was widely understood to be very different from earlier practices, which it was often assumed tended to credulously accept myth and tradition as easily or even more easily than they did the facts. But in this talk, I want to challenge this idea by exploring the example of the search for lost Mayflower ship in 1920s Britain. In relating this little known story. I want to suggest that the turn to a more professionalized rational factual history was true only a very small proportion of historical practitioners, even in the most self consciously modern of modern nations written with the Mayflower is my case study. I'm going to explore some of the ways that romantic tradition and myth were highly influential in historical practice. The Mayflower is of course a particularly good example to use here, given how heavily mythologize the story of the ship and its passengers has become. But as we know from the talks given by my colleagues in the previous two weeks, the British afterlife of the story has been much less well documented than the American version. So it might come as a surprise that there are uniquely British Mayflower myths. However, given that the ship's passengers and as many believed the ship itself were of British origin. It is not surprising that attempts were made to find the physical evidence of the Mayflowers resting place somewhere in this country. It's a bit like an early 20th century version of the search for the remains of Richard the third Richard the third but without anything like the scientific certainty of mitochondrial DNA analysis. So having introduced this bigger theme of the relationship of modern history to modern myth. I can now return to the matter at hand that a great many people in the early decades of the 20th century firmly believed claimed to believe that a barn in the future countryside was built from the Mayflower was almost exclusively due to the efforts of one man. And here he is James Randall Harris, born in 1852 died in 1941, or Randall, as he was known to his vast network of friends and acquaintances. Randall's long and very career is difficult to sum up in such a short paper. A recent biography runs to well over 800 pages, but he was born in 1852 in Plymouth into a congregationalist family. He later converted to Quakerism and became active in Quaker educational settlements. He studied mathematics at Cambridge before being seduced by the wonders of the Greek New Testament. He changed his academic allegiance and became an expert in Greek paleography. He developed a lifelong obsession with ancient books and manuscripts of all kinds. After a career teaching in both American and British universities, he was eventually appointed librarian of the John Wilens Library in Manchester. But Randall was something like an elderly and somewhat less swashbuckling version of Indiana Jones. When not teaching or lecturing, he traveled extensively. In search of antiquities, he collected many strange objects, but his main aim was to locate ancient papyri, sometimes putting himself in extreme danger to do so. This is just an array of items that are actually still in James Randall Harris's collections, which are held at the Woodbrook Quaker Study Center in Birmingham, just outside Birmingham in Selioc. And he collected from everywhere and anywhere that he could collect from. And sometimes it's not really clear why he wanted a particular object, and often his understanding of the object is tenuous at best. But it's interesting that he was such a kind of magpie in his collecting. But with all this collecting, he did occasionally put himself in some danger and on one of his many sojourns across the Mediterranean in 1917, the ship on which he was traveling came under attack by German U-boats. Randall survived, and he made it to his destination, where he met his friend, the scholar of Zoroastrianism, J. H. Moulton. On their return journey, their ship was once again torpedoed by the Germans. Randall was lucky, but Moulton, and a great many others, died of cold and exhaustion as they awaited rescue. After four days at sea, bailing and rowing in turn, the survivors made it to Corsica. There was great rejoicing in Britain, where Randall was something of a celebrity amongst Quakers and other nonconformists, as well as being a well respected and well connected scholar. And these are just bits from his, from Randall's collection of press cuttings, which I'll show you, he had loads, books and books and books. But these were just the ones that he collected about his own kind of escape from death, but also a letter that was that he published, and that was sent to J. H. Moulton's brother, just describing the situation in which in which that that man died. And it is quite a harrowing story, but Randall himself did survive to tell it. Inevitably, these violent and traumatic events had a profound effect on Randall's outlook. It was this experience that, at least in part, I think, spurred him to energetically promote the cause of internationalism. His experience as a scholar in both countries, both Britain and America, led him to regard Anglo-American cooperation as the key to securing peace and preventing further war. His interest in the Mayflower story stemmed from this conviction, I think. Starting in 1918, he began to collect clippings, not only of his own advocacy for British or Anglo-American Mayflower commemoration, but about Mayflower activity more generally. And this is just a bits of his scrap album. There are books and books of these scrap albums, though, in his archive. It's probably one of the most complete archives of Mayflower press cuttings in the world, possibly the most, actually. One of his first public appearances after his ordeal at sea was to give a speech at the meeting of the Free Church Council in March 1918. He was warmly welcomed by an audience who were well aware of what he had survived only a few months before. It was in this speech that Randall first suggested a great memorial festival to celebrate the tersentenary of the sailing of the Mayflower in September 1920. As the inheritors of the religious liberty of the American pilgrims, he envisaged the free churches as taking the lead role in the organization of festivities. However, he also emphasized the overall historical importance of the Mayflower voyage, which symbolized the shared past of Britain, America and Protestant Europe, as he put it. At another such meeting in September 1918, Randall declared the celebration should have, quote, internationalism inscribed on its front, unquote, and that the festivities should follow the journey of the pilgrims themselves from the Netherlands to Britain to America. The meeting ended with Randall reading extracts of two scenes from a short play he wrote to reflect those sentiments entitled