The Arrival of the Mayflower: Pilgrims Sail to the New World

By Tim McNeese

On September 6, 1620, the Mayflower sailed from Plymouth, England, to the New World, landing in what would become Massachusetts. Those on board were willing to face a dangerous voyage and an uncertain future in order to build a community where they could worship freely. They had planned to settle in the northern stretches of the territory known as Virginia, but fate and bad weather forced them to land instead in New England. The Mayflower's arrival marked the beginning of a new kind of settlement in America-one in which people came to the New World to build a life for themselves and their families. The arrival of the Pilgrims brought a distinctly different approach to life in New England, with an emphasis on hard work and strong religious beliefs whose influence would shape the region for generations. The Arrival of the Mayflower delves into the hardships and triumphs won by this hearty band of settlers, as they escaped religious persecution in England to start their lives over in the New World.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chelsea House
• Release date: Jan 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781617530883

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The Arrival of the Mayflower

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Contents

Chapters

Introduction

God's Outlaws

Seeking a New Life

A Plan Unfolds

New World Travelers

Exploring Their New World

Moving to Plymouth

Building a Community

A Place in the New World

Support Materials

Chronology

Further Reading

Bibliography

About the Author

Index

Chapters

Introduction

For too many years, the congregation of Separatist Christians who originally worshiped in the country village of Scrooby in Nottinghamshire, England, struggled to maintain their fellowship. The time was the early 1600s, and history remembers these oppressed worshipers as the Pilgrims. Part of a conscience-driven Protestant sect, these Reformation-era Englishmen and women had been constantly persecuted by the Crown, their religious services interrupted, their leaders punished, and their future always in doubt. The government oppressed such groups because they challenged the authority of the Church of England. Times had become so uncertain for the Separatists that they fled to Leiden, Holland, but they felt the culture there was too unrestricted and feared its influence upon their children.

The Promise of New England

The solution to the group’s dilemma emerged from an unlikely place and person. Puritan leaders William Brewster and William Bradford both read Captain John Smith’s 1616 book, A Description of New England, which chronicled his establishment in the spring of 1607 of Jamestown, the first successful English colony in North America. Brewster and Bradford began making plans for their followers to transplant their faith in a new location—America.

By September 1620, a party of 102 men, women, and children were ready to leave for the New World. After two delayed starts, the Pilgrims sailed across the Atlantic on the crowded wine vessel, Mayflower. Shipboard conditions were miserable. The vessel was in poor condition, the water onboard soured, food molded due to the ocean dampness, and flour barrels were soon alive with maggots and weevils. In addition, high winds and a damaged ship created dangerous conditions.

On November 9, the nightmare ended as the Mayflower finally came within sight of land. Although the Pilgrims had set sail for a harbor further south, the storms had blown them off course to the north. The ship’s crewmembers scanned the horizon and decided they were offshore from the highlands of Cape Cod, in the New England that John Smith had written about in his book. The great arm of the cape provided a natural barrier and harbor, and a welcome calm after the storms that had battered the Mayflower.

A group of English Puritans known as the Pilgrims braved a long and dangerous voyage to settle in the area that would later become known as Massachusetts.

Source: Library of Congress. Prints and Photographs Division.

The colonists decided to remain in this location and build their colony, a New World outpost that promised new opportunity, including the freedom to worship as they pleased. Yet so many questions lay ahead. What was the land before them like? Would it support their number? Had storms flung them here because it was God’s choice for them? Would life be better here? What was God’s plan for His people?

History records the arrival of the Pilgrims on the shores of lands that would one day be known as Massachusetts, named after a local tribe of Native Americans. It does not record how many American Indians were already on those shores, perhaps even hiding in the underbrush, observing the Pilgrims and their great canoe that floated in the water, its sails billowing like clouds.

