Mayflower and Plymouth Colony
The Mayflower sailed from Plymouth in September 1620 with 102 passengers and reached Cape Cod on 11 November after sixty-six days at sea. About forty of them were Separatists — English Protestants who had rejected the Church of England as unreformable rather than seeking to purify it from within, which is what distinguishes them from Puritans. They had left England for Leiden in 1608, and after twelve years found their children becoming Dutch and their trades unprofitable. The rest, whom the Separatists called Strangers, were ordinary emigrants recruited by the merchant investors who financed the voyage. Their patent was for the mouth of the Hudson, in the Virginia colony. Contrary winds and shoals off Cape Cod turned them north, and they settled outside the jurisdiction they had authority for. That produced the Mayflower Compact, signed aboard by forty-one men before landing, in which they agreed to combine into a civil body politic and to obey the laws it made. It was a practical answer to the fact that some passengers were saying their patent no longer bound them, and it has been read since as a founding document of self-government. They settled at a site the Wampanoag called Patuxet, cleared and abandoned after an epidemic — probably leptospirosis carried by earlier European contact — had killed most of its inhabitants. Half the passengers died the first winter. The colony survived on maize supplied and taught by Tisquantum and on a treaty with Massasoit that held for fifty years. That treaty collapsed into King Philip's War in 1675, one of the deadliest conflicts per capita in American history. The Compact's reputation as a founding charter grew in the nineteenth century, when New England was writing the national story.
- Year: 1620 CE
- Category: Political
