Framed by Patch: Mayflower II's 54th

On June 2, 1957, 17-year-old Joe Meany had an arguably unique high school graduation. No “Pomp and Circumstance.” No yawn-punctuated valedictory speech. While his fellow classmates were safely on land in Waltham, he was out bobbing in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, aboard the newly constructed, Mayflower II.

“It was fun,” Meany said. “I was sea-sick for the first week and a half, but it was an adventure.”

The ship’s international company of 33 men arranged a mock ceremony for their American cabin boy. Attendants Jack Scarr and Joe Lacey donned baggywrinkle fake beards and clothed Meany in an inside-out rain slicker and homemade mortar-board. Captain Alan Villiers read from a giant “diploma,” signed by himself and King Neptune. 

Everyone on the quarterdeck broke out into, “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” while the ship lightly rolled, and Meany welled up.  Minutes later, a radio message reported that he had also graduated with honors and had received a four-year scholarship to Notre Dame. Meany went on to major in electrical engineering but said he received a great precursor to that education aboard the 25-foot wide and 106-foot long vessel.

On June 12, 2011, one day till the fifty-fourth anniversary of the Mayflower II’s arrival in Plymouth, Massachusetts, seven Plimoth Plantation role players reenacted the graduation ceremony for Meany and his wife, Ann Marie, whom he was dating at the time of the voyage. The two looked on as a crowd of tourists cheered from all corners of the ship.

Meany had won the job of cabin boy through the Boys’ Clubs national competition to select their Junior Citizen of the Year. The opportunity took him to Holland and England, and then 54 days navigating west across the Atlantic Ocean, toward Plymouth. He learned knotting and rigging from Second Mate, Adrian Small. He washed dishes in ocean water and showered in the rain. He slept, two to a cabin, in the cramped quarters of the ‘tween decks. The only modern devices they had aboard were a steering wheel, a compass, and a radio.

Mayflower II was the brainchild of Englishman Warwick Charlton. Charlton felt the strengthened bond between England and the United States, fortified in World War II, needed to be commemorated in a lasting, symbolic gift. Having been inspired by William Bradford’s journal, Of Plimoth Plantation, Charlton thought a replica of the Pilgrims’ Mayflower was the way to do it. From 1955-57 in the town of Brixham, in Devon, England, shipwrights constructed the square rig at the Upham Shipyard. Stanley Bonnett, a journalist with the Daily Mail, opined that he thought the ship had a 50-50 chance of making it to the States. When he came on board, the crew “roughly seized [Bonnett], a sack was tied over his head and he was propelled, struggling fiercely—and probably imagining that he was destined for an unseasonable swim—to the fo’c’sle, where he was bound to a stanchion and anointed with cold water,” according to the journal of crew member, Peter Padfield. Of course, Mayflower II survived and so did Bonnett. And Plimoth Plantation agreed to maintain and exhibit the ship after she arrived in Massachusetts.