You have the wrong impression about the Mayflower crossing and Landing of the Pilgrims. And about Pilgrims and colonization in general. The Pilgrims did not come over seeking religious freedom. The core of the colonist was made up of “Scrooby Separatist” - a sect organized in 1606 at England’s Scrooby Manor to oppose residual ritual in post-Reformation church services. But they didn’t just sail to Plymouth and stake a claim. The New World, as far as Europe was concerned, was already “owned” by entrepreneurs called
Merchant Adventurers, who speculated in colonies though tracing companies. These investors issued land grants to people like the Pilgrims and sponsored their emigration to America in return for goods shipped back to England. Roughly 70 Englishmen were organized to finance the Mayflower expedition. The Scrooby Separatists, meanwhile, had been living in Leyden, Holland, enjoying Dutch religious freedom but despairing of losing their British identity. The amount of confusion surrounding their departure on the Mayflower was, to understand it, unbelievable. Negotiation upon negotiation; nitpick upon nitpick; delay upon delay. The poor Pilgrims eventually
had to sell off their butter from the ship’s stores to pay their fares. Two ships were slated to sail – the tiny Mayflower and the tinier Speedwell. But the Speedwell ail but sank before it cleared the English coast, and th Mayflower set out alone. Less than half the Mayflower passengers were Scrooby Separatists. The rest of the 101 voyagers were servants, others English separatists and tag alongs.
The Mayflower was about 90 feet long, 26 feet wide and weighed 108 tons. Most passengers slept in the ship’s 25-by-15-foot “grear cabin”, which afforded each Pilgrim accommodations slightly smaller than a frigidaire. The Pilgrims did, however, pack a lot of stuff – including furniture, clothes, smoked herring, dried ox tongue, oatmeal and brandy, beer, wine, salt cod, pickled eggs, Bibles, medical books, cannons, pigs, goats, chickens, one mastiff, and a spaniel. The crossing took 67 days. It was one grueling passage – analogous to taking the Green Line (refers to a Boston subway line) from Park Street to, say Munich. On the way, one crew member died (but nobody liked him anyway; he mocked the Puritans), and one passenger manservant, William Button, passed on. There was also one shipboard birth, a boy, named Oceanus Hopkins.
On November 10, 1620, the Pilgrims finally sighted land. To their dismay it was Cape Cod; they had been aiming for Manhattan. (There are actually conspiracy theories that ship’s pilot John Clark was bribed to take the Mayflower too far north and leave the Hudson for the Dutch.) The Mayflower ancored off P-town, and scouts took chilly day trips to find a suitable colony site. When the gang finally landed at Plymouth, they did not, as legend holds, fail to their kness and thank God for the lousy soil. Actualy, they kind of scruffled around and debated whether Plymouth was a good enough spot for settlement. Good enough, they decided in their exhaustion.
By spring, haif the Mayflower passengers were dead (including Oeanus). Of the surviving 54, 21 were under 16. No goods had been sent back to the colony’s inventors.