The Return of the Mayflower. It's a very strange sort of dramatic concoction out of Randall's purely out of Randall's imagination. And it's in effect a kind of short play which imagines the arrival of a number of famous Americans into Plymouth on the Mayflower. It's a very, it's a very odd and idiosyncratic kind of tale. But it captured people's imaginations. Everyone who heard it found it interesting and appealing and sort of fantastic in the in the old sense of the word. So Randall captured the imagination of his hearers by performing parts of it at different meetings across the country, drumming up support for his celebrations. The force of his personality, quite apart from the political and diplomatic arguments for a Mayflower tersentenary seemed to give added impetus to his plans. One newspaper reported that, quote, there were constant ripples of laughter at Dr. Harris's quaint conceits and humorous sallies. However, he had plenty of method in his merriment. It is evident that he and his friends will do their best to make the Mayflower tersentenary celebration in 1920 a big thing, binding America and England ever closer together, unquote. When it came to drawing attention to the Mayflower tersentenary, it's hard to overestimate the significance of Randall's own personality and energy in this. The American press was equally charmed by Randall. A report in the New York Evening Post described the Quaker scholar as blending qualities often thought to be incompatible. He could boast a serious scholarly reputation, but he also possessed, quote, a spiritual insight and literary charm, unquote. Randall was an earnest advocate of national and international cooperation, and yet his humorous fence, quote, his humorous fancies take the reader or hear frequently by surprise. Clearly, part of Randall's effectiveness was down to the fact that he appealed to his audience's sense of historical curiosity and to their imaginations and to their sense of humor. So there's this sort of binding together of his personality and the story that he's trying to tell. In the Western Morning News, a correspondent noted that Randall's view of both the pilgrim story and of history more generally was that people have forgotten and were required to be reminded by things like dinners and processions and pageants and other things which appeal to their imagination. So it's very much about trying to bring the Mayflower story back into the imagination of the people who were encountering it. According to Randall's account, it was around this time late in 1918 that he first heard of the tradition surrounding the Jordan's barn. He was intrigued, not least because as he put it in one of his books on the subject and we'll get to more of those later. The story presented, quote, a good opportunity for estimating the weight of traditional evidence and the trustworthiness of an excellent memory. By April 19, he was deeply, April 1919, he was deeply involved in investigating the tradition for all the world like it had a solid basis in fact. Randall's reason for pursuing the tradition so avidly were clearly connected with the upcoming Tercentenary. However, another reason that he spent so much time and energy investigating the Mayflower barn tradition is that he saw it as a modern iteration of his own preoccupation with mythology and mythology. As early as 1903, Randall had begun serious research into the comparative histories of different mythologies alongside his work on the Greek New Testament. Randall traced ideas with the pioneering scholars of classical, traded ideas with the pioneering classical scholars, Jane Harrison and Gilbert Murray. He was a close friend of the archaeologist and author of the book of a book on the Greek god Zeus, Arthur Bernard Cook. And he was also a very good friend of the author of the golden bow James G Fraser. And there were constant letters between the two of them about different aspects of classical mythology, but also what we want today think of as comparative religion and anthropology. So Randall is very much working in this kind of interdisciplinary way, where he's thinking about, you know, modern history but he's also thinking about ancient ancient myth and ancient traditions. And Randall was was heavily influenced by by James Fraser when he wrote his own sort of large mythographic tract called bow energies, published in 1913, which is kind of typical of Randall's odd, or his idiosyncratic, I suppose, way of thinking about things. He was obsessed with the idea of twin cults that religions actually came from people's worship of twins, which is quite interesting. And if we just I'll just show you this. If you see in the middle there the image of a murdered twin from West Africa, that's Randall was collecting materials about this, this, this theory I suppose that he had about the origins of religion. I won't get into why he thought twins were murdered, but yeah, it's a long story. Anyway, so he's working within this kind of group of scholars but he's also doing other things at the same time but I think that there is the sense that these are all connected in the way he works. So Randall's energy is published 1913 that was his, his longest mythographic work but there were there were loads of others as well. And these are just a few of them and that's just illustrating his the letters from JG Fraser and also a few of the texts that Randall himself wrote. I guess if there is a connection then between Randall's views on the Mayflower and his work on mythography. We can see this in his first full length scholarly work on the Mayflower which was the last of the Mayflower. It's just a little book in which Randall attempts to trace the Mayflower through documentary evidence. So really going back to his roots as a scholar of books and a scholar of manuscripts. He's trying to find the document documentary evidence for what happened to do this ship. It's not until a bit later on that he starts to think about what happened to its physical remains. But nevertheless, even this book, The Last of the Mayflower which is focused much more on the documents and on archives is actually brimming with remarks that suggest he had myth in mind, you know, mythology in mind when he was when he was bringing himself to this this Mayflower idea. He drew comparisons between different systems of belief. And he put the Mayflower into that and this was the idea of sort of comparative religion was a new one, but it was very much an accepted part, an accepted method within mythographic scholarship at the time. So in The Last of the Mayflower Randall notes quote the air of romance and a religion that had for so long surrounded the Mayflower story. And in this air he said would quote in earlier days have expressed itself in mythical fancy unquote. And