Why ever would we want to celebrate the Pilgrim Fathers and their disasters as they crawled towards eventual settlement in the new world, when they were such a bunch of Native American murderers and bigots?

King James didn’t want them, the Dutch were fed up with them during their in excel in Holland, as were seemingly pretty much everyone that came across them in every port they entered on the coast of England.

Sure they came here and Dartmouth shipwrights tried in vain to repair the little Speedwell and they did hold prayer meetings in under an oak tree that still exists today – not the one that boatmen tell the visitors was part of a hedge that was grubbed out at around the time of Second World War Two to make larger field for the growing more desperately needed food.

The actual tree is still there and is a great oak that you may walk to this very day.

Newlyn in Cornwall was the pilgrim’s last port of call, as the water taken aboard in Plymouth was so rancid that it had to be tipped away and replaced with the clean, sweet water of that then fishing village

There was already a colony of settlers in Jamestown and if the Pilgrim Fathers could have got off the Mayflower there, they would have but the storms were so terrible.

As for the Speedwell she made other journeys after that, so where is the truth in the story of her being rotten and coming apart?

As for spending lots of cash on marking the 400th anniversary of a load of murders and land-grabbing bigots, I suppose it depends on your point of view.

But let’s have a bit consideration for those that sheltered them, taught them how to farm, and how to survive – who were then turned on murdered and displaced in what seems to be the normal way of things in the conquest of anywhere and anything

Better we had waited and spent the cash on the 100th anniversary of D-Day, the entry of the Americans into the Second World War in northern Europe, which is now only 27 years away, because without their input in men and equipment we would have been speaking German – that is if we were alive at all.

Kevin Pyne

Lake Street, Dartmouth