By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 8, 2026
What Was the Pilgrims’ Voyage on the Mayflower, and Why Does It Still Matter?
The Pilgrims’ voyage on the Mayflower was a sixty-six-day Atlantic crossing carrying 102 English passengers and roughly thirty crew from Plymouth, Devon, on 16 September 1620 to a landfall at the tip of Cape Cod on 9 November 1620. The journey produced the Mayflower Compact of 11 November, the founding of Plymouth Colony in late December, and a treaty with the Wampanoag confederation under Massasoit in March 1621.
The crossing is one of the most thoroughly documented founding voyages in colonial American history, and yet much of what most readers think they know about it derives from nineteenth-century painting rather than from the manuscript record. Two primary sources do almost all the load-bearing work for any honest reconstruction. The first is the journal of William Bradford (1590 to 1657), kept across the years 1620 to 1647 and published only in fragments before its full nineteenth-century recovery as Of Plymouth Plantation; its manuscript is held by the State Library of Massachusetts. The second is A Relation or Journall of the Beginning and Proceedings of the English Plantation Setled at Plimoth in New England, printed at London in 1622 by George Morton and now universally known as Mourt’s Relation, the bulk of which is almost certainly the work of Edward Winslow [1][2].
This guide reconstructs the voyage from those two manuscripts, places it inside the broader pattern of historical and archaeological mysteries, and refuses to flatten the Wampanoag side of the encounter. The story is not a single arrival; it is two peoples meeting at a moment when one of them, the Patuxet, had just been almost entirely killed by an epidemic, and the other, the English Separatist congregation from Leiden, had no business surviving its first winter at all.
Departure: Plymouth, Devon, 16 September 1620
The Mayflower was not the only ship the Pilgrims had intended to use. The original plan called for two vessels: the Mayflower, a 180-ton merchantman chartered out of London, and the Speedwell, a smaller pinnace the Leiden congregation had purchased in the Netherlands. The two ships were to carry the entire emigrant party across the Atlantic together. The Speedwell, however, leaked badly on her first attempt to put to sea from Southampton in early August 1620, and again on a second attempt out of Dartmouth. After a third return into port at Plymouth in Devon, her master and Robert Cushman the agent agreed she was unfit for the crossing, and the company abandoned her on the Devon coast [1].
The Final Sailing
On 16 September 1620, by the Old Style Julian calendar still in use in England, the Mayflower sailed alone from Plymouth Sound under Master Christopher Jones with a crew of about thirty and 102 passengers. Bradford’s later list, compiled from memory and from the colony’s own surviving records, divides them roughly into two groups: the so-called Saints, members of the Separatist congregation that had spent the previous twelve years in religious exile at Leiden in the Dutch Republic, and the so-called Strangers, English laborers, craftsmen, and indentured servants recruited by the Merchant Adventurers of London who held the joint-stock investment in the venture. The two groups did not entirely trust one another, and that mistrust would shape the politics of the first month after landing [2].
The Atlantic Crossing, September to November 1620
Sixty-six days at sea is a long passage. The North Atlantic at the equinox is reliably hostile, and Bradford records that the second half of the voyage met “many fierce storms, with which the ship was shroudly shaken, and her upper works made very leaky” [1]. One of the main beams amidships cracked under the strain. Master Jones held a council with the senior passengers, and a great iron screw, brought over from Holland for raising house frames, was used to force the beam back into position and lock it in place. The ship sailed on. Bradford treats this near-disaster with characteristic plainness, neither dramatizing the danger nor pretending it had not been close.
Births, Deaths, and a Man Overboard
One passenger died at sea, a young servant named William Butten in the employ of the physician Samuel Fuller. One was born, Oceanus Hopkins, son of Stephen and Elizabeth Hopkins, named for the water under his cradle. A young Separatist named John Howland was washed overboard during a gale and caught hold of a topsail halyard trailing in the sea; the crew hauled him back aboard with a boat hook, and he lived to become one of the patriarchs of New England. The Atlantic crossing, in other words, killed almost no one. The dying would begin once the ship was anchored.