he made a direct comparison between the Mayflower and the Argo, the ship that Kerry Jason and the Argonauts in their search for the golden fleece. So the Argo, according to Randall have been canonized by the Greeks. And they did this by actually identifying physical fragments of the ship in their temples. And then it was eventually the ship the Argo was placed amongst the stars. And that was the sort of the way that Greek astronomers would sort of see the ship in the heavens and and connected to sort of myth and science at the same time. So the Mayflower, Harris was sort of claiming was undergoing a similar process of canonization as what happened to the Argo and he calls the Mayflower the Argo of the Atlantic for that reason. And I think that's where this idea that well let's find the physical ship the physical ship must be out there somewhere. I think that's where that comes from that this notion that in order to canonize we must find the physical remains. And the barn at Jordan's I think actually fits a pattern of myth making of which Randall was uniquely conscious. And although he was unique, so he says this is this would have happened in earlier days that the Mayflower would have become mythical fancy actually Randall himself became the architect of a modern myth. He worked on the basis that there was a correlation between a correlation between ancient myth and modern tradition and modern history. As was the case with ancient myth and appeals to the imagination, wedded to evidence in the form of a physical site place that could function in effect as a shrine, or perhaps a theatrical set struck a chord with audiences in a way that no amount of purely reasoned or you know modern inlined argument could. But at least from Randall's point of view, there was a growing body of evidence evidence to support the hypothesis that he had found the remains of the Mayflower at Jordan's. By July 1920, he was finalizing the book in which he would make the case that the barn was a ship. This was called the finding of the Mayflower and that was published in 1920. But before the book went into print, Randall associates in the Quaker Society of Friends which actually owns the Jordan sites are used to own the Jordan site, decided to act before any other agencies picked up on the story. In July 1920, the Central Literature Council of the Society of Friends, which was basically kind of the public relations arm, sought to capitalize on James Randall Harris's dualistic reputation as both a scholar and a performer. The head of the Literature Council wrote to a number of London news editors in breathless terms. I hear that a most important announcement is this week to be made in connection with the Pilgrim Father celebrations this year. I am not allowed to divulge what it is exactly that that ever ingenious investigator, Dr Randall Harris has discovered regarding the later history of the good ship Mayflower, a great portion of which he contends is still in existence. He will have a most romantic story to tell, which is likely to lead to a certain spot already of historic interest, becoming the one Mecca, which American and other tourists will make sure they do not miss unquote. This statement was issued alongside an invitation to a selection of London press men who were invited to Jordan's on 30th of July 1920 to hear the story in person. Randall, the ingenious investigator was in his element in the situation. There he was on the very spot where he had been conducting minute historical and antiquarian investigations, and he had an audience waiting with baited breath. And so he began, you are now sitting in the cabin of the Mayflower, and perhaps the spirits of the departed Pilgrim Fathers may be looking over your shoulders. He spooled out the story of his investigation and his own belief that this very barn may well be the upturned hull of the famous Argo of the Atlantic. One observer related how quote a thrill passed through the little company when Dr Randall Harris summoned them in imagination into the cabin of the Mayflower Captain Bradford commanding. He told of his discovery as he walked up and down the platform, head bent, hands clasped behind. He spoke rapidly as one glad to unburden himself and share his secret. This performance and others like it had the desired effect. American and British visitors alike began to make pilgrimages to the barn, especially as the Tercent scenery celebrations heated up in August and September of 1920. There were fears that light-fingered American visitors might make off with precious pilgrim relics, and the Jordan's ground keeper had to be extra vigilant. But this was a small price to pay. Randall believed wholeheartedly that the Mayflower voyage had marked an epochal moment in world history and that its commemoration should be equally significant. It should mark the moment when Britain and the United States could cement their friendship, thus ensuring the survival and progress of civilization itself. Following his performance for the press, the finding of the Mayflower was published, and it's worth taking a moment to examine not only Randall's evidence, but the way that evidence was presented to the readers of that book. In the finding of the Mayflower, Randall explained how he had first attained expert verification that the barn was indeed built of ship's timbers, and that these were of approximately the correct age and size to belong to a ship of the Mayflower's type, a double-masted schooner of about 180 tons, so Randall thought. He also established that the bricks in the barn's foundations were of the correct size to be dated to around 1624 or 1625, the time at which Randall suggested that the Mayflower had been broken up and used for building material. On the back of a door in the barn, he found a floral design, a Mayflower perhaps, and perhaps the iron plate fastened to one of the roof timbers was the very same, which William Bradford described as having been removed from the printing press and used to repair a fractured beam. But the crowning glory of Randall's search was an inscription also on a roof timber. In a typically playful tone, Randall at first teased his readers that the inscription must read R. Harris. But no, it quite clearly must read Mayflower Harwich, the ship's name and place of construction. Such shaky evidence is not the stuff of hard science or even hard history. But as Randall said, for me, the whole quest is a romance, a chase, a mystery, a delight. The journey from the folk memory to the folk understanding is a succession of surprises. This appeal to the folk element of knowledge was of a piece with Randall's belief that folklore was one of the historical sciences. The notion of folk memory becoming folk understanding suggests that in common with many