the.com/mayflower
The ship wasn't named for comfort — it carried 102 people and a lot of regret below deck.
means The flowering hawthorn shrub that blooms in May, and — far more famously — the ship that carried English Puritan separatists from Plymouth, England to Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620.
from The word is a plain Old English compound — 'May' plus 'flower' — originally just naming whatever bloom opened in that month (hawthorn in England, trailing arbutus in parts of North America). Ships of the era were often named after flowers, saints, or virtues, and 'Mayflower' was a common enough ship name in the 1600s; the one that mattered to history happened to be the one that landed at Plymouth Rock with a colony's worth of hope and misery aboard.
- actual size
- about 100 feet long, smaller than a tennis court
- original plan
- was headed for Virginia, missed by miles
- survival rate
- nearly half died before the first spring
- name reused
- so common later ships kept stealing the name