The Pilgrims crossed the ocean seeking a better life, and built a new society to achieve their vision. The Mayflower’s story is framed as human triumph. The tales around these two arrivals, the Mayflower and the White Lion, highlight a foundational rupture in the American story. This is the key message: The story of America is deeply entangled with the practice of slavery. Unlike the Pilgrims, we don’t know their names or individual stories, but their arrival in the “New World” is equally significant in American history. These enslaved people were sold as property to Virginia’s English colonists. But inside, it transported about two dozen captives from Angola. Like the Mayflower, this ship had an English crew. The arrival of this ship, White Lion, also deeply shaped the course of America’s history. Yet, just a year earlier, another English ship docked farther south along the coast, in Virginia. The story goes on to herald its Pilgrim passengers as some of America’s first non-native residents. In popular mythology, the story of America began in November of 1620, when the English colonial ship, Mayflower arrived on the shores of Massachusetts.
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