other mythographers, Randall viewed folk memory as a kind of subconscious survival, something which had been widely known or believed in the past, but which no longer played a part in the common stock of everyday stories. It had to be brought back into the collective consciousness of history. And Randall's aim as a practitioner was to identify those survivals and re-establish the imaginative connection that had once been there. Once unleashed, the story of the Barnes Association with the Mayflower was never going to be easily brought under control. Indeed, there seemed little appetite for control at all, particularly amongst Americans. Reading of Randall's investigation, the American Pacific Highway Association approached the Society of Friends and requested a piece of the Barnes Timber to be housed in the Peace Portal, a large stone archway built to mark the border between America and Canada in the newly built Pacific Highway. A ceremony was duly held at the Jordan site in January 1921, complete with American dignitaries and a solemn procession which saw the cutting placed in a ceremonial box for transportation to the Peace Arch. This briefly revived interest in the barn and the Mayflower story, with some papers repeating quite uncritically the claims made by James Randall Harris the previous summer. Randall, who had proved beyond reasonable doubt, the identity of the Jordan's barn as being yet built from the Mayflower attended the ceremony. You can see him, he is forth from the right as you're looking at it. Simple and informal though the event was, the press noted how, quote, the significance of its symbolism captivated the imagination. Paying tribute to the organizers in a speech at the ceremony, the agent general of British Columbia, F.C. Wade, described the Peace Portal as in itself an incident of wonderful imagination. This flourish of coverage in early 1921 led to one of the only bouts of rain on Randall's otherwise sunny parade of more Mayflower mythologizing. It came from J.W. Horrocks, a professor of history at Southampton University, who took exception at Randall's rather tenuous notions about the Mayflower and the barn, especially as these took on a life of their own. Horrocks thought that those who were seduced by Randall's theories were simply too hasty in what he called their powerful will to believe. Picking his way through the finding of the Mayflower, Randall's book, in a series of letters to the Times literary supplement, Horrocks called into question each bit of physical evidence from the idea that the Mayflower was a suitor in the first place to the inscription, which was invisible, even with the strongest magnifier he said, and I think we can sympathize, to the card floral design, to the controversial bricks. For his part, Randall pointed out in his response the following month that Horrocks had actually failed to definitively confute his findings. Moreover, Horrocks could not invalidate one of Randall's primary claims that folk memory was worthy of the historical investigator's attention. Randall argued strongly that folk memory and tradition were, quote, as valid as a document in the record office, unquote, and that previous investigators of the Mayflower had simply failed to take them seriously enough. Insofar as the light-hearted, almost otherworldly Randall ever seemed to, he took offense at Horrocks' accusations of being hasty or slipshod with the evidence. And yet he rebelled in the charge of enthusiasm, crowing up, for me, the whole quest is a romance, a chase, a mystery, a delight. The journey from the folk memory to the folk understanding is a succession of surprises. This is something that I think really captures what Randall's all about. So it's everywhere. But his determination to investigate local traditions as something more than simply fabrication or fancy shows the way he was willing to give to forms of evidence looked on with suspicion by professional historians. He also proved more than willing to interpret evidence in a light favorable to tradition. There was always an overlay of rationalist methodology, but when he presented the story, Randall was able to subsume any dull flecks of rationalism under a polished sheen of playful speculation. And the finding of the Mayflower was a work of supposition and wishful thinking, but the story it told was just plausible enough. The evidence could be interpreted in the way Randall interpreted it, and obviously the Americans of the Pacific Highway Association were very keen to accept that interpretation. Randall was convinced that tradition passed down informally between ordinary people had evidentiary weight in and of itself, and that in the hands of the right investigator, it could be corroborated through historical investigation. This Randall demonstrated in another of his Mayflower requests, the search for the masts of the Mayflower. Because if one accepts that the barn at Jordan's was indeed built from Mayflower, the location of the masts was the last remaining mystery. They weren't they were not there they weren't built into the barn and they would have been pretty obvious because we're talking about basically tall broad pillars of solid wood. But even there Randall had some leads, and he investigated these to the full. He didn't actually publish this investigation at the time there was some coverage of it in 1920 and 21, but it wasn't until 1932 that he actually published the full work on the on the subject of the masts of the Mayflower. But he done all the investigating in 1920 and 21. At the barn, there was nothing nothing more than tradition or folk memory to go on when finding the masts. In this case, it was the memory of an elderly minister who wrote to Randall and related his personal recollection of his own time as a preacher in Abingdon near Oxfordshire. There it was said locally that the mast had been built into a congregationalist chapel, which was in possession of two large wooden pillars of precisely the kind Randall was looking for. When Randall started to investigate the masts it was well past the height of Mayflower mania. Nevertheless, his enthusiasm for tradition as evidence meant he couldn't resist the romance of the chase. As he proceeded to investigate Randall found that there was another competing story associated with the Abingdon building that the two pillars in what was by then a school room had in fact come from the shift that it brought William orange to Britain in 1688. This Randall thought, or this is how he interpreted it, was one tradition which had grown from another, and he called this a bifurcated tradition. These traditions had in common and association with migrants from Holland, William III, and the pilgrims, given that pilgrims had spent 10 years in Holland before leaving for