Disclaimer: These events are told from the viewpoint of this descendent of one of the first American families. We settled in Maryland. I’ve just returned from Holland, where the pilgrims spent 12 little-known years before going back to England to then head to the New World. I spent the summer tracing the deranged footsteps of our ancestor pilgrims.

Chapter 1: How to Flee Every Country Until You Finally Find One Without Neighbors

History insists the Pilgrims were paragons of virtue: earnest, long-faced saints trudging forth to build God’s vacation home in the wilderness. That’s the brochure version. The truth? They were a wandering sack of wheezing moral carbuncles who drank like condemned sailors and lectured like unpaid interns of the Inquisition. These were my ancestors—on my mother’s side—proof that genetics carru a sense of humor.

They weren’t “religious refugees”; they were walking noise complaints. England didn’t persecute them—it quietly changed the locks.

Their first stop on the global Tour of Being Unbearable was Amsterdam, a city that could tolerate anything: hash smoke, sailors with questionable piercings, anarchists juggling flaming pamphlets, and the odor of a million pickled herrings. Yet even Amsterdam—the spiritual capital of “do what you want, just don’t bleed on the furniture”—took one whiff of the Pilgrims’ sanctimony and said, with Dutch politeness, “F*ck No!”

The Dutch, who could peacefully co-exist with Catholics, Jews, prostitutes, philosophers, and windmills—all at the same dinner table—took one look at the scowling God Squad and collectively wondered whether Spanish rule might’ve been the better deal.

So the Pilgrims lurched onward to Leiden, a lovely scholarly town unprepared for the arrival of Calvinist mildew. Leiden welcomed them with open arms and closed nostrils. “Yes, come in,” said the locals, “start your linen shops, enrich our culture—please, diversify our gene pool! We beg you.”

Twelve years later, the same townspeople were reconsidering every decision they had ever made. The Pilgrims refused to learn Dutch, refused to experience joy, and refused to let their children become anything other than junior-grade killjoys. They looked upon Leiden—a quiet university haven with cobbled streets and excellent cheese—and declared it another Sodom, only better organized.

So Leiden, in an act of refined civic mercy, escorted them to the exit. Probably with a nice loaf of bread and a pair of wooden shoes to speed their departure. “Thank you for your enthusiastic hostility,” the Dutch likely said. “Please never return. The tulips fear you.”

And so, having exhausted the patience of the most tolerant society in Europe, the Pilgrims gazed across the Atlantic—toward a continent where nobody yet knew them, and thus nobody had told them to go away. It must have felt like destiny. It was, in fact, the last refuge for people so irritating that even world champions of tolerance issued a restraining order.

Thus these morally inflamed scarecrows boarded the Mayflower and set out to build a land where they could finally be free:

Free to punish everyone else for existing.

And that is how a band of joy-proof religious auditors fled every civilized country that asked them to leave, only to plant their flag in someone else’s backyard and call the whole thing “liberty.”

Chapter 2 — The Great Retreat: How the Pilgrims Fled Holland, Sank a Ship, Terrorized Two Ports, and Still Somehow Made It to America

Leaving Leiden wasn’t a “fresh start.” It was an act of pest control.

After twelve excruciating years of Puritan spiritual pollution—thick, choking clouds of sanctimony drifting over canals like Calvinist smog—the Dutch finally broke. This is a nation that tolerates everything: weed, prostitution, anarchists riding bicycles naked, and tourists from Ohio. But even they have limits, and those limits were reached the moment the Pilgrims refused to smile, assimilate, or shut up.

Amsterdam had already tried to shake them off like a wet umbrella.Leiden lasted longer, because Leiden is polite.But eventually even its famously calm citizens agreed that living near the Pilgrims felt like attending a 12-year funeral for someone who wasn’t dead yet.

The message was universal, unmistakable, and delivered with a complimentary pair of wooden shoes:

“Please leave before morale collapses and the windmills unionize.”

So the Pilgrims waddled down to Delfshaven to board the Speedwell, a ship whose very name was an act of historical satire. This pathetic little craft looked less like a vessel of destiny and more like the punishment a shipwright receives for being drunk at work. If the Speedwell had been an animal, the humane thing would have been to put it down.