Cape Cod and the Mayflower Compact, November 1620
Land was sighted on the morning of 9 November 1620, the high sandy backbone of what is now the Outer Cape near Truro. The Mayflower’s patent from the Virginia Company authorized settlement at the mouth of the Hudson River, well to the south, but the autumn was advancing and the shoals off Monomoy turned the ship back. Master Jones brought her instead into the calm hook of Cape Cod Harbor, today’s Provincetown Harbor, and dropped anchor on 11 November.
An Agreement Drafted in the Cabin
The fact of landing outside the patent created a legal problem. Several of the Strangers reportedly told their fellow passengers that, in the absence of any binding authority north of Virginia, “none had power to command them” once on shore. The leaders of the Separatist contingent, William Brewster and John Carver foremost among them, drafted a short civil compact in the great cabin of the Mayflower, modeled on the church covenants the Leiden congregation already used. Forty-one adult male passengers signed it on 11 November 1620. The Mayflower Compact, as it came to be called, has survived only in transcripts; the original signed sheet is lost. Its operative clause binds the signatories to “covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation,” and to obey “such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions and offices” as the body might frame [1]. John Carver was elected the first governor.
Five Weeks of Reconnaissance
From 13 November through 21 December, exploring parties under Captain Myles Standish ranged the Cape on foot and in the ship’s shallop. They found buried baskets of seed corn at a place the Patuxet had called Corn Hill, took the corn for planting, and intended, according to Mourt’s Relation, to pay for it later [2]. They had a brief skirmish with a Nauset war party at First Encounter Beach in Eastham on 8 December, in which arrows flew and muskets answered without casualty on either side. On 11 December (Old Style; today commemorated as Forefathers’ Day on 21 December New Style), the shallop reached the harbor of Patuxet on the western shore of Cape Cod Bay. The site had cleared fields, fresh-water brooks, and no living inhabitants. Master Jones brought the Mayflower across the bay, and on 25 December 1620 the company began felling timber for the first common house at Plymouth.
The First Winter, December 1620 to March 1621
The winter that followed killed roughly half of the company. Bradford’s count is grim and concrete: of the 102 passengers who sailed from Plymouth Devon, only fifty-three lived to see the harvest of the following autumn, and of the eighteen wives only five [1]. Among the dead were Bradford’s own wife Dorothy May Bradford, who fell from the deck of the Mayflower into the icy waters of Cape Cod Harbor on 7 December 1620 while her husband was ashore on the second exploratory expedition; the colony’s first governor John Carver and his wife Katherine the following spring; and most of the laborers of working age. Scurvy, pneumonia, and what Bradford simply calls “the general sickness” took two and three a day at the height of the dying in February and March. The Mayflower herself remained at anchor through the winter and lost almost half her own crew.
The Records of the Dying
The colony kept no formal burial register that winter. The dead were laid in unmarked graves on Cole’s Hill above the harbor, and the survivors planted corn over the disturbed soil to hide the extent of the mortality from any watching eyes. Patricia Scott Deetz and her colleagues at the Plymouth Colony Archive Project at the University of Virginia compiled, from Bradford’s later list, from probate records, and from the 1623 Division of Land, the most reliable modern reconstruction of who died and when [3]. Their database reads, page after page, as a quiet indictment of any romantic reading of the founding.
Samoset, Tisquantum, and the Treaty with Massasoit, March 1621
On 16 March 1621, a tall Abenaki sagamore named Samoset walked into Plymouth alone, unarmed, and addressed the astonished colonists in broken but intelligible English, asking for beer. He had picked up the language from the English fishermen and traders who had been visiting the coast of Maine for at least a generation before the Mayflower’s arrival. He stayed the night, ate heartily, and left the following day with promises to return. He did, on 22 March, with a man whose biography contains the entire prior history of European contact in New England compressed into a single life.
