Stepping Stones

At Whit's End, Jill Segler and Ryan Cummings are puzzling over their history lesson about the Pilgrims. They can't understand why anyone would endure so much hardship just to plant a colony. When Whit looks at their textbook, he discovers something scandalous: the editors have cut key phrases out of the Mayflower Compact. After playing a reading of the real document, the kids notice the missing words, including "in the name of God," "for the glory of God," and the aim of advancing the Christian faith. Since their teacher never really explained the Pilgrims' faith, Whit invites them into the Kids' Radio studio, hands them special helmets, and sends them on an imagination-powered journey into history.

The journey begins in 1607, in the reign of King James, an unpopular Scottish king who has already survived plots against his throne and his life. He has no patience for the group who call themselves Puritans, wanting purity in their worship, and whom he calls Separatists for leaving the Church of England. He orders them hounded, taxed, jailed, and stamped out "like the vermin they are." In the little village of Scrooby, the Puritans meet secretly in the manor house of postmaster William Brewster, led by their pastor, John Robinson. When the magistrate and his militia pound on the door, the congregation slips out through a hidden passage behind a bookcase, a drill they have rehearsed many times. Brewster himself has already spent three months in jail after an English sea captain betrayed an earlier escape attempt, so the group now pins its hopes on a Dutch captain to carry them away.

After months of suffering, the Puritans finally escape to Holland and settle in Leiden, where for years they work, build homes, and worship freely. Yet they never feel truly at home. They are Englishmen at heart, and they worry about their children growing up shaped by Dutch culture. Believing themselves a people of destiny, they conclude after much prayer that God wants them to establish a settlement in the New World.

Deacon John Carver and Robert Cushman travel to London to arrange the voyage and meet Thomas Weston, who represents investors called the Adventurers. As the departure nears, Weston grows slippery. He demands a new, much worse agreement, claiming his investors are nervous after another settler voyage lost 130 of 180 passengers. He has not even secured a ship yet, though he has his eye on one called the Mayflower, and he casually reveals that strangers, other settlers unknown to the Puritans, will be joining them to offset costs. William Bradford is alarmed at building a community dedicated to God with non-believers aboard, but Pastor Robinson urges the congregation to embrace the strangers as Holland once embraced them, to share their faith, and to learn to live civilly amid their differences.

The Puritans buy a small ship, the Speedwell, and at the port of Delfshaven they tearfully say goodbye to friends and family; some parents, including William and Dorothy Bradford, leave young children behind. But the Speedwell does not live up to its name. She leaks on the way to England, leaks again after repairs at Southampton, and forces the two ships back to port twice more before being abandoned at Plymouth as unseaworthy. Some passengers give up entirely; the rest crowd onto the Mayflower with the strangers, whom the despairing Cushman describes as mocking and uncooperative. It is now September 6, dangerously late in the season, and provisions are already running low, but the travelers place themselves in God's hands. As Bradford declares, there is no turning back.

Weeks of storms follow. More than a hundred passengers are crammed into a middle deck only five feet high, nearly everyone seasick, unable to go topside for air. Then a huge wave cracks the ship's main beam, the timber that holds the vessel together. The carpenter cannot repair it, and Master Jones, the ship's captain, admits their only hope is somehow forcing the beam back into place. The Puritans reveal that they have brought a screw jack, a construction tool intended for building houses in the new land, and with it the men lift the broken beam back into position, saving the ship.

Blown far off course, Jones finally sights land, not Hudson's Bay where their patent allows them to settle, but Cape Cod, well to the north. At the insistence of Mr. Martin, the Adventurers' representative, they attempt to sail the two hundred miles south, but the wind dies and the tide drives the Mayflower toward roaring breakers and deadly shoals. Just when shipwreck seems certain, the wind shifts and Jones steers them to safety. He then makes a historic decision: he will not risk the ship again. "You may feed your agreement to the fishers," he tells Martin; they are sailing back to Cape Cod.

The news ignites an uproar between the Puritans and the strangers. John Billington, sick of the Puritans' prayers and Bible readings, talks openly of mutiny and vows the strangers will go their own way once ashore. Bradford warns that divided, so small a company has no chance of survival, and pointedly reminds Billington that Captain Standish's militia holds the weapons. Surprisingly, it is Martin, once the loudest scoffer, who calms Billington, admitting he has come to admire the Puritans' courage. Brewster then proposes drafting an agreement to govern them all, promising Billington it will not be a list of religious rules but must satisfy everyone, drawing on the lessons of toleration the Puritans learned in Holland. This becomes the Mayflower Compact, signed on November 11, 1620, a promise by all aboard to work for the common good, which Whit tells the kids was in a way the beginning of freedom of religion in the New World. The passengers also elect the godly, well-respected John Carver as their governor.

Jones anchors the Mayflower in a sheltered harbor on the inside of the Cape. Though the land looks desolate and exposed, Carver decides it is the place God has provided, at least as a base for exploring. Sixteen armed men row ashore, and after nearly three months at sea their first act on solid ground is to kneel and thank God for delivering them across the vast and furious ocean. That night the travelers enjoy their first fire in many days, while Bradford soberly reflects that they have no friends to welcome them, no inns, no houses, no towns. "Who will sustain us but the Spirit of God and His grace?" he asks. The Puritans and their companions have already been through so much, but the hardest part still awaits them.