IN THE SEVERAL DECADES before 1620, growing numbers of English fishermen, colonists, and pirates sailed back and forth across the Atlantic. West Country fishermen went to Newfoundland, caught and dried cod, and sold it back in Europe. Church-prescribed fasts guaranteed a massive demand for fish. English colonizers established fragile settlements at Jamestown and on the Somers Isles (Bermuda), and English sea dogs preyed on Spanish vessels. Alongside the Dutch, England was an ascendant power in the Atlantic, but ocean travel remained risky in the best of circumstances.
Those the Pilgrims faced were far from the best. The trouble had begun before the departure from Delfshaven. The congregation’s leaders had reached an agreement with Thomas Weston about the financial terms of the venture. The basic arrangement was that the “Adventurers” (investors) and the “Planters” (settlers) would form a joint-stock company, a partnership that would last for seven years. Individuals received shares on the basis of their investment or, in the case of the passengers, for undertaking the work of planting a colony. The point was to ship furs and other commodities back to England, and at the end of seven years all shareholders would divvy up the profits. Over the course of those seven years, the settlers would have two days a week to work for themselves, and they would own any houses they built.
When Weston returned to London and met with his investors, they demanded two changes. Even the houses and gardens, or rather their value, would be included in the company’s pool of assets, and, apart from the Sabbath, the settlers would work every single day for the company. Weston agreed, and Robert Cushman assented to the altered terms.
Back in Leiden, John Robinson and others were livid at the new terms, which they deemed “conditions fitter for thieves and bond-slaves than honest men.” In a letter to John Carver, Robinson lamented “that you and your likes must serve a new apprenticeship of seven years, and not a day’s freedom from task.” Yes, the Adventurers would hazard their money, but the settlers would risk their lives. In return, the Adventurers were reducing them to servitude. Robinson concluded they had depended too much on Weston.1
Robinson and the most prominent congregants—Samuel Fuller, Edward Winslow, William Bradford, and Isaac Allerton—were upset with Weston, but they were furious at Robert Cushman. Angry letters went between Leiden and London. Robinson denounced Cushman as “most unfit to deal for other men.” Cushman was piqued at the criticism. He had done his best for them. Did they think he had “no brains?” Fuller and the others answered that they wished he had used them.2
Under this torrent of criticism, Carver and Cushman turned on each other. Carver insisted that it was Cushman’s fault alone. Cushman countered that Carver too had consented to the changes.
In a letter to his disgruntled coreligionists in Leiden, Cushman explained that when the Adventurers had seen the initial agreement, they had refused to accept it. Two leading investors had promptly withdrawn five hundred pounds. He had to give way or scuttle the entire plan. “If we will not go,” the former grocer explained, “they are content to keep their moneys.” Cushman maintained that the alterations were insignificant. Any houses they built would be worth very little, and any profits that accrued would benefit themselves as well as the Adventurers. They would not be like slaves. The whole point was to found a prosperous colony that would attract more settlers. If the congregation no longer trusted him or if they wanted him to stay behind, they could cast him off the way Jonah had been thrown overboard to avert God’s wrath. Cushman’s explanation never reached Leiden. According to Bradford, Carver “stayed [withheld]” it “for giving offence.” The bad feelings festered throughout the summer.3
The Pilgrims found a second development troubling as well. Weston had arranged for a group of “strangers” (that is, not members of the congregation) to join the colony. Some of these men invested money in the venture, and given that most of the congregants had remained in Leiden, the planned colony needed the boost in numbers. The additional bodies, however, further corroded the group’s cohesion. Christopher Martin, on behalf of the strangers, became a third agent alongside Carver and Cushman. The separatist agents quickly took a dislike to their new partner. Against Cushman’s counsel, Martin went to Kent and began purchasing provisions for the voyage, prompting Cushman to accuse him of acting like a “king [rather] than a consort.” It was already a “flat schism,” Cushman lamented.4
Preparations continued despite the rancor. Weston chartered a second, much larger vessel named the Mayflower, which sailed from London to Southampton to meet the group coming from Leiden. For the voyage and their first winter, the colonists needed beef, hard biscuits (Shakespeare once called a fool’s brain as “dry as the remainder biscuit after a voyage”), peas, barley, fish, butter, cheese, and oatmeal. They needed beer, partly to get down the biscuit, but mainly because it provided more nutrients and spoiled less readily than water. They needed tools to build houses. They needed seeds to plant crops. They needed armor and weapons—matchlock muskets and cannons—to defend themselves against Natives and rival Europeans.
