50 Fun Facts About The Mayflower

Which leaky companion ship was abandoned in England, forcing the Mayflower to cross the Atlantic alone?

Speedwell sprang leaks three times, forcing two returns to port before she was left behind. The colony's own historian later suspected her master of causing the leaks on purpose to escape the voyage.

Before shoals and rough seas turned it back to Cape Cod, the Mayflower was heading for the mouth of which river?

The Hudson was the planned site, inside land the passengers had a patent to settle. Coming ashore far to the north put them outside that patent, one reason they drew up rules of their own.

Before carrying the Pilgrims, the Mayflower mostly took English cloth to France and brought which cargo back?

Wine was the regular return cargo, shipped from Bordeaux to London. The Mayflower was a small trader used to short hops across the Channel, not an ocean-going ship.

What sea-inspired name was given to the only baby born aboard the Mayflower during the Atlantic crossing?

Oceanus, Latin for ocean, was the name the Hopkins family gave their son. A second boy was born aboard later on, once the ship lay at anchor off the American coast.

Samoset startled the Mayflower colonists in March 1621 by greeting them in English and asking for which drink?

Beer was what Samoset requested, in English picked up from fishermen off the coast of Maine. The settlers gave him strong spirits, biscuit, cheese and a piece of duck instead.

Which landmark, absent from every Pilgrim account, was first named as the Mayflower landing place 121 years later?

Plymouth Rock was identified in 1741 by Thomas Faunce, a 94-year-old church elder, as townsfolk planned a wharf that would bury it. The boulder later broke in half when they tried to haul it away.

Mayflower passenger Stephen Hopkins survived a 1609 Bermuda shipwreck thought to have inspired which Shakespeare play?

The Tempest drew on reports of the Sea Venture wreck, after which Hopkins was sentenced to death for mutiny and then pardoned. He was the only Mayflower passenger who had already seen the New World.

By tradition, the Mayflower's timbers were reused in 1624 to build what in the Buckinghamshire village of Jordans?

A barn in Jordans is said to hold the ship's beams, bought from a London shipbreaker's yard. The link has never been proved, though the building drew tourists from around the world for decades.

Which tech company designed the AI captain that steered a crewless Mayflower research ship across the Atlantic in 2022?

IBM designed the software that sailed the solar-powered trimaran with nobody aboard. A first attempt in 2021 was abandoned after three days, and the 2022 crossing needed a tow into Halifax for repairs.

How many passengers were crammed aboard the Mayflower when she finally left Plymouth, England, in September 1620?

All 102 passengers shared a living space with a ceiling only about five feet high, plus a crew of 25 to 30. Each person had less room than a modern single bed.

In which country had the Mayflower's Separatists spent about twelve years in exile before sailing for America?

The Netherlands let the exiles worship freely in the university city of Leiden. They left partly because their children were growing up more Dutch than English.

The Separatists aboard the Mayflower had broken the law at home by quitting which established religious body?

The Church of England was, to the Separatists, beyond repair, so they left it entirely. Holding services outside it was against the law, which is why the group first fled abroad.

Which interpreter, kidnapped in 1614 and sold in Spain, later showed the Mayflower settlers how to grow native crops?

Squanto learned English in captivity and got home in 1619, only to find his whole village dead of disease. He lived with the colonists for 20 months as their guide and translator.

Which Native nation, led by Massasoit, made a 1621 peace treaty with the Mayflower colonists that lasted for decades?

The Wampanoag had been badly weakened by epidemics, and Massasoit wanted allies against powerful neighbors to the west. The peace collapsed only after his death.

The Mayflower reached America thirteen years after which settlement became England's first permanent colony there?

Jamestown was founded in Virginia in 1607, and its record was grim: one winter, remembered as the Starving Time, left only about 60 colonists alive. The Mayflower's passengers knew the risks and sailed anyway.

Which Mayflower passenger governed Plymouth Colony for about thirty years and wrote its most detailed history?

William Bradford became governor in 1621 after his predecessor died. His handwritten history vanished for decades, resurfaced in a bishop's library in London and came home in 1897.

