Four hundred years ago this month, a small group of people arrived on the northeastern coast of the continent and formed a colony.  They weren’t the first colonists to the New World, yet their settlement, which was called the Plymouth Colony, remains one of the more remarkable achievements in American history.

Tens of thousands of Americans are their descendants – and most of them don’t know it.  The people known as the Pilgrims are vaguely remembered at Thanksgiving time – a national holiday proclaimed by Abraham Lincoln in 1863. 

These 102 people also remain a bit misunderstood. 

To understand who the Pilgrims were and why they left England for the Colonies, we need to review what occurred in Great Britain under the tyrannical Henry VIII over eighty years earlier, in the 1530s.  Carefully avoiding the tawdry details of what transpired, it is important to realize how easily power corrupts many who acquire it. 

Henry VIII wasn’t even supposed to be the king – his elder brother Arthur was groomed for the role.  Then the newly married Arthur suddenly died, and Henry married his widow, Catharine of Aragon. (Incidentally, she was the daughter of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain – the monarchs who financially backed Christopher Columbus in 1492.)  For twenty years the couple, as king and queen, lived happily.  A single daughter, Mary, was born to them, but no son.  Henry desperately wanted a son, but Catherine was, by the early 1530s, beyond the years of childbearing.  Henry looked elsewhere and found Anne Boleyn, one of his wife’s ladies-in-waiting, as the object of his desire.  The crafty Anne insisted on Henry marrying her, so Henry tried to divorce his wife – unheard of in the Catholic Church in those days.  Henry did it anyway.  He married Anne, and had another daughter, Elizabeth.  He was excommunicated for his actions.  Undaunted, Henry started a new church:  The Church of England.  The king made himself the head of it.

Things did not go well for Henry the second time around.  He ended up making false charges against his second wife, had her executed, and married another.  Jane Seymour, wife #3, produced a male heir but died in childbirth (and Henry had three more wives before he finally died in 1547).  The young prince, Edward, died unwed at age 15, and the devout Mary, Henry’s older daughter, tried to bring the old church back, killing many Protestants during her short reign (that’s why she earned the nickname Bloody Mary).

The years passed, and religious intolerance continued to plague England.  There was a brief respite during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, but after her death the problems escalated anew.  People were arrested, tortured, and even killed for differing with the national church.  A group known as the Puritans thought they could solve the problems by “fixing” the Church of England.  It led to a terrible and lengthy Civil War, which ultimately led to the execution of their monarch, Charles I, in 1649.

During the reign of King James I (the father of the unfortunate Charles I), the pre-war turmoil escalated. Laws were passed to forbid any religion other than the Church of England to be practiced.  Catholics, Quakers, Calvinists and Puritans found themselves in danger of arrest.  Among the Puritans, there emerged a group of Separatists who thought that there was no hope to fix England’s national church, and decided to form a new manner of worship.  Even the Puritans did not particularly like the Separatists.  King James threatened to harass these differing people until they acquiesced, died, or were banished from the country.

The Separatists were the Pilgrims.  One of their leaders, William Brewster, wrote several books against the Church of England – he was appalled that this church was conceived through the machinations of an adulterous king.  Threatened with arrest and execution, he and some of his followers fled to The Netherlands.  They did not wish to remain there because they were English and proud of their heritage (and the Dutch, while very liberal and kindly, were not exactly religiously upright, or so the Pilgrims thought.  They did not want their children growing up in Holland).  Finally, they received permission to colonize in America.

Of the 102 Pilgrims who settled the Plymouth Colony, 52 were religious advocates.  The other fifty were those who were friendly to the group.  Many, (like John Alden, a young cooper) were invited to make the voyage because Brewster and William Bradford, the recognized leaders of the group, knew they would require men and women with certain skills for survival.  They leased two ships, The Mayflower and The Speedwell , and prepared to leave England during the summer of 1620.  They were granted an area north of Virginia, in the Hudson Valley of what would later be New York.

While in the midst of their preparations, the Separatist leaders met Captain John Smith.  This early explorer of the northeastern coast of America offered to go with them.  They declined his offer, but paid close attention to his tales of the land farther north.  They also took one of Smith’s maps of the coastline and carefully studied it.