Tisquantum’s Long Way Home
Tisquantum, called Squanto by the English, was a Patuxet by birth, born in the village whose cleared fields the Pilgrims were now plowing. In 1614, the English captain Thomas Hunt, sailing under John Smith, had kidnapped him along with about twenty other Patuxet and Nauset men, taken them to Malaga in southern Spain, and sold them into slavery. Tisquantum escaped slavery, made his way to London, lived in the household of the merchant John Slany, and crossed the Atlantic again in 1619 in the company of Captain Thomas Dermer, returning to Patuxet to find every member of his community dead in the epidemic of 1616 to 1619 that had swept the New England coast. He was, when he met the Pilgrims, the last living Patuxet. He spoke fluent English. He knew the harbor better than any Englishman alive. He stayed with the colony, taught them how to plant corn with fish for fertilizer, and acted as an interpreter and emissary until his death from a fever in November 1622 [2][4].
The Massasoit Treaty
On 22 March 1621, Massasoit Ousamequin, the leading sachem of the Pokanoket Wampanoag and the senior figure of a confederation of communities stretching from Narragansett Bay to Cape Cod, came to Plymouth with about sixty warriors. After a careful exchange of envoys, in which Edward Winslow walked alone into the Wampanoag camp as a hostage of good faith, Massasoit and Governor Carver concluded a six-clause mutual-defense treaty, recorded in Mourt’s Relation [2]. The terms bound each side to refrain from injury to the other, to leave weapons outside any meeting between the two parties, to come to the other’s defense in the event of unjust attack by a third party, and to return any tools stolen from English fields. Massasoit’s strategic calculation, made plain in the work of historians such as Neal Salisbury and Lisa Brooks, was that an alliance with the small and obviously vulnerable English settlement would help offset the rising power of the Narragansett, who had been less affected by the recent epidemic and were pressing on Wampanoag territory from the west [4].
The Harvest of 1621
In the autumn of 1621, after a successful first corn harvest grown according to Tisquantum’s instructions, Governor William Bradford (who had succeeded Carver upon the latter’s death in April) declared a thanksgiving celebration. Edward Winslow’s letter of 11 December 1621 to George Morton in London, printed in Mourt’s Relation, gives the only contemporary account of the event. Ninety Wampanoag, including Massasoit himself, joined the fifty-three surviving English for three days of feasting on venison, fowl, and corn [2]. The gathering was a diplomatic occasion as much as a meal, and it would be more than two centuries before the nineteenth-century United States retroactively reframed it as the origin of a national holiday. The Wampanoag who attended did not understand themselves to be founding the United States; they understood themselves to be ratifying a treaty with a strange and very small group of recent arrivals.
What the Two Manuscripts Show, and What They Hide
Modern reconstructions of the Mayflower voyage and the first year at Plymouth depend on a small handful of texts that disagree productively with one another. Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, written between roughly 1630 and 1647 and held in manuscript by the State Library of Massachusetts, supplies the providential interpretive frame and the long view of the colony’s first three decades. Mourt’s Relation, printed in London in 1622 from journal entries kept day by day, supplies the contemporaneous detail. Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War (Viking, 2006) is the standard modern synthesis for general readers and is careful to keep the Wampanoag perspective in view [5]. The reconstruction of the Mayflower II at Plimoth Patuxet Museums, built at Brixham in Devon between 1955 and 1957 and now moored at Plymouth Massachusetts after restoration at Mystic Seaport, gives the only physical sense of the ship herself; no rigging, planking, or fitting from the original Mayflower is known to survive [6]. The Plymouth Colony Archive Project assembled by Patricia Scott Deetz makes the underlying probate, court, and land records searchable for the first time at scale [3]. Read together, these sources allow a careful reader to see both what the English wrote and what they did not.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long did the Mayflower voyage take?
Sixty-six days from Plymouth Devon on 16 September 1620 to first landfall at the tip of Cape Cod on 9 November 1620. The Mayflower then spent another five weeks in Cape Cod Harbor while exploring parties searched for a permanent settlement site, dropping anchor at Plymouth on 16 December 1620.
How many passengers were on the Mayflower?
102 passengers sailed from Plymouth Devon, accompanied by a crew of approximately thirty under Master Christopher Jones. Two passengers, William Butten and Oceanus Hopkins, were respectively a death and a birth at sea, leaving the same number aboard at landfall as had departed.
