In our digital age, with jets flying overhead and giant container ships plowing across the ocean’s surface while hi-tech nuclear submarines move secretly through the watery darkness below, we tend to look at past modes of transportation, especially old wooden sailing ships, as antiquated and quaint. But nothing could be further from the truth. In her day, the Mayflower represented the culmination of centuries of technological development.
Four hundred years ago, a structure a little more than a hundred feet long built by hand of wood, iron, hemp, and flax used only the wind to transport more than a hundred people safely across three thousand miles of ocean. There was no GPS, no support network of instant communication, few maps, and just one ship in the midst of a turbulent sea, headed to a place about which her passengers knew virtually nothing.
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