The first two attempts at leaving ended with leaks and breakages, especially aboard The Speedwell , and the group had to turn back for repairs.  The Speedwell was finally abandoned, and some of its passengers remained in England.  Others who were insistent on the voyage boarded the crowded Mayflower.  The group left from Plymouth, England, on September 6, 1620, over a month later than planned.

The Pilgrims had a difficult voyage.  Although the first weeks brought fair weather, for the rest of the journey the ship battled several gales and at least one major hurricane.  “ Men which all their lifetime had occupied the sea ,” observed William Bradford, “ never saw more outrageous seas.”  During the hurricane, the deck split and one of the members fell overboard.  The young man, John Howland, grabbed a rope and hung on for his life as he fell into the raging sea.  He managed to survive the ordeal.¹ 

During the crossing, one member of the group and one member of the crew, both young men, died from sudden illness.  They were buried at sea.  The young sailor who died had harassed and mocked the Pilgrims on a daily basis, swearing they would all be entombed by the Atlantic.  When he was the one buried at sea instead, the Pilgrims thought Providence had intervened.

The storms drove the ship farther north than originally planned.  Though the capable Captain Christopher Jones could get them back on course, Brewster and Bradford decided that going a bit farther north was all right with them.  They landed on Cape Cod, at present day Provincetown, on November 6, 1620.  Two days later an exploration party, led by Miles Standish, went ashore.

After a few brushes with unfriendly native warriors who had endured skirmishes with earlier explorers, the exhausted people aboard The Mayflower headed westward to the place where they would settle.  Near a sizable boulder, on December 11, they noticed that the earth was “goodly” and found a spring of fresh water.  They called their colony Plymouth, after the town in England where they had embarked.² 

The Pilgrims had carried seeds for planting, and livestock, but it was too late to plant crops.  The winter was devastating.  In the bitter cold with little rations, half of the group sickened and died.  In the spring, two native men, Samoset and Squanto, approached the group separately – and both, amazingly, spoke a little English.  The two men had been taken to Europe by explorers.  It appears that Samoset had been taken as a slave, but was later freed.  The two men showed the Pilgrims how to grow corn, how to fertilize the ground with fish, and how to use the natural resources for survival.

Later that year, during the harvest season of 1621, the Pilgrims invited their Native American friends, including the tribal chief, Massasoit, to a feast of Thanksgiving.  The celebration lasted for many days.

The Plymouth Colony survived.  They created the Mayflower Compact , the laws agreed upon and signed by the Colonists, which ensured religious freedom and equal justice under the law.  Our U.S. Constitution is partially derived from the laws established by the Pilgrims.

Over the next three years, more colonists joined them.  In 1630, a large group of one thousand Puritans came to the area and established another colony nearby, the site of present-day Boston.  They named their settlement The Massachusetts Bay Colony.³ 

Seventy-two years after the Pilgrims arrived, the two colonies were joined, becoming the Colony of Massachusetts.

Many of the historic misrepresentations attributed to the Pilgrims were actually caused by the Puritans from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  Accusations of religious intolerance, torturous punishments (including hanging a Quaker woman because she would not become a Puritan), and the scandalous Salem Witch Trials of the 1690s are unfairly claimed to have been done by the Pilgrims.  Instead, they were the actions of the rather unyielding Puritans from Boston and Salem.  They were part of the same group that killed their king in England – the only British monarch ever executed.  After a brief attempt of governing by the Puritan Oliver Cromwell, the English people asked Charles II, the son of the slain king, to come back and take over the reins of government – which he did.

Plymouth today, the site of the Pilgrim landing near the famous Plymouth Rock, is greatly altered after four centuries.  Plymouth Rock, now only a small boulder, is nothing like the large rock when the Pilgrims first settled in early America.

Historian Rose Briggs, who wisely grasped the significance of this early colony, remarked, “It is the fact that they landed – and remained – that matters, not where they landed.  Yet it is no bad thing for a nation to be founded on a rock.”⁴ 

We owe much of the liberty we enjoy to that small group of middle-class people who boarded a small and imperfect ship for distant, unknown shores.  They wanted a life of freedom for themselves and, more importantly, for their posterity.  They believed they could self-govern, and they proved successful in doing it.  Four centuries later, we still have that chance for the life they sought and achieved: that which Lincoln called “ the government of the people.”  How appropriate that it was Abraham Lincoln who proclaimed Thanksgiving a national holiday.⁵ 

It is an event worth remembering, every day of the year.