Mayflower Voyage and Plymouth Colony (1620): The Pilgrims

The Mayflower voyage of 1620 carried 102 English passengers across the Atlantic to found Plymouth Colony on the coast of what is now Massachusetts. Its core was a congregation of religious Separatists later known as the Pilgrims. Their Mayflower Compact, their devastating first winter and their alliance with the Wampanoag leader Massasoit made the voyage one of the founding stories of the United States.

Background: from Scrooby and Leiden to the Mayflower

In early seventeenth-century England, the Church of England was the only lawful church. Most Puritans wanted to reform it from within, but a minority, called Separatists, believed it was too corrupt to be saved and formed their own congregations. That was illegal, and after the Hampton Court Conference of 1604 King James I made clear he would not tolerate nonconformity.

One Separatist congregation met at the manor house of William Brewster in Scrooby, Nottinghamshire. Facing fines and arrests, its members left secretly for the Dutch Republic in 1607–1608, settling first in Amsterdam and from 1609 in Leiden, where they could worship freely under their pastor John Robinson.

Life in Leiden was hard. The exiles worked long hours in the cloth trade, feared that their children were becoming Dutch, and worried that the truce between the Dutch and Spain, due to end in 1621, would bring war. By about 1617 they had decided to found a settlement of their own in America.

The congregation had no money of its own. It obtained a patent from the Virginia Company, which allowed it to settle within the company’s vast territory, and struck a deal with a group of London investors, the Merchant Adventurers, organised by Thomas Weston. Colonists and investors would share the profits of seven years of labour, and the terms caused bitter disputes before the ship even sailed.

Only a minority of the Leiden church could go. Robinson stayed behind with the majority, and Brewster led those who left. To fill the ships, the investors recruited other settlers, mostly from London and south-east England, whom the Separatists called “strangers”. They included the soldier Myles Standish, hired to organise defence.

The plan used two ships. The small Speedwell brought the Leiden group to England, where it met the Mayflower, a merchant ship of about 180 tons under its master and part-owner Christopher Jones. They left Southampton together on 5 August 1620, but the Speedwell leaked so badly that both ships put back twice, first into Dartmouth and then into Plymouth. There the Speedwell was abandoned, and some of its passengers crowded into the Mayflower while others gave up.

The crossing

The Mayflower finally sailed alone from Plymouth on 6 September 1620. Dates here follow the Julian calendar the English then used; add ten days for the modern calendar. The ship carried 102 passengers, including around 30 children, and a crew usually estimated at about 30.

The voyage lasted about 66 days. Autumn gales battered the ship, and one of the main beams cracked; the passengers helped force it back into place with a large iron screw brought from Holland. A young servant, John Howland, was swept overboard in a storm but caught a trailing rope and was hauled back aboard. One passenger, William Butten, died at sea, and a boy was born and named Oceanus Hopkins.

On 9 November the passengers sighted Cape Cod. Their patent covered land further south, near the mouth of the Hudson River, and Jones turned in that direction. Dangerous shoals and breakers off the elbow of the Cape forced him back, and on 11 November the Mayflower anchored in the harbour at the tip of the Cape, near today’s Provincetown.

The Mayflower Compact

Because they were now outside the area of their patent, some of the “strangers” argued that no one would have authority to govern them once they landed. To prevent this, the leaders drew up a short written agreement before anyone went ashore.

In the Mayflower Compact, signed on 11 November 1620 by 41 adult men, the signers declared their loyalty to King James and combined themselves into a “civil body politic”. They promised to make and obey “just and equal laws” for the general good of the colony. They then chose John Carver as their first governor.

The Compact was not a constitution, and it did not create a democracy in the modern sense: women and children did not sign, and the colony remained a loyal English settlement. Still, it was an early example of settlers creating a government by mutual consent, and later Americans saw it as a forerunner of their own founding documents.

Choosing Plymouth and the first winter

For about a month, armed parties explored the Cape on foot and in the ship’s shallop, a small sailing boat. They found Native graves and stores of buried maize, some of which they took; Bradford later wrote that they repaid the owners about six months afterwards. On 8 December, at a place they named First Encounter, a party was attacked by Nauset men, but no one was killed.

