The Mayflower
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50 free The Mayflower trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Few ships are as famous as the Mayflower, and few are as misunderstood. She was a small, aging merchant vessel that was never meant to carry settlers across an ocean, and almost nothing about her 1620 voyage went to plan. The crossing ran late, the weather turned, and the passengers came ashore in November, hundreds of miles from where they had permission to live. This quiz follows the whole story. It starts with the ship herself and the false starts in England, moves through the storms, births and near disasters at sea, and lands with the passengers on a cold New England shore. Later questions cover the people on board, the first hard winter, the neighbors who helped the colony survive, and the ways the voyage has been remembered since, from poems and monuments to a modern replica. It is written for history fans, teachers planning a November lesson, families looking for a Thanksgiving table quiz, and anyone who has a Mayflower name somewhere in the family tree. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so the questions work just as well read aloud as played on screen.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which leaky companion ship was abandoned in England, forcing the Mayflower to cross the Atlantic alone?
Speedwell
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.
Q 02Before shoals and rough seas turned it back to Cape Cod, the Mayflower was heading for the mouth of which river?
Hudson
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.
Q 03Before carrying the Pilgrims, the Mayflower mostly took English cloth to France and brought which cargo back?
Wine
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.
Q 04What sea-inspired name was given to the only baby born aboard the Mayflower during the Atlantic crossing?
Oceanus
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.
Q 05Samoset startled the Mayflower colonists in March 1621 by greeting them in English and asking for which drink?
Beer
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.
Q 06Which landmark, absent from every Pilgrim account, was first named as the Mayflower landing place 121 years later?
Plymouth Rock
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.
Q 07Mayflower passenger Stephen Hopkins survived a 1609 Bermuda shipwreck thought to have inspired which Shakespeare play?
The Tempest
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.
Q 08By tradition, the Mayflower's timbers were reused in 1624 to build what in the Buckinghamshire village of Jordans?
A barn
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.
Q 09Which tech company designed the AI captain that steered a crewless Mayflower research ship across the Atlantic in 2022?
IBM
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.
Q 10How many passengers were crammed aboard the Mayflower when she finally left Plymouth, England, in September 1620?
102
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.
Q 11In which country had the Mayflower's Separatists spent about twelve years in exile before sailing for America?
Netherlands
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.
Q 12The Separatists aboard the Mayflower had broken the law at home by quitting which established religious body?
Church of England
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.
Q 13Which interpreter, kidnapped in 1614 and sold in Spain, later showed the Mayflower settlers how to grow native crops?
Squanto
Q 21Who was the first Pilgrim child born in America, delivered aboard the Mayflower as she lay anchored off Cape Cod?
Peregrine White
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.
Q 22Which master and part-owner of the Mayflower kept his ship in America through the deadly first winter of 1620–21?
Christopher Jones
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.
Q 23Which signer of the Mayflower's 1620 self-rule agreement became Plymouth Colony's first governor?
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.
Q 14Which Native nation, led by Massasoit, made a 1621 peace treaty with the Mayflower colonists that lasted for decades?
Wampanoag
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.
Q 15The Mayflower reached America thirteen years after which settlement became England's first permanent colony there?
Jamestown
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.
Q 16Which Mayflower passenger governed Plymouth Colony for about thirty years and wrote its most detailed history?
William Bradford
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.
Q 17Which professional soldier did the Pilgrims hire as military adviser for the Mayflower voyage and the colony's defense?
Myles Standish
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.
Q 18Two dogs are recorded on the Mayflower: a small springer spaniel and a large female of which breed?
Mastiff
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.
Q 19How many of the Mayflower's passengers died during the stormy ten-week Atlantic crossing itself?
One
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.
Q 20Which Mayflower passenger, swept overboard in a storm and hauled back by a rope, is an ancestor of both Presidents Bush?
John Howland
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.
John Carver
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.
Q 24In Longfellow's 1858 poem about the Mayflower settlers, which passenger does John Alden woo on a friend's behalf?
Priscilla Mullins
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.
Q 25John Alden, who outlived every other signer of the 1620 shipboard agreement, was hired for the Mayflower in which trade?
Cooper
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.
Q 26What name did the Mayflower's Separatists give the fellow passengers recruited by the voyage's London investors?
Strangers
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.
Q 27What buried food did a Mayflower scouting party dig up and carry off on Cape Cod, saving it as seed for spring?
Corn
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.
Q 28Which Cape Cod town marks the harbor where the Mayflower first dropped anchor, five weeks before reaching Plymouth?
Provincetown
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.
Q 29On which level of the Mayflower, with a ceiling only five feet high, did the passengers live during the crossing?
Gun deck
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.
Q 30England in 1620 still used which calendar, dating the Mayflower's November arrival ten days before modern accounts?
Julian
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.