Where Left Is Right / The Old Site

On this day, 385 years ago, a group of 102 Puritans (or "Pilgrims" as we've come to refer to them) sailed from Plymouth, England, headed west across the Atlantic. Originally they had planned to depart in two ships, the Mayflower and the much smaller Speedwell. The latter turned out to be too leaky to make the trip, though, and after several false starts -- and after leaving about 15-20 of their number ashore, the remainder, with a crew of about 30, boarded the Mayflower alone for the voyage.

The voyage took between 65 and 103 days, depending on whether you count the ship's first sighting of land on November 19th (at what we now call Cape Cod, Massachusetts), its first anchorage (November 21st, at present-day Provincetown), or its final anchorage when the passengers disembarked to establish a colony (December 26th, at Plymouth). The group hadn't been headed for Massachusetts or anywhere near it -- their land grant was actually in Virginia -- but by then they were probably ready just to get off the boat.

Strangely, after two to three months aboard a creaking 12-year-old wooden ship, in the cold of autumn and on the blustery Atlantic, almost all of the 102 original passengers survived -- only one or two died. (And two were born.) How'd they do that?

For an answer, let's turn first to the Mayflower's size -- or more precisely, its capacity. This is sometimes expressed as 180 tons. To our modern ears, this seems consistent with our own way of expressing a ship's size in terms of the tons of water it displaces. But this is wrong, because the unit of measure in which the number 180 expresses the size of the Mayflower isn't tons, but tuns. A lowercase-u tun, which is... what? Here's what the American Heritage dictionary (courtesy of Dictionary.com) tells us:

1. A large cask for liquids, especially wine.
2. A measure of liquid capacity, especially one equivalent to approximately 252 gallons (954 liters)

Right: The Mayflower was rated at 180 tuns because it could carry up to 180 large wine casks. Prior to its service in bearing emigrants across the Atlantic, the ship had in fact been heavily involved with the wine trade; it would carry various English goods east across the English Channel, and return laden with Bordeaux and brandies in the aforementioned casks. After enough of these trips, the hold had acquired enough of a fragrance that the Mayflower could be dubbed a "sweet ship" -- a generic term, not one specific to the Mayflower, for any ship which had developed such a character. (In fact, sweet ships were often specifically not used to carry other kinds of cargo, because the less-pleasant odors could also be absorbed by the hold... and transferred to wines in the future!)

The other side-effect of the Mayflower's sweet-shipness is a bit more conjectural. But it is believed that the reason so few of the Pilgrims got sick on the way over was that the alcoholic remnants of the ship's earlier cargoes had so suffused the wood -- and, by extension, the air -- that the hold was practically medicinal (at least by standards of the time). Bugs and bacteria simply couldn't thrive there.

The stereotype of the Pilgrims/Puritans as dour anhedonists isn't 100% true. For example, at that famous first Thanksgiving they served beer, wine, and brandy. But they did object strongly to drunkenness, and maybe that's where the stereotype originated. And there's certainly at least a little irony in thinking of all of the Puritans surviving their difficult voyage almost accidentally thanks, at least in part, to their vessel's history with alcoholic potables.

There's a metaphor in all this, you know. (Come on, you didn't think I was actually just stumbling around so far off-topic, did you?) It occurred to me as I thought about the Mayflower and its passengers and about the peculiar character of each.

In 21st-century America, conservatives are prone to wielding the word "liberal" (and its derivatives) like a club. They do the same thing with all forms of the word "social," equating social programs with Socialist ones. Liberals, they say. How clueless.

But you know what? Latter-day conservatives (and in this piece I'm speaking of the hard-right-wing sort of conservatives) simply display no capacity for self-reflection or -understanding. They don't recognize that the very ship in which they sail is suffused with the fragrance and the very fact of liberalism, starting with the very first principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence and subsequent founding documents, and proceeding through the present day. These principles live in the system of government, the institutions of government, without which the principles are just a load of high-sounding, well-meant phrases. The list of things produced by government and inspired by liberal principles is a familiar one (at least in liberal circles), but here are some examples to remind you:

• The Declaration of Independence
  
• The Constitution and Bill of Rights
  
• The interstate highway system
• The 40-hour work week
• Universal suffrage
• Civil rights
• Universal public education
• Truth-in-advertising and other consumer-protection laws
• Land-grant universities
• The Americans with Disabilities Act
• The earned income tax credit
• Insured bank deposits
• The National Weather Service
  

...It goes on forever. And every one of these things derived from liberal principles -- charity towards all, malice towards none, common sense, simple human decency, empathy, and so on -- every one of these things surrounds and lifts up conservatives as well as liberals, wealthy as well as poor, genius as well as dunce. It wouldn't go too far to say that our society is ennobled by them. They all put into stone, into the force of law, the recognition that everybody is better off when as many "everybodies" as possible are taken care of -- including conservatives. Without the invisible but ubiquitous aroma of liberalism, we'd all get sick. Society would die, taking with it conservatives and liberals alike.

And while this last bit isn't metaphor-driven, it's just as important to understand: Every one of these liberal, government-sponsored initiatives "fails" only when conservatives -- or weak-kneed liberals -- succeed at putting the brakes on them.

We can all make it to the Promised Land. But we can't make it without liberalism.