God's Outlaws

Their images crowd the bulletin boards of American elementary schools every November. Along with pictures of a rickety, tri-masted wooden ship, Native Americans, a cornucopia, and full-breasted turkeys is a couple dressed in drab costumes of black and white. The man wears a high hat sporting a buckle, a black frock, white stockings, and buckled black shoes; the woman sports a white cap and is dressed in a long black dress. To school children, they are known as the Pilgrims and their images remind them of the turkeys they’ll enjoy on their own Thanksgiving Day.

Who are these two and what do they have to do with the modern holiday we call Thanksgiving? The story of these two plainly dressed people and a hundred others who accompanied them to America four centuries ago is one of the first history lessons school children hear. They learn about their story of a harvest meal, the first of hundreds of years of Thanksgivings.

But there is so much about the story that elementary children do not come to know; so much more that makes this story from long ago a fascinating tale of escape, survival, faith, and conflict, one worthy of America’s colonial beginnings. It is a story of how a poor band of people of like-minded faith, along with others who were Strangers to them, left England in the year 1620, risked everything to cross a stormy sea in that bulletin board boat called the Mayflower, to start a new life in the howling wilderness they would know as New England. And that story involved not just those who sailed to the New World. Although America was a new place to them, when they arrived, they encountered American Indians who had called America their home for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Just as the Pilgrims’ lives were changed dramatically by their arrival in America, so would the lives of the Indians they encountered.

The story of the Pilgrims did not technically begin with their departure from England westward toward America. Since religion played an important role in their decision to make their journey onboard the Mayflower, it is important to understand just what they believed and why. More than a century before the Pilgrims set their sights on the New World and the freedoms they believed they would find there, Christianity in Europe was in the midst of great change. For much of early Christian history, the Catholic Church had dominated and become an extremely influential and powerful institution. It was also seen by some as increasingly corrupt. During the Late Middle Ages (1300–1500), nothing held more power over the people of Europe than the Catholic Church and its leader, the pope. While such men were supposed to represent the best of the Church, as spiritual giants, the popes of the late 1400s, sometimes known as the Renaissance Popes, were notoriously worldly. Many of them were morally corrupt and expected to live in extravagant luxury in the lavish confines of St. Peter’s in Rome, the longstanding headquarters of the Catholic Church.

The popes of this era were a disappointment as church leaders. They sometimes bought their appointments. Although they, like all Catholic clerics, took vows of celibacy—meaning they would not marry or engage in sexual activity—these popes kept mistresses and fathered illegitimate children. Sometimes popes even appointed such male offspring to high church office, including roles as bishops, cardinals, and even future popes. The Catholic papacy was so corrupt, everything seemed for sale. Of Pope Leo X (1513–1521) it was said, he would have made an excellent pope if he had only been a little religious.¹

Then, as early as the mid-1400s, the Catholic Church faced criticism from within. Some clerics, including priests, monks, and friars, saw the necessity for moral change and created a revival movement that hoped to cleanse the church of corruption and abuse. By the early 1500s, critics within the Catholic Church began to speak out and even spoke against certain Church doctrines they felt were wrong. One such Catholic critic was a German named Martin Luther, who would soon lead a full-frontal assault on the Church, its corrupt practices, and its worldly leadership. Luther (1483–1546) was a friar in the Augustinian Eremite Order, who served as a theology teacher at the University of Wittenberg in Saxony. His studies and his teaching led to great protests against Catholic abuses, beginning in 1517, fomenting a religious revolt that became known as the Reformation. His influence and that of other would-be reformers led to a split in the Catholic Church from Bohemia to England. These religious changes in England would provide incentives to the people who became the Pilgrims.

Religious rivalry among European powers was a central impetus for permanent European settlements in the Americas in the 16th century. The seeds of this contest were sewn by figures such as Martin Luther, who, in challenging Catholic orthodoxy, gave birth to Protestantism.

Source: Library of Congress. Jupiter Images.