America. And this could mean that some vestiges of, there was some vestige of, quote, natural confusion in a tradition of people selling from Holland that had come down somehow into the present. And though he admitted there was nothing convincing to support the Abingdon chapel tradition. He was still willing to consider it alongside this William of Orange story and actually connecting the two stories in some somehow he tried to make that seem well actually it's more plausible that one of them is true. But if they're telling both, then one must be true. But still there was nothing he couldn't find anything, anything absolute. So he did eventually abandon that effort. But Randall's three main works of Mayflower research. Well, this kind of Mayflower research he had others as well. These three works, the last of the Mayflower, the finding of the Mayflower, and the masts of the Mayflower form a kind of trilogy in which his views on sort of modern mythology and on the evidentiary weight of tradition emerge very strongly. The first work acknowledged the mythic qualities of the story, but attempted to trace the documentary evidence in a way that reflected Randall's longstanding expertise in paleography and manuscript hunting. While the finding of the Mayflower and the masts of the Mayflower were a departure from the realm of documented history into this shadier realm of tradition and myth. Stories attached to specific places passed down from generation to generation with little or no documentary corroboration. So the big question I guess we have to ask is whether such an approach makes Randall's practice on historical. Does it make him merely a storyteller. And in a sense, if we allow history, the word history, the concept history to stand for rationalism and empiricism, then I suppose we have to consider Randall's work on the Mayflowers being beyond the bounds of proper history. J. W. Horrocks was probably right that Randall's belief about the Mayflower barn was flat out wrong. And yet for many it was too good a story to resist speculation plausibility and possibility were enough. And really, frankly, how many of us actually accept that history is just factual evidence and rational argument at a time when so many of us are undertaking efforts to decolonize knowledge. It seems deposit to point to the ways that modern historical practice resists the strict rationalism that so many scholars believe makes it somehow exceptional and frankly more sophisticated than the myth and tradition of less modern societies. What Randall's search for the lost ship shows us is that there's something more to historical investigation than just the methodical search for facts and evidence, even in the era of professionalism. I suggest that that's as true in 2020 as it was in 1920. Randall's delight in the chase simply mirrors our delight in the telling and the hearing. And it's that sense of romance and of imaginative fancy that every good historical story shares that we rarely acknowledge it with myths and traditions of human societies everywhere in all parts of the world. Thank you. Thank you very much, Martha. I am going to invite our audience to to ask you their questions. I have a few that have come in already. I'm just going to remind people that if you do want to ask a question, you can put it in the Q&A at the bottom, or in the chat. Both of those will find their way to to Martha and myself. So thank you so much, Martha. There were so many interesting, interesting avenues there. And I thought I would just take chairs prerogative because I wanted to to ask one of the one of the things that it really reminded me of. I was thinking about folk knowledge and the finding of ships and it reminded me of the the search for Franklin's ship and the Northwest Passage, which I think they found in about 2017. I can't remember the exact date, but but you know, Inuit oral tradition was was key in that finals of discovery. And I wondered, yeah, I just that just struck me as a kind of as a historical parallel. And I wondered, you know, to what to what degree was Randall sort of was he engaging with those kinds of other other forms of sort of ethnographic scholarship. I wonder if you could kind of go into that a bit more. Yeah, I think he absolutely was I think his, I think his interests were more in, I don't think he was particularly interested in sort of the Americas, but he was very interested in Africa. He was interested actually in Africa and sort of the Eastern and Central European sort of ethnography, ethnography, I guess, not exactly sure why those two places but that seemed to be where he tended. So yes, he was absolutely aware of, or he was absolutely sort of engaged with oral tradition and oral knowledge from other cultures. And I think, although I haven't seen him say it and writing or anything but it seems to me that he's almost he is a part of that he is his own way of doing things somehow. But yeah I think you're absolutely right about the Franklin story which it is really really interesting that, as we sort of move further and further into a more technologically enhanced version of modernity. We actually are going back to these older stories and you know similarly thinking about, you know earthquake science and things like that or it's actually being changed through the kinds of oral knowledge that's been passed down through it through societies and that's it's actually making our own knowledge much that much bigger I think that much more in depth. Yeah, thank you. I'm going to ask an audience question as a Joanna says, the myth making of finding the Mayflower seems very much like searching for a physical relic in order to create or legitimize a saint in the Catholic church. To what extent do you think the finding of the physical mayflower has characteristics of a sort of religion in itself as a sort of religious pursuit. Could you comment. Yeah, definitely. I think that I suppose it's it comes down to how we conceptualize and how we try and disaggregate you know myth and religion and, which is of course it's own kind of big debate but yes absolutely I think there are you know it Randall uses the word canonization and of course he's using that as a as a shorthand for thinking about the way the Greeks treated the Argo, but the Greeks wouldn't have had the same understanding what canonization was they were simply making it a part of the heavens. You know, quite literally in some ways. So for us thinking about how you know Randall's trying to bring the Mayflower into a kind of British myth making. It's, I think he probably was thinking about it in those terms, but he was himself an odd and oddly rationalist sort of. He had an oddly rationalist way of thinking about Christianity he was as a Quaker as an as a former rationalist he