Mayflower Madness Begins...

A London iron merchant, Thomas Weston, loaned [the pilgrims] the money needed to pay for their trip across the pond. Like all good venture capitalists, Weston placed conditions on his loan. One was to take "hired help" along with them to the New World to help make their endeavor profitable to him. The second condition was, they had to take a few "colonists' of no profession at all. Since the Pilgrims trusted neither the "hired help" nor the "colonists", they took to calling the entire lot of them "strangers". Which was wise because a handful of the strangers were really much stranger than all of the other strangers.
...
For [Lord Peperium] had been commissioned by his circle of recusant friends to hire the vessel that was to take them to the new world where, they hoped, they would succeed in planting the Old Faith. As he scanned the ornate sterns of the vessels that swayed almost imperceptibly at their moorings on the ebbing tide, he was not encouraged.

There was the three-masted Pope-Shredder, a likely craft with the severed head of Leo X for a figurehead. Then he spied the Consubstantiation, a tub of a vessel equipped with what looked like two sterns; a ship that, if it ever left the dock, would succeed in going absolutely nowhere.

All this week at Patum Peperium.