Bradford says:  “Where they find the bigger ship come from London, Mr. Jones, Master, with the rest of the company who had been waiting there with Mr. Cushman seven days.”  Deacon Carver, probably from being on shore, was not here named.  In a note appended to the memoir of Robert Cushman (prefatory to his Discourse delivered at Plymouth, New England, on “The Sin and Danger of Self-Love”) it is stated in terms as follows:  “The fact is, that Mr. Cushman procured the larger vessel, the may-Flower, and its pilot, at London, and left in that vessel.”  The statement—­though published long after the events of which it treats and by other than Mr. Cushman—­we know to be substantially correct, and the presumption is that the writer, whoever he may have been, knew also.

Sailing with his wife and son (it is not probable that he had any other living child at the time), in full expectation that it was for Virginia, he encountered so much of ungrateful and abusive treatment, after the brethren met at Southampton,—­especially at the hands of the insufferable Martin, who, without merit and with a most reprehensible record (as it proved), was chosen over him as “governor” of the ship,—­that he was doubtless glad to return from Plymouth when the Speedwell broke down.  He and his family appear, therefore, as “May-Flower passengers,” only between London and Plymouth during the vexatious attendance upon the scoundrelly Master of the Speedwell, in his “doublings” in the English Channel.  His Dartmouth letter to Edward Southworth, one of the most valuable contributions to the early literature of the Pilgrims extant, clearly demonstrates that he was suffering severely from dyspepsia and deeply wounded feelings.  The course of events was his complete vindication, and impartial history to-day pronounces him second to none in his service to the Pilgrims and their undertaking.  His first wife is shown by Leyden records to have been Sarah Reder, and his second marriage to have occurred May 19/June 3, 1617, [sic] about the time he first went to England in behalf of the Leyden congregation.

Mrs. Mary (Clarke)-Singleton Cushman appears only as a passenger of the
     may-Flower on her channel voyage, as she returned with her husband
     and son from Plymouth, England, in the Speedwell.

Thomas Cushman, it is quite clear, must have been a son by a former wife,
     as he would have been but a babe, if the son of the latest wife,
     when he went to New England with his father, in the Fortune, to
     remain.  Goodwin and others give his age as fourteen at this time,
     and his age at death is their warrant.  Robert Cushman died in 1625,
     but a “Mary, wife [widow?] of Robert Cushman, and their son,
     Thomas,” seem to have been remembered in the will of Ellen Bigge,
     widow, of Cranbrooke,