Project Mayflower: Building and Sailing a Seventeenth-Century Replica

The Mayflower II—the replica of the 1620 ship that brought the Pilgrims to America and launched a nation—is seen by some 2.6 million visitors to Plymouth 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: to build a historically...