But no — the Pilgrims climbed aboard, packing it with their belongings, their grievances, and enough religious judgment to sink the Spanish Armada.

Enter: The Speedwell’s Suicide Attempts

Before they even cleared the harbor, the Speedwell began leaking like a colander with a drinking problem. The Pilgrims prayed, naturally. The ship begged for death. Water poured in. Psalms poured out. Neither effort improved conditions.

Still, the Pilgrims declared it a “test from God,” because God, apparently, was a part-time ship inspector with a grudge.

They tried again. The Speedwell began hemorrhaging water with biblical enthusiasm.It didn’t just leak — it exorcised itself.

By the time they limped into Plymouth, the crew had had enough. Forced to endure a week trapped with human fogbanks who believed smiling was idolatry, the sailors whispered what everyone already suspected:

The Speedwell wasn’t broken. The crew tried to kill it. On purpose.

Sabotage was not just understandable — it was heroic. Imagine sailing across the Atlantic while being forced to listen to men who believe dancing leads to eternal damnation. Sabotaging the ship wasn’t wrongdoing. It was a mercy killing.

The Pilgrims Respond in Their Favorite Way: Blame Reality

Eventually the Pilgrims realized the truth:

* The Speedwell was not seaworthy.

* The crew hated them.

* God was clearly trying to keep them in Europe.

* Literally every sign pointed to “stay home.”

Naturally, they ignored all of this.

They sold the Speedwell to some unlucky fool, then squeezed the entire congregation of frostbitten zealots onto the Mayflower — transforming a single ship into a floating monastery of despair.

There they were:102 sour-faced fundamentalists, one leaky ship, zero self-awareness, and an entire ocean worth of people praying they’d never come back.

And England’s Reaction?

England watched them leave the way a landlord watches rats crawl into someone else’s apartment.

A sigh of relief so deep it disturbed local weather patterns.

And thus the journey began—

Not by courage, not by divine command, not by destiny,but because two nations screamed “NO” loudly enough that the Pilgrims mistook it for a call to adventure.

Chapter 2a: What the English Thought When the Pilgrims Came Back Begging for a Boat—Or—”Look Who’s Crawling Back in a Doublet”

And so, America’s great founding myth didn’t begin with trumpets, angels, or divine revelation.It began—quite predictably—in a pub that smelled like God’s armpit after a long jog.

England at the time was a cheerful penal colony masquerading as a kingdom. Criticize the king’s haircut and you could lose your head. Criticize his theology and you could lose the rest. Privacy was a rumor; dignity was a luxury reserved for people whose shoes weren’t infested with mildew. The monarchy owned its subjects the way a butcher owns hogs—completely, unromantically, and with dinner plans.

Into this fragrant swamp of monarchy and misery waddled the Pilgrims—professional buzzkills, spiritual hall monitors, faces puckered by decades of religious constipation. Rain lashed the thatched roofs of Rotherhithe as they sloshed into the Mayflower Pub, a tavern so foul it could’ve been designated a public health hazard by a blind inspector.

Inside, the air was a swirling cocktail of stale beer, boiled cabbage, wet wool, human sadness, and an undertone that suggested several of the walls had once been alive. The floor clung to boots like a spurned lover. The tables had not been cleaned since before the invention of hope. Even the rats in the doorway took one look and muttered, “No thanks.”

At a beer-stained plank masquerading as furniture sat the future founders of the United States—each one looking as if God had personally insulted their mother. It's important to point out that they weren't simply sitting among sloshing ale, they were sloshing it themselves, right down their gullets.

Bradford, hunched over his mug, wore the expression of a man preparing to sue heaven for breach of contract.Brewster looked pinched and puckered, as if he had been clenching his theology since birth.Winslow, too young to know better but too Puritan to enjoy life, brooded like an apprentice undertaker.

Nearby, the pub “ladies” loitered—corseted veterans of the local economy—one sporting a loose bosom crowned by a wiry mole so proud and defiant it deserved representation in Parliament.

Then in thundered Miles Standish—a compact, muscular storm cloud whose natural resting state was “actively suppressi...