didn't have much time for kind of Catholic myth making or you know thinking about saint hood or anything like that so it's quite interesting that he was quite willing to do it himself with the Mayflower but in terms of his own religious practice less so. Yeah there's some really interesting kind of tensions there I think so thank you that's a really good question. One and I have there's another question which is of links into that from Phil who says, it doesn't seem to me a coincidence that this kind of spectacular discovery occurs at the same time as the explosion of archeology in the near and things like the rediscovery of Tutankhamun, and obviously the massive publicity that that accrued. And the public obviously in that period seem to be really obsessed with this sort of discovery. And scholars at the time seem to think of discovery itself as a legitimate sort of scholarly goal. Do you have any any thoughts on that I suppose connecting to a slightly difference at tradition to say the Catholic. Yeah, no that's really interesting. Yeah I think that there is this. I mean I suppose we're living through a similar time where we think that the things that are open to us are actually exposing ways of exposing discoveries that you know like Richard the third final resting place and like trying to you know is reading an article the other day about someone who's digitally recreated the faces of the Roman emperors, you know so we're trying really we're living through another age where we think that the technology or at least our is to our technologies I suppose are ways of understanding knowledge are opening up those new avenues. So yes I think there is that in at this time really because of this kind of the old well it's not it's an older idea at that point but the kind of March of intellect that we're their technology is enhancing our ability to understand these things. We are professionalizing and regularizing our way of thinking about disciplines like archaeology and anthropology, and this is only going to increase the amount of knowledge we can gain on these about these subjects. So yes I think there is absolutely a connection between what Reynolds doing and he does himself kind of occasionally identify as an archaeologist but he tends more to think of himself as an antiquarian in the old fashioned sense of the word. But yes he does he does occasionally kind of box himself into the archaeology box. When it's useful when it's useful to him. Yeah, he obviously he obviously made a point of treading a lot of different sort of different parts at once. We have a few questions, sort of, I suppose touching on some truthfulness it's obviously it's it's it captures the imagination as you've as you've well pointed out and that was obviously a big part of his mission. And so, Joanna who asked the early question about Catholicism says do you know if the alleged piece of the Mayflower is still at the peace arch border crossing and is it visible to the public. It's it's actually well what happened it was in the 1990s it was there up until the 1990s and then it had to be moved because actually water damage water had got into it's what it was housed in the casket it was housed in. And then moved to a museum I think on the American side I think it's in Washington. So you can still see the piece, but you have to see it in the museum it's not but the peace portal is still there that you can go and visit the peace portal. I did make an effort to get there but it's actually further from where I was then I couldn't go and see it. But yes you can visit the peace portal and you can go and see the chunk of the Mayflower barn. I imagine that's that it's further than I thought it's probably true of many places in the Pacific. Yeah, on that mountain. Keep going. So I'm Ed was asking, given the finding which happily coincided with the Tercentenary was there any commercial interest in supporting Harris's claim. And because I think you made a brief mention of this it did attract a lot of tourists and was that sort of commercialized in any way. Yeah, I think it did. It did attract quite a few tourists. I haven't looked into what the area of Jordan's actually did around that. It's interesting because Jordan's itself is a, I don't know if any of the audience has been there or easy is even from there but the community in Jordan's is actually a relatively new one in 1920. It's a it's a it's a plan sort of almost like a garden city almost. So I think that part of the reason that Randall found the barn there was that actually it was drawing attention, not just to the Quaker meeting house and not just to the barn itself but also to this newly constructed community and I think that it was in a way just trying to get that community on the map. I have yet to really look at how that community responded I think there was positive. I think it was positive generally people supported Randall and bringing people into Jordan's but I haven't looked into that to that side of it quite yet but I do think there was definitely a commercial sort of angle to it yeah. And we have a question both Sheila and Jim have actually asked essentially the same question which is, you know, were there are other, were there or are there any other sort of alternative destinations or accounts of what happened to the remains of the ship. Yeah, there was actually at the time that Randall decided it was in the barn. There was another place in there was a farmhouse in Essex. That was declared to be also built from the Mayflower. And actually, I mean the poor American ambassador must have received chunks of, you know, random bits of wood from all over Britain because people were just claiming that oh no no but my, my farmhouse my barn is built from the Mayflower. Yes, there were there were competing claims but I think this one was particularly, this one was particularly strong simply because of Randall's way of marketing it and I use that word advisedly you know he was, he was very good at getting himself on the map. You know he wanted people to know about Jordan's and he wanted people to know about this barn. So even though other there were other claims people just didn't, they simply didn't have the power that he had to get them across. That's interesting. And as opposed to follow up a little bit Margaret says, has anyone ever subjected the timbers of the barn to dendro chronological, I would say it dendro chronological investigation. Absolutely sure about that. They might have done since I think I think Randall actually did do some you know he did do some good work and I'm not trying to you know slag him off in any way. And he did actually investigate the you know he went to a shipbuilders and the shipbuilders came around to the barn and they said yes this is almost certainly built