Nay, before the voyage did end, a woman great with child offered twenty
shillings for a rat, which the proprietor refusing, the woman died.One voyage in 1731 took twenty-four weeks, and of the 150 passengers on
this ship more than 100 starved to death. As ghastly as the trip was for
adults, it was worse for children. Few lived to tell the tale.
Apart from being poorly provisioned by owners and chandlers, ships
had little space for food and drink. Few seventeenth-century ships displaced
as much as 150 tons. Columbus’s flagship, the Santa María,is thought to
have displaced about 100 tons and to have been about 75 feet long. The
Niñaand the Pintawere about half that size. Many of the remarkable voy-
ages of exploration by the Portuguese, Spanish, and Genoese in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries were made in vessels as small as modern sailboats—
30 tons and 25 or 30 feet in length. In his remarkable 1524 voyage on behalf
of King François I of France, Giovanni Verrazzano reconnoitered almost the
whole North American coast in a ship that displaced only about 70 tons and
was perhaps 65 or 70 feet long. The Mathewof the Genoese John Cabot
(Cabotto, Italian for “the coaster”) was little more than half that size.
Big ships were rare. In 1582, just before the Spanish Armada sailed
against England, the English owned only twenty ships of more than 200
tons. Two out of three of the rest were less than 80 tons. Among the ships of
its time, the 90-foot-long Mayflowerwas a relatively ample 180 tons; and the
Ark,which took the first settlers to Maryland, was a nearly gigantic 350 tons.
TheDove,which accompanied the Ark,was only about 50 tons. The most
common ship of the seventeenth century was the Dutch flat-bottomed fluyt
or fly boat, which usually displaced only about 50 tons. The Ty g r e ,on which
people and supplies were sent to Virginia in 1621, was a pinnace or brigan-
tine rated at only 45 tons. Even smaller was Sparrow,30 tons, which went to
Plymouth in 1624. We do not know of many of the seventeenth-century
ships, but eighteenth-century ships were also as small as modern yachts: the
William and Mary,theWilliam and Elizabeth,and the Beginningeach dis-
placed only about 30 tons and were only 30 to 45 feet long.
Packed with people, their belongings, their equipment, and their ani-
mals, such diminutive vessels had scant room for anything else. Even when,
as on the Mayflower,the passengers rather than avaricious owners bought
The Fearsome Atlantic 31