When the Pilgrims on the Speedwell arrived at Southampton, their leaders informed Weston that they would not accept the changes to the agreement. Because they would not agree to the new terms, Weston told them “to stand on their own legs.” Those legs were weak.5 The Pilgrims did not have enough money to purchase the provisions they needed for the coming winter. They sold some extra butter, but they were still short on other necessities.
The venture hung by a thread, but it did not collapse. The Pilgrims had determined to go and had no intention of slinking back to Leiden. The Adventurers, for their part, wanted to recoup what they had already invested. The basic arrangement was clear, in any event. The Adventurers anticipated profits from what the settlers shipped back to England, and the Pilgrims expected that their investors would send more colonists and supply them with provisions and trading goods. At the same time, the ongoing disputes were troubling. If the two sides could not reach terms while in England, there was little reason to think they could cooperate when separated by an ocean.
Tracks of the Speedwell and the Mayflower, 1620. (Map by Andrew C. Smith.)
In early August the Pilgrims sailed from Southampton aboard the Mayflower and the Speedwell. Their fates now rested in the seaworthiness of the two vessels and the skill and trustworthiness of their crews. They did not get very far. When the Speedwell started to leak badly, the two ships put into Dartmouth, a small Devonshire port.
By this point, Cushman was beside himself. “Our victuals will be half eaten up … before we go from the coast of England,” he lamented in a letter to a friend. They would have nothing to eat when they reached their destination. Meanwhile, Martin’s contempt for the separatists ate away at Cushman’s morale. The former grocer and wool comber was suffering from a malady he suspected would prove fatal. He and fellow passenger William Ring wondered “who shall be meat first for the fishes.” Cushman reckoned it would take a miracle for them to plant a colony under these circumstances.6
A week later, they set forth again, sailing a few hundred miles into the waters of the Atlantic before the Speedwell’s leaks worsened. They reversed course for Plymouth, where the Speedwell’s master declared his vessel unseaworthy. It is likely that after the Speedwell’s crew refitted her for the Atlantic crossing, her masts and rig were too tall and large for her hull, opening her seams under the pressure of ocean winds. Bradford blamed the ship’s master, suggesting that he and his crew wanted to free themselves from the risks of the journey and noting that the Speedwell soon returned to service.7
Whether or not the Speedwell’s master had intentionally created the leaks, the passengers were down to a single ship, and the Mayflower could not take everyone and everything. Cushman now bowed out. The criticism he had received from his pastor and fellow congregants had broken his spirit. According to Bradford, Cushman’s “heart and courage was gone.” William Ring also chose to remain behind, and several families with young children were pleased to escape “the brunt of this hard adventure.” Bradford compared the Pilgrims to Gideon’s army. Before Gideon led his soldiers into battle, God told him to send away those who were afraid. God continued whittling down the army until only a tiny fraction remained. Likewise, the remaining Pilgrims were only a fraction of the Leiden congregation. Bradford took heart from the fact that Gideon’s few valorous men had scattered the enemies of Israel.8
When the Mayflower once again set sail, it was already September 6. Most of the passengers had been living aboard the ships for at least a month, just the beginning of what Bradford later termed their “long imprisonment … at sea.”9 The lateness of the season, the shortfall in provisions, and the constant bickering all augured poorly for the success of their venture.
According to William Bradford’s list, 102 men, women, and children were passengers on the Mayflower. The crew, headed by shipmaster Christopher Jones, probably numbered around 30 men. Two dogs were aboard, a mastiff and a small spaniel.
A majority of the free adult men—those who were not servants to other passengers—were members of the Leiden congregation or closely connected to its members. Among them were stalwarts such as Elder William Brewster; deacons John Carver and Samuel Fuller; and respected men such as William Bradford, Edward Winslow, and Isaac Allerton. The oldest passenger was James Chilton, recovered from the April 1619 assault that had nearly killed him.
