You know how every cheesy high school drama loves pushing that inspirational "our ancestors were all upstanding puritan saints" angle when covering the Mayflower's historic journey?
Well, prepare to have those rose-tinted myths completely decimated - because this list is about to hit you with some raw, unvarnished truths about the kinds of f*ckless degeneracy and scandal that plagued the voyage from day one!
Let's start by addressing the raucous, indentured servant-fueled sexcapades that evidently turned the ship's cramped gundecks into virtual bacchanals throughout the crossing.
According to cryptic journal passages by more prudish pilgrims, groups of rowdy young bondsmen traveling to secure labor contracts in the New World took full advantage of their relatively lawless circ*mstances at sea.
Holding wild, all-night raves involving sinful dancing, public fornication, even same-sex dalliances, their incessant disorderly conduct made pious passengers fear for their souls and wonder whose side the devil truly played for during those stormy nights.
Upstanding puritan saints, indeed…
2. The Drunken Dwarf Mascot Murder
Speaking of burgeoning debauchery amid that allegedly hallowed pioneer company, let's next expose one particularly f*cking crazy tale that began with what many saw as a harmless bit of Renaissance-style freak show entertainment.
To help fledgling colonists pass the long nautical stretches, one eccentric passenger brought along a dwarven servant commonly referred to as "Master Nathaniel" to serve as a sort of shipboard jester providing merriment through crude humor and gymnastic feats.
However, tensions quickly escalated over Nathaniel's notoriously bawdy antics which sailors found hilarious but stuck-up puritans saw as affronted blasphemy.
Things finally went totally sideways during one drunken revel when the drunken dwarf somehow wound up falling from a mast yardarm directly onto the VIP passenger deck below - fatally crushing an elder's wife who'd continually hectored him over his lack of decorum.
Whether intentional or mere fatal slapstick, Nathaniel's impact broke the poor woman's neck instantly before an outraged mob of vengeful colonists responded by beating the diminutive mirth-maker to death in turn.
His disgraced corpse was then stuffed and pickled by the crew for preserving as a beakhead-mounted curiosity for the rest of the journey! So much for cheerful colonial folk tales...
From merely unruly pioneers to full-on murderous psychopaths in the ranks, the Mayflower's seedy underbelly only gets deeper thanks to suppressed legends about one hulking pilgrim who was quite literally...too big for his britches.
According to fearful whispers shared generations later among New England's rural hamlets, a brobdingnagian ogre of a man named Jonas Ketcham took perverse pleasure in using his immense 7-foot stature and inhuman strength to secretly terrorize fellow shipmates into irrepressible psychological submission.
Tales persist of Ketcham smashing grown sailors' limbs for the most innocuous perceived slights, slamming minors' heads through oak frame beams when they dared raise their voices around him, and at one point even crushing a colicky infant to toilet-splattering pulp by nonchalantly pinching its torso right in front of the traumatized parents!
As the blood-curdling stories go, this real-life Grendel figure only met his match mid-voyage when a cadre of brave crew members finally overwhelmed him with weighted nets and harpoons during an onboard frenzy - tossing his thrashing carcass into the creaking cargo holds where the towering brute ultimately wasted away after gnawing off one of his own feet for sustenance.
Vicious maritime folklore at its rawest!
4. The Macabre Pilgrim Dolly Proto-Snuff Industry
But the sordid depravities cast aboard that fateful little wooden tub didn't only stem from physical violence and murderous impulses.
No, there was also a sinister psychological component fueling some of the Mayflower's most morbid controversies - as evidenced by the horrific accounts surrounding what historians have only referred to as the "Pilgrim Dolly" trade.
Seems that in their boredom and despair, a coterie of repressed young servant girls descending into full-blown hysterics took to fashioning makeshift rag dolls meant to ghoulishly depict the bodies of their fellow passengers enduring progressed stages of starvation and scurvy.
The resulting effigies were incredibly lifelike according to contemporaneous entries - rendered with bark-stuffed malnutrition bellies, child-hair sewn wigs matted in pus, even disturbingly scabby accoutrements much too vile to reiterate here.
But most chilling of all were the ritualistic degradations these disturbed lasses allegedly visited upon their "Pilgrim Dollies" in private, often acting out warped psychosexual dramas where they'd simulate cannibalism or demented mummifying frottage upon their handmade victims.
