The Sixty-Six-Foot Cargo Ship That Carried 102 English Separatists Across the Atlantic in 66 Days in 1620

The Mayflower was an English merchant cargo vessel of about 180 tons burden, originally in the wine trade between England and Bordeaux. She was 30 metres long, three-masted, and captained by Christopher Jones, a part-owner. Her 102 passengers were a mixed party of approximately 41 English Separatists from the Leiden exile community and 61 paying “Strangers” recruited by the London Merchant Adventurers.

The voyage was the second attempt. The Mayflower had originally sailed in August 1620 with a smaller vessel called the Speedwell, which kept leaking and had to be abandoned at Plymouth. The Leiden contingent crowded onto the Mayflower for the final departure on 16 September 1620.

The crossing

The 66-day Atlantic crossing put 102 passengers into approximately 25 by 7 metres of cargo-deck space for nine and a half weeks. Two died at sea — a young servant of the surgeon and a sailor. One was born — Oceanus Hopkins, son of Stephen Hopkins, in the mid-Atlantic in October 1620.

Cape Cod was sighted on 19 November 1620. The intended destination had been the mouth of the Hudson River, about 200 miles southwest. The reasons for landing at Cape Cod are disputed. William Bradford’s account in Of Plymouth Plantation says the Mayflower tried to sail south and was turned back by dangerous shoals at Pollack Rip off Monomoy Island. A revisionist reading is that Jones deliberately landed north of Dutch-claimed territory on the Hudson because his passengers had no English patent for that area. Either reading fits the surviving record.

The Mayflower anchored in Provincetown Harbor at the tip of Cape Cod on 21 November 1620.

The Compact

The Mayflower Compact was drafted aboard the ship the same morning before anyone disembarked. The document was about 200 words long and was a mutual-consent agreement that the passengers would submit to “such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices” as the colony would establish “for the general good.”

The reason was immediate. The passengers had been intended to settle under the Virginia Company patent at the Hudson. Landing well outside Virginia jurisdiction, the Strangers had begun arguing on board that the original patent did not apply to New England and that they were not bound by the Separatist leadership’s authority once on land. The Compact created a new locus of mutual-consent political authority that the Strangers had agreed in advance to accept.

The 41 adult male passengers signed it on the cabin table. The document had no royal authority. It was simply a private agreement.

Its longer constitutional resonance — as a precedent for political authority derived from the consent of the governed — became a foundational reference for the American republican tradition in the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly in Daniel Webster’s 1820 bicentennial Plymouth oration that re-established the Mayflower Compact in American political memory.

The first winter

The 102 passengers spent five weeks exploring Cape Cod and the nearby mainland before selecting the site for permanent settlement. They moved across Massachusetts Bay to the location they named Plymouth on 21 December 1620 and began building. The winter of 1620-1621 was unusually cold. The colonists were exhausted, scurvy-affected, and inadequately housed in the partially-built settlement.

Approximately 45 of the 102 passengers died before the spring of 1621 — about half the colony. The dead included John Carver (the first elected governor), the carpenter John Alderton, William Mullins, Edward Tilley, and most of the wives of the founding families. Of 18 women who had landed, only 5 survived to the autumn of 1621.

The colony’s survival depended on assistance from the local Wampanoag people under the sachem Massasoit, who in March 1621 negotiated a treaty of mutual defence with the colony and provided crucial agricultural and dietary knowledge through the bilingual Tisquantum (Squanto), who had spent six years as a captive and labourer in England between 1614 and 1619 and spoke English.

The 1621 autumn harvest — the conventional memory anchored as the first Thanksgiving — was the first signal that the colony would survive.

What followed

The Mayflower herself returned to England in April 1621, after a winter laid up at Plymouth waiting for the colony to stabilise. Christopher Jones died in March 1622, aged about 52, of an undocumented illness probably contracted during the Plymouth winter. The ship continued in service for two more years and was broken up for scrap timber around 1624.

Approximately 35 million Americans are documented direct descendants of one or more of the 102 original Mayflower passengers. Three of the surviving passengers — William Bradford (governor of Plymouth Colony 1621-1657), William Brewster (the religious elder), and Edward Winslow — produced documentary records that became the principal contemporary sources for the colony’s first decades.

The Plymouth Colony existed as a separate political entity until 1691, when it was absorbed into the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Plymouth Rock — the boulder at Plymouth Harbor traditionally identified as the colonists’ first landing point — was not identified as such until 1741, when a 95-year-old Plymouth resident named Thomas Faunce dictated his recollection of having been told the story by an original colonist as a child. The rock is small (about 3 metres across after 19th-century chipping by relic-hunters) and has been displayed under a Greek-revival portico since 1880.