Many historians have presumed that Myles and Rose Standish numbered among the “strangers.”10 Myles Standish had served with a company of English soldiers in the Dutch Republic. He survived the Siege of Ostend, which ended in 1604 and left around seventy-five thousand soldiers dead. Standish’s company was probably garrisoned in Leiden, and at some point he became well acquainted with John Robinson. The Pilgrims’ pastor once directed a message to “your captain, whom I love.” Standish in turn bequeathed a small inheritance to Robinson’s granddaughter Mercy. Standish’s library in New Plymouth included several puritan titles and one tract by the Ancient Church’s Francis Johnson. If Standish did not belong to the Leiden congregation, he was at the very least sympathetic to its principles.11
Jamestown began as an exclusively male settlement, but more than a quarter of the Mayflower passengers were women or girls. Many families had made difficult decisions that summer. William and Dorothy Bradford, for instance, left their son John in Leiden. Samuel Fuller’s wife and child remained behind as well. Other couples, however, preferred to risk death together than to part. Among the nonseparatists, William White, John Billington, and William Mullins all brought wives and children. Three women were in the final trimester of pregnancy when the Mayflower left Plymouth.
Other than some members of the ship’s crew, Stephen Hopkins was the only individual aboard who previously had crossed the Atlantic. In 1609, Hopkins had left his family behind and headed for Jamestown as a minister’s clerk. Hopkins’s duties included reading psalms and other passages of scripture during services. After seven weeks on the Atlantic, the Sea Venture sailed into a hurricane. Massive waves and wind buffeted the ship. The sky “like an hell of darkness turned black upon us,” wrote passenger William Strachey. As the storm finally abated, the battered vessel foundered just off the Bermuda islands.
Having cheated death, and now gorging on fish, fowl, wild boars, turtle, and berries, some of the men wanted to stay in their newfound paradise rather than proceed to Virginia. Hopkins was among the rebels. He argued that the shipwreck on Bermuda had made them free. If they reached Jamestown, however, the investors of the Virginia Company might detain them even after their terms of service expired. They would live as slaves. Thomas Gates, on his way to Jamestown as Virginia’s new governor, did not think the rebels deserved to live at all. Hopkins was manacled, found guilty of mutiny, and sentenced to death. Hopkins now made clear his preference for servitude over execution. He “made so much moan” about the “ruin” his demise would cause his family back in England that Gates issued a pardon.12
Hopkins eventually survived a few years in Jamestown and then returned to England. He found that his wife had died, but he was reunited with their three children. Undeterred by his near death at sea and the hardships in Virginia, he chose to return across the Atlantic on the Mayflower. He brought his second wife and three children, and during the crossing Elizabeth Hopkins gave birth to a son, whom they named Oceanus.13
Roughly one in five passengers came as a servant, apprentice, or ward; some were attached to Leiden congregants and some to Weston’s recruits.14 Four children became Mayflower passengers in scandalous circumstances. They were the “spurious brood” of one Samuel More. In order to consolidate and preserve his family’s property, More’s father had arranged a marriage between the seventeen-year-old Samuel and a relative six years his senior. Two sons and two daughters arrived at a rapid clip between 1612 and 1616, but by then, Samuel More realized that another man had been fathering them. The cuckolded More in short order disinherited his children, sued his wife’s lover, and annulled his marriage.
More next acted to get rid of the children. He later wrote that he decided to free them from the “blots and blemishes” of bastardy, but he chose a callous if effective way of freeing himself from them. The first ship sailing for Virginia happened to be the Mayflower. More invested money on behalf of each child, and a servant handed the children over to Cushman and Weston. The Carvers and Winslows each took one child; William and Mary Brewster added the remaining two to their household. In the span of a few years, the “spurious brood” had lost their parents, property, and homeland.15
Out of all of the passengers, perhaps only Stephen Hopkins was prepared for what lay ahead. “Being in a ship is being in a jail,” the eighteenth-century literary giant Samuel Johnson commented, “with the chance of being drowned.” Johnson added that an inmate had “more room, better food, and commonly better company.” Sea travel was a nightmare one endured and hoped to survive. A typical Atlantic crossing took about eight weeks. For much of that time, passengers huddled below deck, crammed into dim, foul quarters.16
The Pilgrims comforted each other during these months, but otherwise they agreed with Johnson’s observation about the “company.” Some of the nonseparatists probably leaned puritan, but if they were like nearly everyone else in England, they disdained Brownists. The Pilgrims for their part loathed Christopher Martin. Worst of all were the sailors, whom the self-styled godly regarded as a godless rabble.