Why was the Speedwell abandoned?
The Speedwell, a small pinnace purchased by the Leiden congregation, leaked dangerously on three successive attempts to put to sea in the summer of 1620. Bradford suspected her master had deliberately overmasted her to give himself an excuse to back out of the voyage. Whatever the cause, she was left at Plymouth Devon and the entire emigrant party crowded onto the Mayflower.
Who signed the Mayflower Compact?
Forty-one adult male passengers signed the Mayflower Compact on 11 November 1620 in the great cabin of the ship while she lay at anchor in Cape Cod Harbor. The signers included John Carver, William Bradford, Edward Winslow, William Brewster, and Myles Standish. Women, children, indentured servants, and the ship’s crew did not sign. The original document is lost; the text survives in transcripts.
How many Pilgrims died during the first winter?
Of the 102 passengers who arrived at Cape Cod, roughly fifty died during the winter of 1620 to 1621, leaving fifty-three to celebrate the harvest of autumn 1621. The mortality among adult women was disproportionate; only five of eighteen wives survived the first year. Bradford’s wife Dorothy May Bradford drowned in Cape Cod Harbor on 7 December 1620.
Who was Tisquantum, and how did he know English?
Tisquantum, often called Squanto, was a Patuxet man kidnapped from his home village in 1614 by the English captain Thomas Hunt and sold into slavery in Malaga, Spain. He escaped, made his way to London, and returned to New England in 1619 to find his entire community killed by an epidemic of 1616 to 1619. He spoke fluent English and served as the colony’s interpreter and agricultural teacher until his death in November 1622.
What was in the treaty between the Pilgrims and Massasoit?
The treaty concluded on 22 March 1621 between Massasoit Ousamequin and Governor John Carver had six clauses: mutual abstention from injury, mutual prosecution of any of their own people who broke the peace, mutual restoration of stolen property, mutual aid in the event of unjust attack by a third party, mutual notification of approaching war, and the laying aside of weapons during meetings. The text is preserved in Mourt’s Relation.
Where can a researcher consult the original sources?
Bradford’s manuscript of Of Plymouth Plantation is held by the State Library of Massachusetts in Boston. Mourt’s Relation survives in copies of the 1622 London printing held by major research libraries and is freely available in modern editions. The Plymouth Colony Archive Project at the University of Virginia, directed by Patricia Scott Deetz, gathers the probate, land, and court records of the colony into a single searchable archive.
Was the Mayflower II built from the original ship?
No. No timber, fastening, or fitting from the original Mayflower is known to survive. The Mayflower II is a full-scale reproduction built between 1955 and 1957 at the Upham shipyard in Brixham, Devon, to plans drawn from period merchantmen. She crossed the Atlantic under sail in 1957 and is now berthed at Plymouth Massachusetts after a multi-year restoration completed at Mystic Seaport in 2020.
Did the Pilgrims actually land at Plymouth Rock?
Neither Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation nor Mourt’s Relation mentions a rock. The first documentary reference to Plymouth Rock as the specific landing point dates from 1741, more than a century after the event, when a 94-year-old elder named Thomas Faunce identified the boulder to townspeople preparing to bury it under a wharf. The story may be true and may be later memory; it cannot be confirmed from contemporary records.
What is the significance of the harvest celebration of 1621?
Edward Winslow’s letter of 11 December 1621 describes a three-day harvest gathering attended by ninety Wampanoag, including Massasoit, and the fifty-three surviving English. The event was a diplomatic feast, not the founding of a national holiday. The reframing as the origin of American Thanksgiving emerged in the nineteenth century. For the Wampanoag, the gathering ratified the March treaty and acknowledged a shared interest in the early survival of the small English settlement.
How did the voyage shape later English colonization in New England?
The Plymouth settlement remained small (its population reached only about 300 by 1630) but its institutional precedent (a self-governing covenanted community in a region outside any royal patent) shaped the founding documents of Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and New Haven. The Mayflower Compact is sometimes cited as a constitutional ancestor of the United States, though the line of descent is interpretive rather than direct.
