I thought I should honor the city which hosted the conference which took me to the Netherlands with a post:
Besides having the older University in the Netherlands, Leiden was also the host of the “pilgrims” – yes, the Mayflower departed from the Netherlands, not England. Who knew? Apparently they stayed for about 10 years before moving on. This interests me because it’s a typical part of many emigration stories: a short migration (usually from a rural to an urban environment) precedes the longer voyage. Once you make first step out of your particular home (your Heimat, for German emigrants), those affiliations with home and hearth are loosened enough to make a larger migration conceivable.
Unfortunately I did not have time to visit the “pilgrim” museum, though my suspicion that it’s essentially either a tourist trap or a pilgrimage (hah!) site for Americans seeking their “heritage” probably had something to do with that. It would be interesting to compare it with the emigration museums in Bremen and Hamburg, however, which are both fantastic. The conference kept me pretty busy in any case.
