60 Fun Facts About Pilgrims

In which Nottinghamshire village did the future Mayflower Separatists meet secretly at a manor house?

The manor belonged to the Archbishop of York, so the group's own landlord was the churchman they were defying.

Before crossing the Atlantic, the Separatists spent about a dozen years living in which Dutch city?

Many of them worked in the city's cloth trades, and William Brewster taught English at its university.

Which pastor led the congregation in Holland but never made the crossing, dying there in 1625?

He preached a farewell sermon at the quayside; his son Isaac later joined the colony in 1631.

What were the London investors who financed the Pilgrims' voyage called?

The colonists were meant to send fish, timber and furs home to repay the debt, and it took them decades to clear it.

Which patch of coast was the Pilgrims' intended destination when they set out in 1620?

That spot was then the northern edge of the Virginia patent, and it became Dutch New Netherland instead.

What was the name of the leaky companion ship that twice forced the Mayflower back to port in 1620?

It was sold off in London and, once repaired, went on to make several successful voyages for its new owners.

Under what name had the Pilgrims' 60-ton companion ship fought against the Spanish Armada in 1588?

Decommissioned in 1605, she was renamed after a wildflower, with a pun on the speed her new owners hoped for.

How many passengers did the Mayflower carry across the Atlantic in 1620?

About 30 crew were aboard as well, all packed into a cargo ship roughly 100 feet long.

Once the Mayflower finally left England alone on 6 September 1620, how many days did the crossing take?

The return trip in spring 1621 took less than half that time, helped by the prevailing westerlies.

Who was the master (captain) of the Mayflower on its 1620 voyage?

He was part owner of the ship and died in 1622, within a year of bringing her home.

What did Mayflower passengers use to force a storm-cracked main beam back into place mid-ocean?

The jackscrew had been bought in Holland to help build houses, and it may have saved the whole voyage.

Which passenger was washed overboard in a storm and hauled back aboard after grabbing a trailing rope?

He later became personal secretary to Governor Carver and served for years as a deputy to the colony's General Court.

What was the name of the baby born at sea during the Mayflower's crossing?

The name was chosen for the obvious reason; sadly he did not survive childhood.

Who was the only passenger to die during the actual Atlantic crossing?

He was a young servant of the colony's physician, Samuel Fuller, and died just days before land was sighted.

Which Mayflower passenger had been shipwrecked in Bermuda in 1609 en route to Jamestown?

The Bermuda wreck of the Sea Venture is often cited as an inspiration for Shakespeare's The Tempest.

The Mayflower first dropped anchor on 11 November 1620 in which Cape Cod harbour?

The ship spent five weeks there while parties explored the Cape before settling on Plymouth.

How many men signed the Mayflower Compact aboard ship in November 1620?

The list of signers comes from a 1669 history, since the original document does not survive.

What did the Separatists call the non-Puritan passengers recruited by the Mayflower's investors?

That threat of splitting off is exactly why the Compact was drawn up before anyone went ashore.

Who wrote and first signed the Mayflower Compact and became the colony's first governor?

He died in April 1621 after collapsing in his cornfield on an unusually hot day, and his wife followed within weeks.

In what year was the 1620 shipboard agreement first given the name 'Mayflower Compact'?

For its first 170 years it was simply the agreement or combination; the catchy name arrived with Forefathers' Day oratory.

What name, meaning a traveller from afar, was given to the first English baby born in New England in 1620?

He lived until 1704 and was the last surviving Pilgrim Father, though he was too young to remember the crossing.

Governor William Bradford's wife Dorothy died in December 1620 while he was away exploring. How?

Bradford recorded her death tersely in his journal, and some historians have speculated it was suicide.

Roughly what share of the Mayflower's passengers died during the first winter of 1620-21?

Only 52 or so people were alive to see spring, and half the crew died too.

Those who died in the first winter were buried on which rise opposite Plymouth Rock?

A granite sarcophagus placed there in 1920 holds bones accidentally dug up on the hill in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Which Pilgrim elder sailed with his wife and two sons named Love and Wrestling?

As the colony's only university-educated member, he served as its religious leader until an ordained pastor arrived in 1629.

Which 1619 book from the Pilgrims' secret Dutch press made King James order a manhunt for the printer?

The elder who ran the press went into hiding for a year and only resurfaced when it was time to sail.

Which Abenaki man startled the colonists on 16 March 1621 by greeting them in English?

He had picked up English from fishermen off Monhegan Island in Maine, and his first request was for beer.

Squanto was kidnapped by an English captain in 1614 and sold in which Spanish city?

Local friars reportedly rescued the captives, and notarial records later found in the city's archives document the sale of 25 Native people.

Squanto showed the colonists to plant their corn together with what, as fertiliser?

The herring ran up the brook by the settlement each April, exactly when the corn went in.

'Massasoit', the colonists' name for the Wampanoag leader, was a title meaning what?

The English mistook the title for his name, and it has stuck for four centuries.

Which Pilgrim leader nursed Massasoit back to health in 1623?

He is also the only Mayflower passenger whose portrait was painted from life, in London in 1651.

