There, the Mayflower’s passengers found an abandoned Indian village and not much else. (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 CompactĪfter sixty-six days, or roughly two miserable months at sea, the ship finally reached the New World. Many of the passengers were so seasick they could scarcely get up, and the waves were so rough that one “Stranger” was swept overboard. As a result, the journey was horribly unpleasant. The Mayflower set sail once again under the direction of Captain Christopher Jones.īecause of the delay caused by the leaky Speedwell, the Mayflower had to cross the Atlantic at the height of storm season. 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 Speedwell began to leak almost immediately, however, and the ships headed back to port in Plymouth. 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. And the King of England gave them permission to leave the Church of England, “provided they carried themselves peaceably.” 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). A prominent merchant agreed to advance the money for their journey. They decided to move again, this time to a place without government interference or worldly distraction: the “New World” across the Atlantic Ocean.įirst, the Separatists returned to London to get organized. (These young people were “drawn away,” Separatist leader William Bradford wrote, “by evill example into extravagance and dangerous courses.”) For the strict, devout Separatists, this was the last straw. For one thing, Dutch craft guilds excluded the migrants, so they were relegated to menial, low-paying jobs.Įven worse was Holland’s easygoing, cosmopolitan atmosphere, which proved alarmingly seductive to some of the Saints’ children. 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. (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 likedĭid you know? The Separatists who founded the Plymouth Colony referred to themselves as “Saints,” not “Pilgrims.” The use of the word “Pilgrim” to describe this group did not become common until the colony’s bicentennial. 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. In 1608, a congregation of disgruntled English Protestants from the village of Scrooby, Nottinghamshire, left England and moved to Leyden, a town in Holland.
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