The
Mayflower
In September
1620, a merchant ship called the Mayflower set sail from Plymouth, a port on
the southern coast of England. Normally, the Mayflower’s cargo was wine and dry
goods, but on this trip the ship carried passengers: 102 of them, all hoping to
start a new life on the other side of the Atlantic. Nearly 40 of these
passengers were Protestant Separatists—they called themselves “Saints”—who
hoped to establish a new church in the so-called New World. Today, we often
refer to the colonists who crossed the Atlantic on the Mayflower as “Pilgrims.”
Pilgrims
Before the Mayflower
In 1608, a
congregation of disgruntled English Protestants from the village of Scrooby,
Nottinghamshire, left England and moved to Leyden, a town in Holland. These
“Separatists” did not want to pledge allegiance to the Church of England, which
they believed was nearly as corrupt and idolatrous as the Catholic Church it
had replaced, any longer. (They were not the same as the Puritans, who had many
of the same objections to the English church but wanted to reform it from
within.) The Separatists hoped that in Holland, they would be free to worship
as they liked. In fact, the Separatists, or “Saints,” as they called
themselves, did find religious freedom in Holland, but they also found a
secular life that was more difficult to navigate than they’d anticipated. For
one thing, Dutch craft guilds excluded the migrants, so they were relegated to
menial, low-paying jobs.
Even worse was
Holland’s easygoing, cosmopolitan atmosphere, which proved alarmingly seductive
to some of the Saints’ children. (These young people were “drawn away,”
Separatist leader William Bradford wrote, “by evill [sic] example into
extravagance and dangerous courses.”) For the strict, devout Separatists, this
was the last straw. They decided to move again, this time to a place without
government interference or worldly distraction: the “New World” across the
Atlantic Ocean.
The
Mayflower Journey
First, the
Separatists returned to London to get organized. A prominent merchant agreed to
advance the money for their journey. The Virginia Company gave them permission
to establish a settlement, or “plantation,” on the East Coast between 38 and 41
degrees north latitude (roughly between the Chesapeake Bay and the mouth of the
Hudson River). And the King of England gave them permission to leave the Church
of England, “provided they carried themselves peaceably.”
In August 1620,
a group of about 40 Saints joined a much larger group of (comparatively)
secular colonists—“Strangers,” to the Saints—and set sail from Southampton,
England on two merchant ships: the Mayflower and the Speedwell. The Speedwell
began to leak almost immediately, however, and the ships headed back to port in
Plymouth. The travelers squeezed themselves and their belongings onto the
Mayflower, a cargo ship about 80 feet long and 24 feet wide and capable of
carrying 180 tons of cargo. The Mayflower set sail once again under the
direction of Captain Christopher Jones.
Because of the
delay caused by the leaky Speedwell, the Mayflower had to cross the Atlantic at
the height of storm season. As a result, the journey was horribly unpleasant.
Many of the passengers were so seasick they could scarcely get up, and the
waves were so rough that one “Stranger” was swept overboard. (It was “the just
hand of God upon him,” Bradford wrote later, for the young sailor had been “a
proud and very profane yonge man.”)
The
Mayflower Compact
After sixty-six
days, or roughly two miserable months at sea, the ship finally reached the New
World. There, the Mayflower’s passengers found an abandoned Indian village and
not much else. They also found that they were in the wrong place: Cape Cod was
located at 42 degrees north latitude, well north of the Virginia Company’s
territory. Technically, the Mayflower colonists had no right to be there at
all.
In order to
establish themselves as a legitimate colony (“Plymouth,” named after the
English port from which they had departed) under these dubious circumstances,
41 of the Saints and Strangers drafted and signed a document they called the
Mayflower Compact. This Compact promised to create a “civil Body Politick”
governed by elected officials and “just and equal laws.” It also swore
allegiance to the English king. It was the first document to establish
self-government in the New World and this early attempt at democracy set the
stage for future colonists seeking independence from the British.
The First
Thanksgiving
The colonists
spent the first winter living onboard the Mayflower. Only 53 passengers and
half the crew survived. Women were particularly hard hit; of the 19 women who
had boarded the Mayflower, only five survived the cold New England winter,
confined to the ship where disease and cold were rampant. The Mayflower sailed
back to England in April 1621, and once the group moved ashore, the colonists
faced even more challenges.
During their
first winter in America, more than half of the Plymouth colonists died from
malnutrition, disease and exposure to the harsh New England weather. In fact,
without the help of the area’s native people, it is likely that none of the
colonists would have survived. An English-speaking Abenaki named Samoset helped
the colonists form an alliance with the local Wampanoags, who taught them how
to hunt local animals, gather shellfish and grow corn, beans and squash.
At the end of
the next summer, the Plymouth colonists celebrated their first successful
harvest with a three-day festival of thanksgiving. We still commemorate this
feast and remember it as the first Thanksgiving, though it did not occur on the
fourth Thursday in November like it does today, but sometime between late
September and mid November 1621. The colonists were outnumbered two to one by
their guests. Attendee Edward Winslow noted there were “many of the Indians
coming amongst us, and amongst the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with
some ninety men.”
Plymouth
Colony
Eventually, the
Plymouth colonists were absorbed into the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Still, the Mayflower Saints and their descendants remained convinced that they
alone had been specially chosen by God to act as a beacon for Christians around
the world. “As one small candle may light a thousand,” Bradford wrote, “so the
light here kindled hath shone to many, yea in some sort to our whole nation.”
Today, visitors
wishing to see Plymouth Colony as it appeared during the time of the Mayflower
can witness reenactments of the first Thanksgiving and more at Plymouth Plantation.
Mayflower
Descendants
There are an
estimated 10 million living Americans and 35 million people around the world
who are descended from the original passengers on the Mayflower like Myles
Standish, John Alden and William Bradford. include Humphrey Bogart, Julia
Child, Norman Rockwell, and presidents John Adams, James Garfield and Zachary
Taylor.
Citation Information:
Article Title:
The Mayflower
Author:
History.com Editors
URL:
https://www.history.com/topics/colonial-america/mayflower
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