Description
Today, the Mayflower IIthe replica of the 1620 ship that brought the Pilgrims to America and launched a nationis visited by some 2.6 million tourists annually and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. But there is much more to the replica's story than meets the eye. In fact, the origins of Project Mayflower began in the 1950s not with an American, but with a British World War II veteran named Warwick Charlton who had what seemed an impossible dream: build an historically accurate replica, sail her across the Atlantic, and present the finished product as a thank you to his country's wartime ally.
What Charlton didn't know was that the son of a powerful New England financier had the same idea. Henry (Harry) Hornblower II wanted a replica just as badly, though for a somewhat less altruistic reason: as a tourist attraction for a new museum he was building in Massachusetts, soon to be known as Plimouth Plantation, where the original Mayflower had landed centuries befo