Days later, after a storm-tossed voyage in the shallop, the explorers reached a sheltered bay that John Smith had already named Plymouth on a map of 1616. They landed there around 11 December, a day later celebrated as Forefathers’ Day, and the Mayflower came over from Cape Cod. Building began on 25 December 1620.

The site had cleared fields, fresh water and a defensible hill because it had been the Wampanoag village of Patuxet. Its people had been wiped out by an epidemic, probably brought by European sailors and fishermen, that swept the New England coast between about 1616 and 1619. The colonists’ “empty” land was the result of that catastrophe.

The settlers spent most of the winter living aboard the Mayflower while they built houses ashore. Cold, wet weather, poor food and exhausting work combined with diseases that Bradford called scurvy and other illnesses. At the worst point only six or seven people were well enough to care for the sick.

By the spring of 1621 about half of the passengers had died, along with many of the crew. Families were devastated: of the 18 married women who sailed, only four or five were still alive by the following autumn. The dead were buried on Cole’s Hill, reportedly at night and without markers so that local people would not see how weak the colony had become.

Alliance with the Wampanoag

On 16 March 1621 an Abenaki sachem named Samoset walked into the settlement and greeted the colonists in English, which he had learned from fishermen on the coast of Maine. A few days later he returned with Tisquantum, better known as Squanto, a Patuxet man who had been kidnapped by an English captain in 1614, taken to Spain and England, and had made his way home to find his village gone.

On 22 March the Wampanoag paramount leader Massasoit, whose personal name was Ousamequin, arrived with about 60 men. He and Governor Carver agreed a treaty of mutual defence and non-aggression. For Massasoit, weakened by the epidemic and threatened by the powerful Narragansett to the west, an alliance with well-armed newcomers had clear advantages.

Tisquantum stayed with the colonists as interpreter and guide, showing them how to plant maize with fish as fertiliser and where to fish and trap. The Mayflower left for England on 5 April 1621 and arrived in May. Carver died in April, and William Bradford was elected governor, an office he held for most of the next 35 years.

The colony after 1621

That autumn, after the first harvest, the colonists and around 90 Wampanoag men shared a three-day gathering now remembered as the First Thanksgiving. New ships brought more settlers from 1621 onwards, but Plymouth grew slowly and never became wealthy. By the 1640s it had perhaps 2,000 to 3,000 people spread across a number of small towns.

It was soon overshadowed by its larger Puritan neighbour, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded in 1630. Peace with the Wampanoag lasted for more than 50 years, until rising pressure on Native land led to King Philip’s War in 1675–1676, led by Massasoit’s son Metacom. In 1691 a new royal charter merged Plymouth into the Province of Massachusetts Bay.

Myths and facts

Myth: The Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. Neither Bradford nor the 1622 journal known as Mourt’s Relation mentions a rock. The boulder was identified only in 1741 by Thomas Faunce, then in his nineties, on the strength of what his father had told him.

Myth: Everyone on board sought religious freedom. Fewer than half of the passengers belonged to the Leiden congregation. Many others came for land, work or adventure, or as servants.

Myth: The Pilgrims came to create religious freedom for all. They sought freedom to practise their own faith. Plymouth was more tolerant than some neighbours, but it was not founded on the principle of liberty for every belief.

Fact: They did not call themselves “Pilgrims”. Bradford used the word once to describe their departure from Leiden. The name came into wide use from around 1800, especially after the bicentenary of the landing in 1820.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 1607–1609: The Scrooby Separatists flee to Amsterdam and then settle in Leiden.
• 1620, 5 August: The Mayflower and Speedwell leave Southampton.
• 1620, 6 September: The Mayflower sails alone from Plymouth, England.
• 1620, 11 November: The ship anchors off Cape Cod and 41 men sign the Mayflower Compact.
• 1620, 8 December: Exploring party clashes with Nauset men at First Encounter.
• 1620, 25 December: Building begins at Plymouth.
• 1621, 22 March: Treaty of mutual defence agreed with Massasoit.
• 1621, 5 April: The Mayflower sails back to England.
• 1691: Plymouth Colony is merged into the Province of Massachusetts Bay.

Why it matters

Plymouth was small, but its story shaped how Americans imagined their origins: a voyage for faith, a government made by consent and a hard-won survival. The full history is more complicated, resting on an epidemic that emptied Native land and on an alliance that later broke down in war. Both sides of that story explain why the Mayflower still matters four centuries later.