Today, the Mayflower II-the replica of the 1620 ship that brought the Pilgrims to America and launched a nation-is 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