Which English names did the Plymouth court give Massasoit's sons Wamsutta and Metacomet?

The younger brother's name is why the 1675 conflict he led is remembered as a king's war.

Massasoit's son Metacomet led the 1675-76 war against New England colonists under which adopted English name?

He was killed near Mount Hope, Rhode Island, in August 1676, and the war destroyed the peace his father had kept for 40 years.

The Wampanoag translate their own name as what?

Their homeland faced the Atlantic sunrise across what are now south-eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

Which Jamestown captain did the Pilgrims approach before hiring Myles Standish as military adviser?

They decided his price was too high and worried that his fame might make him a dictator.

At which short-lived settlement north of Plymouth did Myles Standish kill Massachusett leaders in 1623?

The killings so frightened neighbouring peoples that many fled their villages, and Plymouth's fur trade collapsed for years.

Which Mayflower cooper, hired at Southampton, was the last surviving Compact signer when he died in 1687?

He was the youngest signer, and his descendants include Orson Welles, Dick Van Dyke and Marilyn Monroe.

Which poet's 1858 The Courtship of Miles Standish invented a Pilgrim love triangle over Priscilla Mullins?

It sold 10,000 copies in London in a single day, and no part of the love story is supported by 17th-century records.

Which Mayflower passenger became the first person in Plymouth Colony to be hanged for murder, in 1630?

Governor Bradford had already called him 'a knave' who would 'live and die' one; his family were the colony's habitual troublemakers.

The last surviving Mayflower passenger, who arrived aged about four and died in 1699, was who?

She married a boy who arrived on the second ship, raised eight children in Plymouth and is buried on Burial Hill.

The Fortune, second ship to reach Plymouth Colony in 1621, was seized on the way home by a warship from which country?

The ship had also arrived with 35 new mouths to feed and no provisions, forcing the colony onto half rations.

According to a colonist's 1621 letter, how many men did Massasoit bring to the harvest celebration?

They outnumbered the roughly 50 surviving colonists nearly two to one.

How long did the 1621 harvest celebration at Plymouth last?

The menu included waterfowl, wild turkey and fish, plus five deer the Wampanoag guests brought in.

Whose 1841 footnote first called the 1621 harvest celebration the 'first Thanksgiving'?

The Pilgrims themselves never used the word for it; their first declared day of thanksgiving came in 1623.

When did the buckles on the popular Pilgrim image's hats and shoes first appear?

The tall 'sugarloaf' capotain hat was real enough, but no buckle ever sat on the front of one.

Per the Mayflower Society's Pennsylvania chapter, what did Pilgrims actually wear daily?

Their religion had no objection to colour; reds, greens, violets and blues all appear in colonial inventories.

How old was Thomas Faunce when he identified Plymouth Rock as the landing place in 1741?

He said his father, who arrived in 1623, had pointed it out; the Pilgrims' own writings never mention a rock.

Roughly how much of the original Plymouth Rock is estimated to survive?

It split in half in 1774 while being hauled to the town square, and pieces are held by the Smithsonian and a Brooklyn church.

Bradford's manuscript history of the colony, lost in the Revolution, resurfaced in the 1850s in which London library?

It was finally handed back to Massachusetts in 1897 and now sits in the State Library in Boston.

Bradford's line 'they knew they were pilgrimes' alludes to a passage in which book of the Bible?

The word was not in popular use for the settlers until a Forefathers' Day toast in Boston in 1798.

Plymouth Colony ended as a separate colony in 1691 when it was merged into which new province?

Plymouth had never held a royal charter, which left it powerless to resist the merger.

The Mayflower's last record is a 1624 appraisal in which Thames-side district?

She was valued at just over 128 pounds and is thought to have been broken up soon afterwards.

The Mayflower II replica, which crossed the Atlantic in 1957, was built in which Devon town?

Its captain took a long southerly loop via the trade winds because he feared the authentic rigging would be dismasted in North Atlantic storms.

Which word did Plymouth's living-history museum drop from its name in 2020 over slavery associations?

In the 1620s the word simply meant a colony; today the museum's English Village recreates the year 1627.

What year is the only known life portrait of a Mayflower passenger dated to?

The sitter was in London on colony business at the time; no likeness of any other passenger was made in their lifetime.

The Pilgrims' Separatist congregations held 'Brownist' beliefs, named after which preacher?

Brownists held that true churches were voluntary congregations, not whole Christian nations; Browne himself went into exile in Middelburg.

Which explorer named the territory 'New Plymouth' in 1614, six years before the Pilgrims arrived?

The name happened to match Plymouth, Devon, the Pilgrims' final departure port.

Before settling on Virginia, the Leiden group considered which South American region as a destination?

The Dutch had founded the Essequibo colony there; fear of Spain and the faltering Eighty Years' War truce drove the decision to leave Holland.

The 1619 land patent the Pilgrims secured from the London Company was issued in whose name?

The king's condition was that the Leiden group's religion would receive no official recognition.

Which English merchant persuaded the Pilgrims to drop talks with the Dutch and stick with the London Company?

The London Company wanted to claim the Hudson area before the Dutch, whose first settlers only arrived in 1624.