Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History, it's a very special episode of the podcast today because this week marks the 400th anniversary of the departure of the Mayflower, that little ship that transported the first English Puritans across the Atlantic to what they called the New World.

After many delays, the exhibition left Plymouth on the 16th of September, 1620.

Ten weeks later, the 102 passengers and around 30 crew arrived near the tip of Cape Cod.

They then endured a brutal first winter where they were sustained by the Aboriginal Americans, the First Nations that they met, notably the Wampanoag tribe.

This is a podcast that we've put together with the team at Mayflower 400. They are leading the commemorations and for the first major commemorations, they are looking not just at the experience of the European crew and settlers, but of the impact on this journey on the Native American peoples.

For this podcast, we're talking to descendants both of the Native Americans and also the European settlers on the Mayflower, but also into historians, writers and broadcasters to tell the story of the Mayflower and talk about its consequences.

We've also heard History Hit, which is a documentary which you can see on our History Hit TV channel, as ever. We're also going to broadcast it live on Timeline History's biggest and best YouTube channel.

That broadcast will go out live at 6pm on the 16th of September, UK time. That's 1pm Eastern time and 10 o'clock Pacific time.

That will be available to watch free for the rest of the year. It's also available to watch free, as I said, on History Hit TV. Just go to History Hit.TV and it will be outside the paywall.

And please visit Mayflower 400.org for even more history and information surrounding the commemoration.

I'll be down the anniversary itself, so watch out on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. But in the meantime, enjoy the podcast.

The traditional interpretation of the Mayflower and the settlement of North America was of course of a new world of virgin land, with perhaps a few savages dotted about.

But we now know that is completely inaccurate. North America was settled. There were vibrant communities of Native Americans there that suffered a series of extraordinary demographic and military catastrophes after the European settlers arrived.

The first person we interview is Stephen Peters. He's a member of the Mashope one-penog tribe, who were the group of people that the Mayflower settlers depended on for their survival through the first grim winter in the new world.

So pre-European contact, which would have been well before the Mayflower had come over, because there had been quite a bit of contact with European explorers and traders prior to the early 1600s.

I really like to think that it was a really idyllic setting for my ancestors to be in. They did live very much in tune with nature.

They took what nature gave and they lived by the water in the summer and they moved further inland in the winter following the food sources, living in foam styles that were efficient for the weather as well.

They also well had a very structured form of government. We know this because when the Europeans did start to come over, they did realize that there was an organization behind it. There was a way for the people to live in harmony.

They had a structure of government that worked very well for them. We also know as well that a lot of the diseases and sicknesses that the Europeans had been dealing with were not something that we had here.

Those were all introduced in the 1600s. They were very difficult for the tribe because they ripped through in very fast fashion.

I do like to look back and think that it was mostly an idyllic way of life for my ancestors prior to the Europeans coming over.

Next up Anna Scott, tell us what Europe was like in the 17th century.

...