The weather soon became even worse than the company. Fierce storms pounded the ship, which sprang leaks. At times, gales forced the crew to furl the ship’s sails and lie at hull. The passengers probably felt much as John Donne did when he endured a ferocious tempest off the Azores in 1597. “Some coffin’d in their cabins lie,” wrote the poet, “equally / Griev’d that they are not dead, and yet must die.” Brave passengers crept from their quarters like “sin-burden’d souls” raised on the last day, expecting to receive the worst of news. Storms at sea and shipwrecks were recurring motifs in the Bible; theologians, philosophers, and poets returned to the subject again and again. The 95th Psalm declared that the sea belonged to God; tempests displayed his power and wrath. In the calm that followed, relieved travelers glimpsed God’s mercy.17
One storm caused “one of the main beams in the midships” to buckle and crack. At that point, Jones and the crew contemplated turning around and limping back to Plymouth. From the Low Countries, however, the passengers had brought a “great iron screw,” a jack used to raise heavy objects during the construction of a home. It allowed the beam to be raised back into place, and the carpenter then secured it with a post. Jones pronounced the ship “strong and firm underwater.” They caulked leaks and continued.18
In his history, Bradford recounted two stories that illustrate how the Pilgrims made sense of the events of the crossing. Aboard the Mayflower was a sailor who “would always be condemning the poor people in their sickness, and cursing them daily with grievous execrations.” This seasoned sailor looked down on the seasick landlubbers around him and looked forward to taking their belongings once he had tossed their corpses into the deep. Then, not yet halfway across the Atlantic, God chose to “smite this young man with a grievous disease.” Even his fellow sailors agreed it was “the just hand of God upon him.” They tossed him into the sea.19
Conversely, Bradford asserted that God saved John Howland, a servant of John Carver. Howland unwisely came above deck during a fierce storm and fell into the sea. Just as God had chosen to slay the profane seaman, so it “pleased God” to save a godly servant. Howland caught hold of a rope. The sailors pulled him out of the water and used a boat hook to bring him back aboard.20
English Protestants had complex and contradictory notions about God’s providence. God punished sin and rewarded righteousness, at least at times. At other times, God’s will was simply inscrutable. The ungodly sometimes prospered and the godly often suffered. In the months that followed, sailors and passengers, strangers and separatists, servants and masters, would die in roughly equal numbers. As the Apostle Paul wrote, there was no respect of persons with God. Still, separatists, like other pious Protestants, interpreted such outcomes not as mere fate or fortune, but as expressions of God’s will.21
After more than two months at sea, the crew sighted what they recognized as the eastern coast of Cape Cod. Still aiming for somewhere in the vicinity of the Hudson River, the passengers persuaded Christopher Jones to sail south. Past the Cape’s southeastern corner, dangerous shoals forced them to turn back. After rounding the Cape’s tip, the crew dropped anchor on November 11 in what is now Provincetown Harbor.
When he recounted these events in his history, William Bradford felt the need to “make a pause.” He urged his readers to remember the passengers’ piety, their poverty, and the goodness of God. “They fell upon their knees and blessed the God of heaven,” he wrote, “who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean … again to set their feet on the firm and stable earth.” The Pilgrims were not yet ashore, but one can imagine them aboard the ship, on their knees in prayers of thanksgiving.