The key year for the English Reformation was 1534. Three years earlier, an English Church Council, known as the Convocation, declared the English king, Henry VIII, as the head of the Catholic Church in England, rather than the pope in Rome. This is a step they took with much prodding from King Henry. With this pronouncement, Henry began to collect for himself the taxes annually raised to support the Roman papacy. Over the next few years, Henry nailed down his personal leadership over the Church of England, and in 1534, the English Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy, which recognized Henry as the head of the English Church. It was this decision by English lawmakers that brought about the formal separation of England from the Roman Catholic Church. In 1559, Henry’s daughter, Queen Elizabeth I, oversaw the passage of the Law of Conformity, which furthered the split and granted additional privileges to the Church of England. (The act also reestablished Anglicanism as the official church in England. Elizabeth’s half-sister, Mary, who ruled before her had supported Catholicism in England.) Four years later, in 1563, the queen called a meeting of church leaders to consider a list of 39 changes to the religious practices of the Church of England that would help ensure the English church would remain Protestant in form and rite.² During this council meeting, Anglican church leaders called for such significant changes as the rejection of the Catholic concept of transubstantiation (the belief that the wine and bread of the Eucharist, the elements of Holy Communion, become the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ), as well as the adoption of the Protestant doctrine of predestination.

Even after the Reformation movement brought about a split between the Protestants and Catholics, the division it caused seemed to have no limits. What motivated the Protestants to separate from Catholicism sometimes encouraged further division among Protestants themselves. In Germany, many Protestants became known as Lutherans. In France, they became Calvinists, after another Reformation leader. In England, even Henry’s new institution, the Church of England, saw further division, as various groups of Christians felt Henry’s church to be nothing more than the Catholic Church by another name. Among those who spoke out against the practices of the Church of England were those Pilgrims who would one day sail to America on the Mayflower.

Among the English Protestants who were dissatisfied with the limited reforms of the Church of England was a sect that hoped to purify the English or Anglican Church of its catholic practices. Its members were commonly referred to as the Puritans. They sought to alter the religious practices and theologies of the Anglican Church into those much less Catholic in form. The Puritans—they were also sometimes called Precisionists, for their exacting interpretations of the Bible—did not believe an official priesthood was necessary. They felt they did not need ordained church officials to interpret the Bible for them. They also wanted to be members of a church that was less formalized, which led them to seek a Gospel of simplicity and lifestyles to go with it. They sought lives of strict morality, as they threw off the ways of the world, such as dancing, attending the theater, and even celebrating Christmas. After all, the Puritans said, the Bible says nothing about the specific date of Jesus’ birth, so why celebrate December 25? Puritan ministers preached to their members lessons that emphasized hard, honest work and plain religion, speaking out against the formalities of the Church of England. Such congregations of Separatists typically functioned independently from one another. They supported their members, maintained strong bonds of spirituality among themselves, and readily disciplined those they felt were straying from the truth. As one Puritan leader described his fellow Puritans: Their desires were sett on the ways of God and to enjoye his ordinances.³

What the Puritans hoped for was a fresh start for Christianity, their own form of Protestantism. Not only did the Puritans hope to establish a church based on less formality in their church structures, they also wanted to live more simply, free from the temptations of the world. This hope and expectation led to outsiders often identifying Puritans by their strict teachings and strong, narrowly defined morality.

This engraving, inspired by an early 17th-century derogatory verse by Richard Brathwaite, satirizes the Puritans' staunch beliefs. The illustration depicts a Puritan (far right) hanging his cat for killing a bird on Sunday, thereby not honoring what many believed should be a day of rest.

Source: Library of Congress. Prints and Photographs Division. Popular Graphic Arts Collection.

One myth developed concerning the Puritans that is still thought true—that adherents wore drab, black and white clothing. This is not so. Puritans typically enjoyed color and their clothing often included deep hues of orange, red, blue, yellow, purple, and brown, shades they called the sadd colors. They were opposed, though, to clothing considered flashy, gaudy, or that drew attention to the wearer due to its brightness or even its expense.

Rejecting transubstantiation and accepting predestination represented important