from the ships of a 70 from the bottom the timbers of a 17th century ship. So actually they got that far. So I think, I think that we can probably be pretty sure that that is the case. How old those those those beams were and when they were caught and things like that no I'm not sure that I'm not sure that people that they could tell for sure you know 1620 or 1670 or what but I think we have got to the point where we can say yes it's a ship, but actually it was a very common practice to build barns from old ships. Turns out everyone was doing it. There's a there's a wonderful note about recycling I suppose. Yes, the after lives of of artifacts. And now I have this this one is very much a comment not a question but it is very interesting so I'm going to read it because I think you will, I think you and it would appreciate it so this is from Anna, he says, thank you for this fascinating talk Martha this is definitely a comment question, but rental Harris was a good family friend of my grandmother's her father Robert Aiton I tune maybe was a minister and Bible scholar who was possibly a student of Randall's and a later colleague of Woodbrook my grandmother would often talk about him. And it was really fascinating to get an insight into the esoteric intellectual world around Woodbrook, including the emerging internationalism I really look forward to reading hearing more about your research. If Anna could get in touch with me I would absolutely love to hear about that and I don't know how many people have actually been to Woodbrook it is a really interesting. It's fascinating it's a fascinating place and it's educational history is is amazingly rich. And it is absolutely an international, you know it's an international institution people came from all over to study at Woodbrook in their summer schools and it has this particular kind of culture and it's a it's it's such an appealing place to be. So I would encourage people to go if they need a writing retreat would Brooks the place to go. But also they hold Randall's Randall's material but yeah if Anna could if Anna please email me I would love to hear about that. Well that's, that's great. I'm very very pleased to hear that that's a that struck a chord. It's actually it is a name I've come across itunes before so yeah he's in there in the archive. And so, Jim is asking, are there any more recent investigations into what happened to the ship do you know of any have they did they sort of circulate in the kind of contemporary historical analysis or the kind of the the 400th anniversary. I've not seen any although my colleagues Tom and Ed might be more up on this than I am I have not seen that much talk about exactly what happened to the ship probably because it's. I mean it's a bit of a, it's a bit of an outside chance that it did it did survive because if it did. If it was broken up, then we wouldn't have it if it was built into something else then we wouldn't really be able to tell for sure, despite Randall's attempts at the inscription reading wouldn't be able to tell that that was definitely that ship. And I think even in terms of the documentary evidence of where you know where the ship would have been after 1620. People have traced it, you know certain certain ships called the Mayflower throughout the 1620s and into the 1650s and beyond, but there were so many Mayflowers that we just don't know. So it's it's very, very difficult, I think, for modern scholars to shift through the evidence to sit through the evidence the same evidence that they had in 1920. But I think we're also less we're less inclined to believe that it did survive I think, but I'm not I can't be absolutely sure about that I'm sure there are people looking out there. Well, I suppose it makes me think of kind of Britain's most famous yield the ship, you know, at the Mary Rose, you know, which is obviously so magical because of its very, it's very physicality you know the fact that it was, you know, and also there's a lovely story about the kind of the engineering work that brought it up and that kind of thing. And there's also I just you know, thinking about it reflected on the fact that so much energy has sort of gone into into the more kind of popular elements so like the rebuilding, you know, the rebuilt Mayflower which I think is from the 70s is that right. There were a few but yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I think, yeah, there's one that isn't it more than California or something there's just sort of there's a kind of a quite a kind of bubbling popular mystery idea around these recreations. And I think I think one of these ships has sailed back to Britain as part of the 400th anniversary if I'm right. Yeah, it was going to I don't know I think some, I think maybe, who's that guy Richard Branson I think he had something to do with it is that who I mean, Virgin Atlantic. But yeah, I don't know I don't know what happened to that effort, and whether it was, yeah, it's coppered, so to speak. Yeah, I'm sure I'm sure somebody in the in the audience knows the answer but I suppose they just got me reflecting that there's sort of different ways that the idea of the physical ship has, you know, has moved into other parts of the kind of of the story telling of the, you know, and I think we touched on one of the previous two talks, you know the fact that you that you have the Plymouth plantation in the US which for those who don't know is a is a living history museum, which, and that sort of tradition in I suppose particularly American historic sort of popular history has quite a powerful kind of line through and the reconstruction of the ships that fit in that in that tradition. So we don't have in quite such the same way in Britain. There was an attempt actually, I don't know in in Harwich, where the where the ship was originally built. The, there was an attempt to kind of create a new Mayflower using traditional methods and everything so they were using the old you know old tools and everything and and and constructing it from, you know, in all the traditional but I think possibly that that one ran out of money and couldn't complete but it was a good idea it was a really interesting idea because it brings out the physical heritage but also the intangible heritage of of of of building techniques and and that kind of, you know, the old traditional knowledge of how you make something from wood and and, you know, without modern modern technology. No, and that is a, you know, it's fascinating with those kinds of practices have a contemporary resonance sorry this is going very off I'm very interested in. I was thinking about, you know, things like the the awful fire at the Notre Dame in Paris and one of the things that that obviously highlighted was then, you know, when you do