Bradford recalled that “they had now no friends to welcome them, nor inns to entertain or refresh their weather-beaten bodies.” Men on Malta had helped the Apostle Paul’s shipwrecked company, but the Pilgrims had no one to succor them, only a wilderness “full of wild beasts and wild men.” They were like the Israelites after the exodus from Egypt, with only the spirit of God to sustain them. Bradford closed the scene with a paraphrase of the 107th Psalm, which he adapted from the Geneva Bible, the translation the Pilgrims brought to New England. “Let them therefore praise the Lord,” he began, “because he is good.” Their souls were overwhelmed by the forbidding landscape and the adversities they knew they would soon encounter. Nevertheless, an annotation to the psalm reminded them that “there is none affliction so grievous, out of the which God will not deliver his.” Like the ancient Israelites, the Pilgrims understood themselves as God’s people, and he had already calmed the storms and stilled the waves.22
Despite the strife and delays of the summer, the crossing had gone well. Except for two men, everyone had survived. In addition to the one crew member, passenger William Butten—a young servant of Samuel Fuller—died shortly before the Mayflower reached land. Now, though, the Pilgrims had to reckon with the enormous mistake they had made in leaving England so late. There was no time to prepare for a winter that had already begun.
According to Bradford’s history, “some of the strangers” also wanted to be rid of the separatists and had made “mutinous speeches” against them during the crossing. Once ashore, they intended to “use their own liberty.” In a 1622 promotional tract for the colony, Bradford and Edward Winslow stated that when they first reached land, some passengers were “not well affected to unity and concord, but gave some appearance of faction.” The situation resembled that faced by Stephen Hopkins and the other men who had wrecked on Bermuda. The Pilgrims had no patent that empowered them to form a government on Cape Cod. Thus, nothing restrained any individuals or groups from going their own way. For the colony to have any chance, the passengers needed to establish the concord and cooperation that had eluded them for months, and they needed to do so right away.23
Jean Leon Gerome Ferris, The Mayflower Compact, 1620, 1899. (Courtesy of Library of Congress.)
To that end, the passengers formed what Bradford variously termed a “combination,” “agreement,” or “association,” which later became known as the Mayflower Compact.24 It was short and to the point. First, the Pilgrims declared themselves the “loyal subjects” of King James, whom they recognized as the “Defender of the Faith.” Next, they noted that they had sailed for “the northern parts of Virginia” in order to glorify God, advance Christianity, and honor their king and country. In order to further those goals, and presumably to survive and prosper, they chose to “covenant, and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation, and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, offices from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony.” The forty-one men who signed the document promised to render “all due submission and obedience” to those chosen officers and laws.25
That was it. The Mayflower Compact did not resemble a constitution or a bill of rights. The document said nothing about voting rights, requirements for holding office, or liberties such as the right to a trial by jury. In keeping with other colonial charters, there was no discussion of how the colony would relate to Native peoples other than a vague nod to their conversion. The colonists had been confined on a ship together for months with nothing to do, but they apparently drafted the agreement only right before going ashore. Given the urgency of establishing a settlement, there was no time to devise anything other than the sparsest framework for self-government.