Not exactly something you'd want little Priscilla Mullins emulating for funsies while also battling exposure, starvation, and what we can only assume were the first rumblings of frontier sexual pathology. Yeesh.
While we're already descending into some incredibly unpalatable subject matter, let's not neglect the truly f*cking harrowing chapters of medical malpractice that also plagued this ill-fated ocean voyage.
Because those poor puritanical souls spent over two months crammed aboard the Mayflower without access to fresh air, clean provisions or proper surgical care, it was only a matter of time before illness and unspeakable remedies set in.
Case in point: the Syphilitic Gangrenous Dismemberment Cabin, a makeshift operating theater notoriously rigged on the ship's lowest decks by one bone-sawing, transorbital lobotomy-performing "surgeon" named Johann Krebbs.
According to squeamish descriptions, this quack quickly gained disrepute for subjecting Salem's most God-fearing settlers to his cringeworthy procedures when gangrene from childbirth, frostbite or advanced colonial syphilis set in.
Barely sterile tools seared in potbelly stove coals were the best cauterization technology available in these makeshift blood-letting sessions - with unlucky patients emerging as peg-legged stumps, eyeless brain trauma victims or at best missing every unaffected finger down to the forearm.
One can only pray those tin coffins nailed up in Massachusetts contained the whole miserable tale.
6. The Mile-Lyed f*cking Coven Infanticides
Next up we have one genuine Lovecraftian fever dream of a scandal - the shadowy folklore surrounding a supposed "coven" of Plymouth ladies who may or may not have engaged in ritualistic infanticide during their transatlantic odyssey.
According to the most coherent accounting, an isolated group of widowed matrons within that original colonial company were overheard reciting strange incantations and staging moonlight bondings with more than a few suspiciously underweight babes-in-arms throughout the journey's final legs.
Other harrowing testimonies describe these so-called "Mile-Lyed" lades doting on abnormally disproportioned spawn said to violently resist baptismal services, while some terrified sailors even claimed bearing witness to the unholiest of satanic masses involving slaked-limb cherubim being pan-fried over driftwood pyres for unholy feasting.
Whether any of these ghastly rumors held merit or not, the shamanistic "coven" was ultimately turned away from disembarking at Plymouth by mistrustful settlers convinced the widows practiced witchcraft and "reared demons" during their seafaring travails.
To this day, antiquarians remain split on whether these tragic mothers simply endured a deadly bout of sea-born illness jumbling their mental faculties, or something far more abhorrent brewed within that cramped gun cabin's flickering lantern glow.
Then of course, there was that most viscerally disturbing of all, the legendary "Seaman's Salty Spittoon Groinplague" said to rapidly overtake the beleaguered Mayflower's decks during its final fortnight in transit.
While specifics remain frustratingly obscure, multiple scholarly sources claim some form of festering, unidentifiable teratoma suddenly consumed the tainted ship's working crew in explosive pus-filled lesions and bloated edemas so obscene they easily cleared entire galleys just from the mephitic vaporized waft alone.
Blast-off lanterns glinted off seeming oceans of every bodily discharge, while delirious sailors lathered in infectious rash resorted to relieving themselves into converted mess tureens for lack of hazard protocols.
At one point, madcap Dutch apothecary Abraham Van Houdening was even summoned from his cabin bunk by groaning men deforming beyond recognition - diagnosed with congealed tracts afflicted by rigid bogtrotter-brand phalluses sprouting thick proteinlesional caps oozing what he could only describe as an obscene "f*ckulant isopepsinated merkin drippage."
Pretty safe bet that frontier expedition didn't make his sylvan brag reel.
So yeah...maybe next time those plucky Hallmark Channel dramas want to airbrush how the colonists "braved the harsh New World tides," perhaps consider that the journey over likely made most of them wish they'd stuck to being peasants back in Olde England!
Because between the unhinged hedonism, rampart violence, psychopathic passengers, ratlines choked with disease and strange marine miasmas, the Mayflower ended up more akin to a floating penal vessel bound for its own form of hell once land mercifully hove into view.
Best leave those overly sanitized folk tales in the past where they belong - clearly reality proved far more f*cked from stem to stern for those poor souls.
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