when these massive restoration projects often happen on frankly religious or, you know, royal buildings, you know how that you know you suddenly, you know, I think isn't there there's a chateau that's been built from scratch somewhere in northern France and suddenly like all of the like traditional masons and carpenters got taken to Paris, I'm paraphrasing but it was I find it I find it very interesting as a sort of, you know, a way of reconnecting with, yeah, as you say this of the built environment and techniques that you know, these are still needed and often, you know, kind of odd moments. We have a comment from Bob who's watching who says as a building's historian I think it very unlikely that the barn contains the ship's timbers. There we go. So common myth but often unsupported in practice that the so that's that's that's one one take on it is crushing us all. Yeah. I'm just having a quick look and one other comment here. So sorry I'm running my eye back up my list. Oh yes, Kenneth says, obviously there was this comparison to the to the Argo and the Argonauts and this was obviously a link that that Randall made in his own thinking. And Christina as well as talking about you know, interested in this idea of the Greek myth. But did, did Noah's Ark ever come a lot sort of appear as a kind of and particularly the search for the argument you mentioned Indiana Jones. Of course it was a different arc but anyway. But you know, did that kind of did Noah's Ark feature as a kind of ship image. Probably enough no and I think it goes back to Randall sort of strange relationship with his own faith because it's, he was, he was super rationalist about his own Christian practice and I think that he would have. I think he would not have thought of of Noah's Ark as a real thing. He would have probably thought of it as something less. Something symbolic, in a sense. And there are instances where he actually goes into aspects of the old and the New Testament, and, and, and, you know, reads old, well, especially New Testament stories as myths. You know, he shows the ways that well this is actually connected to a practice that we see in Ukraine, etc, etc. So he's trying to connect, you know, biblical stories, you know, Christian stories to, to, to other kinds of myth and other kind of tradition so I'm not, I think he would have, he would have just seen the Noah's Ark story as something not to be investigated in quite the same way. But it's an interesting one that it never does come up. I might have to think about that and maybe look back on my notes and see if it did but it's mostly, it's mostly other kinds of myth. Well, that's, that's really interesting. And I think as you say there's the thread of religiosity through the story is so interesting. Joanna has a comment, but she just says, I would highly highly recommend visiting the Mayflower replica on the east coast of the US is near Boston, if you can, it makes it so very real to see how small the space was, and brings a reality to to the myth, which was a nice, a nice touch. And Ed also asked, does the elision between fact and fiction with the Mayflower barns say something about the same issue with Mayflower history more generally, isn't this a mythic rather than historical story from the start. Yeah, I would say it is, I would say it is. I think a lot of the aspect of history that we find most interesting actually probably fall into that category of and that comes, you know, we can think about that in terms of even just the stories that we know about the kings and queens. You know, so a lot of our histories I think are are are infused with as I don't want to say aspects of fiction, because that's too strong a word but aspects of or expressions of a sort of speculation or imaginative. And imagination, I guess, creativity, a kind of sense that history has to have aspects of of the unknowable within it, in order to really appeal to us and in order to really do its job in a sense of kind of giving us giving us narratives giving us understandings of what happened where we came from, etc. And I think the Mayflower does absolutely fall into that category and I think of course it's, it's, you know, in many ways it's a much more strongly, it is much more strongly mythologized and many other stories because it's so well known and because it's particularly in the states that has this, you know, origin aspect to it. So yeah, I think that I think that's absolutely right. That's lovely. Thank you. And Jake has just commented that Leonard Weaver brackets Harwich historian believed that the High Court of Admiralty only valued the vessel as being worth 128 pounds due to its ruinous condition in 1624. So I think, you know, we can take this as part of the sort of evidence for the school of thought that it was broken up. And he says, and yes, the Harwich Mayflower two project did unfortunately run out of money. So, I guess that's to speak to our point from from earlier on and I suppose that's, you know, there's a much broader point there about, you know, this kind of historic commemoration and memorializing and kind of where do these resources come from, you know, kind of kind of thing. But we're just getting to the end now. So I wondered, is there any any final comments you wanted to make any any last observations you wanted to to offer. Sorry, can you hear me okay I think I'm having a bit of trouble. It could well be me mine's gone a bit funny earlier. I was just going to ask if as we can have a couple of last minutes if you wanted if anything else that you wanted to kind of say or any final thoughts. Oh, I'm sorry I can't hear. Okay, well I am going to in that case, wrap us up and say thank you very much to Martha I hope everyone else can hear me. And thank you so much that was a really fantastic presentation and since nobody else can clap for you, I will. Thank you so much. You need that bit that's good. I just to say thank you very much to everybody for coming in and spending your lunchtime with us and a big thank you to Martha. There is a survey which the Voyaging Through History project has put together, and it's in the chat if you wouldn't mind putting that in that'd be lovely. And this talk and all the other ones are available on the British Library's YouTube channel so if you're interested you can go back and have a look. And just to say thank you very much Martha and thank you so much to everybody for for really wonderful and varied social questions I think that we really got everyone sort of thoughts going. So we're going to we're going to finish promptly on time and everyone get on with that afternoon. So thank you very much Martha and thank you everybody and we will see you next time. Thank you. Thank you everyone. Thank you Cara so much. Thanks. No problem. No problem.