Which professional soldier did the Pilgrims hire as military adviser for the Mayflower voyage and the colony's defense?

Myles Standish was elected the colony's first militia commander in 1621 and re-elected for the rest of his life. He also led the first scouting party ashore on Cape Cod.

Two dogs are recorded on the Mayflower: a small springer spaniel and a large female of which breed?

A mastiff and a spaniel were out with passengers Peter Browne and John Goodman in January 1621 when the dogs chased a deer. Both men got lost following them and spent a freezing night in the woods.

How many of the Mayflower's passengers died during the stormy ten-week Atlantic crossing itself?

One passenger died at sea: William Butten, a young servant, three days before land was sighted. The real toll came later, when about half the passengers were dead by spring.

Which Mayflower passenger, swept overboard in a storm and hauled back by a rope, is an ancestor of both Presidents Bush?

John Howland grabbed a trailing topsail rope as he went under and was hauled back aboard. The actor Humphrey Bogart is also counted among his many descendants.

Who was the first Pilgrim child born in America, delivered aboard the Mayflower as she lay anchored off Cape Cod?

Peregrine White was born in late November 1620, after another boy had arrived in mid-ocean. He grew up to hold military and government posts in the colony and lived until 1704.

Which master and part-owner of the Mayflower kept his ship in America through the deadly first winter of 1620–21?

Christopher Jones had planned to sail straight home but stayed until April 1621 because disease killed about half his crew. He died less than a year after getting back to England.

Which signer of the Mayflower's 1620 self-rule agreement became Plymouth Colony's first governor?

John Carver collapsed after working in his field on a hot April day in 1621 and died within days. His wife died weeks later, and the couple left no surviving children.

In Longfellow's 1858 poem about the Mayflower settlers, which passenger does John Alden woo on a friend's behalf?

Priscilla Mullins lost her parents and brother in the colony's first winter, and she did marry Alden. The poet was their descendant, and his book reportedly sold 10,000 copies in London in a day.

John Alden, who outlived every other signer of the 1620 shipboard agreement, was hired for the Mayflower in which trade?

Cooper was a vital job at sea: Alden made and mended the barrels that held the food and drink. Free to sail home afterward, he chose to stay, and he lived until 1687.

What name did the Mayflower's Separatists give the fellow passengers recruited by the voyage's London investors?

Strangers were the craftsmen, servants and hired hands the investors added to make the colony pay. Friction between the two groups is why a shipboard agreement was needed.

What buried food did a Mayflower scouting party dig up and carry off on Cape Cod, saving it as seed for spring?

Corn taken from mounds on what is now Corn Hill in Truro gave the settlers seed they could not have found in time any other way. Their own historian credited it with saving them from starvation.

Which Cape Cod town marks the harbor where the Mayflower first dropped anchor, five weeks before reaching Plymouth?

Provincetown is where the passengers first went ashore, exploring Cape Cod for five weeks before moving on. A 252-foot granite tower, the tallest of its kind in the country, now marks the landing.

On which level of the Mayflower, with a ceiling only five feet high, did the passengers live during the crossing?

The gun deck sat between the open main deck and the hold, and its cannon ports made it the ship's fighting space. Passengers could reach fresh air only by climbing a ladder.

England in 1620 still used which calendar, dating the Mayflower's November arrival ten days before modern accounts?

Julian dates stayed in use in England and its colonies until 1752, long after Catholic Europe had switched. So the anchoring recorded as November 11 is marked today on November 21.

Which tool from a passenger's baggage did the crew use to brace the Mayflower's cracked main beam in mid-ocean?

A jackscrew, which the passengers called a great iron screw, held the buckled beam so it could crack no further. Without it the ship might have had to turn back or risk sinking.

At which English port did the Mayflower first meet the smaller ship that was meant to sail with her to America?

Southampton is where the two ships lay for almost two weeks while the smaller one was patched up. Passengers had to sell food and belongings to cover the port fees.

What name is given to the small sailing boat the Mayflower carried in pieces and rebuilt for exploring the coast?

The shallop was damaged on the voyage, and repairs held up proper exploring for more than two weeks. It later carried the scouting party that found the site of the settlement.

