BOSTON — John Howland is not as famous as William Bradford, John Carver and Myles Standish, notable passengers on the Mayflower, which landed in Massachusetts in 1620.
Yet Howland, who boarded the ship as Carver’s servant, probably had a greater impact on the history of the United States than any of them. And Howland almost never even made it to the New World.
He fell overboard in the middle of the Atlantic during a gale but grabbed a trailing rope and was hauled back aboard by sailors using boat hooks.
Howland and his wife, fellow Mayflower passenger Elizabeth Tilley, had 10 children and more than 80 grandchildren. Now, an estimated 2 million Americans can trace their roots to him.
Howland’s descendants include three presidents — Franklin Roosevelt, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush — as well as poets Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, actors Alec Baldwin and Humphrey Bogart, Mormon church founder Joseph Smith and child care guru Benjamin Spock.
