Two Ships, Two Shores

Abstract

This essay examines how nineteenth-century writers and orators made meaning and myth out of the arrivals of the Mayflower ship in Plymouth, Massa chusetts, and the White Lion at Point Comfort, Virginia. The arrivals of these two ships, one carrying the vaunted Pilgrims and the other carrying the first enslaved Africans to British North America, were almost always misdated as 1620 and thus situated as rival ships representing divergent purposes. I show how this misdating was leveraged by very different groups, from Black ministers speaking in the midst of Civil War to white colonizationists fantasizing about a Black Plymouth. The fraught but tidy imagery of the dual 1620 arrivals also brought to the fore a deep historio graphical divide between those that viewed the nation as the triumphant realization of the Pilgrim’s mission and those who saw that mission as indistinguishable from the slaveholding planters’ to the South. Finally, I turn to the significance of the 1619 dating of the White Lion and the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project to illuminate why dates matter in the writing and righting of Black history in America and how the work of early Americanists might contribute to reorienting the stories we tell and their timelines.