Pilgrims Land in New World: The Mayflower Reaches Shore

After sixty-six days at sea, 102 passengers who had staked everything on religious freedom stepped onto a frozen shore with almost nothing. On December 18, 1620, the Mayflower reached the site of what would become Plymouth, Massachusetts, after weeks of exploring Cape Cod. The colonists who disembarked into the New England winter would lose half their number before spring. The voyage had not gone as planned. The Pilgrims, English Separatists who had broken with the Church of England, intended to settle near the Hudson River in Virginia Company territory. Strong currents or deliberate redirection brought them instead to Cape Cod, far north of their patent. They first anchored at Provincetown Harbor on November 11, but the exposed cape offered poor farming prospects. Before leaving the ship, forty-one male passengers signed the Mayflower Compact, a brief agreement to form a self-governing body and abide by majority rule. Having landed outside their legal jurisdiction, the colonists needed some framework of authority to prevent non-Separatist passengers from going their own way. The Compact is considered a foundational document of American democratic governance. Scouting parties spent weeks exploring before settling on Plymouth Harbor, which offered cleared land, fresh water, and a protected anchorage. The Wampanoag people had inhabited the site, called Patuxet, until a devastating epidemic wiped out the village between 1616 and 1619. The first winter was catastrophic. Disease, malnutrition, and exposure killed roughly half the colonists by March 1621. The survivors were saved in part by Tisquantum, known as Squanto, a Wampanoag man who had been kidnapped to Europe years earlier and spoke English. His agricultural knowledge helped the colonists plant their first successful harvest.