The language of covenant would have resonated with many English Protestants, but there was a particular congruence with separatism.26 As “the Lord’s free people,” William Bradford and William Brewster had once covenanted to form a church and to walk in God’s ways. The compact, however, made the “civil body politic” broader than the body of Christ. Whether out of choice or necessity, political participation did not hinge on church membership or any test of religious orthodoxy. There is also a decided lack of religious content in the Mayflower Compact. When colonists in Bermuda signed their names to a set of six articles in 1612, they promised to worship God, defend the Church of England, observe the Sabbath, and to live righteously. The Pilgrims made no such promises. Their compact was a bare-bones political agreement.27
The Mayflower Compact was in keeping with the instructions of the Virginia Company. Shortly after the company assigned the Pilgrims a patent, its council voted that the leaders of “particular plantations … shall have liberty till a form of government be here settled for them, associating unto them divers of the gravest and discreetest of their companies, to make orders, ordinances and constitutions.” The Pilgrims, though, did not consider the compact a temporary expedient. Instead, it was fundamental to their political order. When the settlers later revised and published their laws, they included the compact’s text, pointing to it as the act that had created an enduring body politic, a little commonwealth within a larger imperial order.28
Shortly after the American Revolution, figures such as John Quincy Adams and Daniel Webster began to identify the Mayflower Compact as the starting point of American democracy and republicanism.29 In recent decades, historians have poured ice-cold water on such notions. George F. Willison, an influential mid-twentieth-century chronicler of the Pilgrims, concluded that rather than “the very cornerstone of American democracy,” the compact “was conceived as an instrument to maintain the status quo on the Mayflower, to show inferiors in general and servants in particular their place and keep them … under the thumbs of their masters.” Mutinous and factious men promised to obey the leaders and laws chosen by the group.30
Nathaniel Philbrick takes this one step further by declaring it “deeply ironic that the document many consider to mark the beginning of what would one day be called the United States came from a people who had more in common with a cult than democratic society.” As Philbrick notes, there were parallels between the separatist church covenant and the civil covenant of the Mayflower Compact. In both instances the people possessed the liberty to choose their own officers. Philbrick, though, claims that once chosen, Robinson was “more a benevolent dictator than a democratically elected official.” Likewise, the Mayflower Compact enabled the separatists on the ship—a “bare majority” according to Philbrick, and in the minority according to Willison—to take control. The compact, thus, was a separatist power grab.31
The Mayflower Compact was not a republican document, as illustrated by its professions of loyalty to King James. Nor did it seek to establish democracy. In early Stuart England, democracy remained a dirty and dangerous word. Indeed, rumors soon reached England that the Pilgrims had overturned the social and political order. “You are mistaken,” Bradford responded, “if you think we admit women and children [to participate in decisions of government].” Only men above the age of twenty-one might qualify themselves, and Bradford added that the colony’s leaders consulted them only “in some weighty matters” at their discretion.32
Still, if John Quincy Adams and Daniel Webster misunderstood the compact and overstated its significance, recent reappraisals go too far in the other direction. For starters, the separatists certainly were not cultists. While the Leiden congregants revered Robinson, the separatist insistence on the liberties of the people weakened the authority of ministers. The congregation, not John Robinson, admitted members, exercised discipline, and elected officers. Before the Pilgrims had left Southampton, moreover, Robinson had reminded his congregants that because of the strangers who had joined them, their “body politic” would not be coextensive with their membership in the body of Christ. Unlike the Massachusetts Bay Colony, moreover, New Plymouth never made church membership a requirement for the franchise. The Pilgrims were neither democrats nor theocrats.
Furthermore, despite Bradford’s suggestion that elected officers governed without undue interference, the Mayflower Compact incorporated significant elements of consent and participation. The Pilgrim men chose their officers “by common consent.”33 Those elected officers then expected obedience and deference, but the compact also promised its signers at least some ongoing role in framing the “just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, [and] offices” that would shape their lives. From the start, the Pilgrims held annual elections. If a leader made himself obnoxious, the colonists could choose someone else the next year.
The inclusion of at least nearly all adult men within the “civil body politic,” moreover, departed from English conventions. In his influential De Republica Anglorum, the politician and diplomat Thomas Smith defined a commonwealth as “a multitude of free men collected together and united by common accord and covenants among themselves.” The Pilgrims had done just that, but by Smith’s standards, very few of them were “free men.” For Thomas Smith, servants and men without property did not possess the liberties enjoyed by landed elites. They had no say, and in some cases they were very nearly the chattel of their superiors, little better than “bondmen” and “slaves.” In the early seventeenth century, for instance, the authorities in London sometimes rounded up indigent persons and shipped them off as servants to Virginia and the Caribbean.34
The Mayflower Compact, by contrast, gave farmers, common laborers, and even servants a place within a body politic. John Carver signed the compact, but so did his servant John Howland. At the very least, nearly all adult male passengers added their names to the agreement. It was pragmatic for Pilgrim leaders to ask disgruntled men to “promise all due submission and obedience,” but their decision to include nearly every male body within their body politic is still striking. Voluntarily subscribed compacts were hardly the only possible means of quashing mutiny and faction.
Bradford writes that after signing the compact, the Pilgrims elected John Carver as their governor “for that year.” Now they were ready to go ashore.35
