Four hundred years ago, on 6 September 1620, the Mayflower set sail from Plymouth in the United Kingdom on a journey to the ‘New World’ that would become one of the most-famous stories in American history. To commemorate the 400th anniversary of the voyage, a new museum in Plymouth has launched a commemorative exhibition about the Mayflower, with more than 400 objects from across four nations and four centuries, setting out to tell the story of the ship and its passengers, and to dispel some of the myths and misconceptions that have surrounded it over time.
The Box is a new museum, gallery, and archive in Plymouth, Devon, designed to celebrate the city’s heritage. The museum, which opened on 29 September 2020, pays homage to the maritime and international connections of ‘Britain’s Ocean City’, with nine permanent galleries encompassing natural history and art collections, extensive archives, and a wealth of artefacts celebrating the city’s long history as a port.
The Mayflower 400 exhibition is a collaborative project, with artefacts on loan from locations across the UK, US, and the Netherlands. According to the curator, Jo Loosemore, the goal was to create a display incorporating the wider context of the journey and correcting many of the inaccuracies that are present in the popular understanding of the Mayflower’s story today. Although the ship takes centre stage, with a large abstract structure representing the Mayflower that visitors can enter running down the middle of the exhibition space, it is surrounded on either side by exhibits highlighting the historical conditions that led to the journey taking place, and the events that unfolded after the ship’s arrival in America.
Excavating around Salisbury Plain