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—— ON THIS DAY ——
SEPTEMBER 6, 1620
Plymouth, England
406 years ago
The Mayflower, which departed Plymouth, England, on September 6, 1620, carrying 102 passengers to North America, where they founded Plymouth Colony.
On September 6, 1620, by the calendar the passengers themselves used, the Mayflower set sail from Plymouth on the south coast of England, bound for North America with 102 passengers and a crew of about thirty. It was the third attempt at departure. The ship had originally left Southampton in company with a smaller vessel, the Speedwell, which leaked so badly that the expedition twice had to turn back. The Speedwell was finally abandoned, some of its passengers crowded aboard the Mayflower, and the single ship went on alone.
The passengers were not a single community. Roughly a third were members of a separatist congregation who had left England for Leiden in the Netherlands years earlier, seeking to worship outside the Church of England. The rest were recruited by the London investors financing the voyage, and included craftsmen, servants, and families looking for opportunity. The two groups did not always get along, and the tension between them shaped the colony they would build.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
Plymouth Colony, the settlement founded in present-day Massachusetts by the Mayflower passengers in the winter of 1620, and the Mayflower Compact they signed before going ashore.
The crossing took sixty-six days. The first half was rough but manageable, mostly a matter of seasickness in cramped and stinking quarters below decks. Later the ship met a series of Atlantic storms severe enough that the crew had to strike sail and let the vessel drift. A main beam cracked and was propped back into place with an iron screw the passengers had brought with them. One passenger, a young servant named William Butten, died at sea shortly before land was sighted. One child was born aboard and named Oceanus.
Land appeared on November 9, and it was Cape Cod, well north of the Hudson River region for which the ship held a patent. After an attempt to sail south was defeated by shoals and weather, the passengers decided to settle where they were. Because they were outside the jurisdiction their patent covered, some among the non-separatist passengers argued that no one had authority over them. The response was the Mayflower Compact, a short document signed by forty-one of the men agreeing to form a civil body politic and to obey the laws it enacted. It is one of the earliest written frameworks of self-government in the English colonies.
The first winter was catastrophic. Living aboard the ship while shelters were built, weakened by scurvy and respiratory illness, roughly half the passengers and a large share of the crew died before spring. The survivors owed their continued existence in large part to the Wampanoag people, whose own population had been devastated by an epidemic a few years earlier, and to individuals including Tisquantum, known as Squanto, who had been kidnapped and taken to Europe years before and spoke English. The alliance that followed held for decades and then collapsed into war, and the story of the Mayflower has been retold, mythologized, and reexamined ever since.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
The Mayflower Compact was an early written agreement to self-government. Faced with settling outside the territory their patent covered, the passengers wrote and signed a document creating a civil authority by mutual consent, a precedent later generations of Americans invoked repeatedly.
Plymouth became a founding story of the United States. The voyage and the colony were later woven into a national origin narrative, including the Thanksgiving tradition, giving them cultural weight far beyond the size or significance of the settlement itself.
The colony's survival depended on Native people whose own world was collapsing. The Wampanoag, reduced by an earlier epidemic, made an alliance with the newcomers that kept them alive. The reexamination of that relationship and what followed it has reshaped how this history is taught.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
On September 6, 1620, after two false starts and the loss of a leaking companion ship, the Mayflower left Plymouth with 102 passengers. It arrived at the wrong place after sixty-six days, its passengers wrote themselves a government before going ashore, and about half of them were dead by spring.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
“They knew they were pilgrims, and lifted up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest country.”
— William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about the Mayflower voyage, the false starts before it, the Mayflower Compact, and the first winter at Plymouth?