Which ship brought the next settlers to Plymouth Colony in 1621, a year after the Mayflower, but carried no supplies?

Fortune landed dozens of newcomers, many of them young men, with nothing to feed them. On the way home, loaded with furs, she strayed off course and was seized by a French warship.

The Mayflower's passengers built their town on the cleared site of which Native village, emptied by an epidemic?

Patuxet had been a thriving village until disease swept the coast in the years just before 1620. Its ready-cleared fields were one reason the newcomers picked the spot.

Which Mayflower passenger, head of a family of troublemakers, became the first Plymouth colonist hanged for murder?

John Billington was hanged in 1630 for killing a fellow settler he regarded as an enemy. Years earlier his young son had fired a musket inside the anchored ship.

Which Mayflower passenger, once a fugitive printer of banned religious books, became the colony's senior church elder?

William Brewster spent the better part of a year in hiding after his press attacked the king's handling of the church. In America he served as the settlers' religious leader and preacher.

Which future president, then a state governor, praised the Mayflower's 1620 agreement at its 300th anniversary?

Calvin Coolidge called the document the foundation of liberty based on law and order. Weeks earlier he had been elected vice president, and he became president in 1923.

Which US president laid the cornerstone of the Pilgrim Monument marking the Mayflower's first landfall, in 1907?

Theodore Roosevelt laid the stone, and his successor dedicated the finished tower three years later. Its design copies a 14th-century bell tower in Siena, Italy.

In which present-day US state did the Mayflower's passengers found their colony in the winter of 1620?

Massachusetts did not yet exist as a colony when the ship arrived. Plymouth governed itself for seventy years before it was merged into its larger northern neighbor in 1691.

Which larger group, often confused with the Mayflower's Separatists, hoped to reform the national church from within?

Puritans stayed inside the church they hoped to purify. They later founded a neighboring colony, and about 20,000 settlers followed in the 1630s, dwarfing Plymouth.

The Mayflower Society, founded in Plymouth in 1897, admits only applicants who can prove they have what?

A passenger ancestor has to be documented generation by generation. The society estimates that tens of millions of people worldwide descend from those who made the 1620 crossing.

For the Mayflower's 300th anniversary in 1920, the US Mint showed the ship on the back of which commemorative coin?

The half dollar paired the ship with a portrait of the colony's longtime governor on the front. A world's fair had also been planned for the anniversary but was canceled after World War I.

Which Mayflower passenger was the groom at Plymouth Colony's first wedding and later served three times as governor?

Edward Winslow remarried seven weeks after losing his first wife, taking a bride who had been widowed that same winter. He is the only original colonist with a surviving portrait painted from life.

Which Essex port, the likely birthplace of her master, was listed as the Mayflower's home in records of 1609–11?

Harwich still shows visitors the house on Kings Head Street where the captain's family lived. Later records describe the ship as being of London instead.

From which Thames-side district of London did the Mayflower set out in July 1620, later the burial place of her master?

Rotherhithe is also where the idle ship was valued in 1624, two years after her master died. No record of her exists after that date.

Which thirteen-year-old Mayflower passenger is, by legend, the first to have stepped ashore at Plymouth?

Mary Chilton is said to have jumped from the boat and waded ashore ahead of everyone else. Both her parents died that first winter, her father being the oldest passenger aboard.

Which pastor first urged his Leiden congregation to emigrate, yet stayed behind when the Mayflower sailed?

John Robinson stayed to care for the many members who could not make the trip. He died in Leiden in 1625 without ever crossing the Atlantic.

Which Mayflower child, sent away as a small boy after a family scandal, grew up to be a New England sea captain?

Richard More and three siblings were shipped off after the man raising them decided they were not his children. Only he survived the first winter, and his gravestone still stands in Salem.

The crewless Mayflower research ship's planned Atlantic route passed over the wreck of which famous ocean liner?

Titanic lies along the course plotted for the solar-powered trimaran. After two attempts and a tow into Halifax, the robot ship finally docked in Plymouth harbor beside a full-size replica of the 1620 vessel.