Plymouth, town in Massachusetts, site of a 1620 settlement of English religious dissenters.Unlike the Puritans who founded
Boston in 1630, these were separatists, believing in total separation from the corrupt Church of England. They became known as
Pilgrims, as many had left England in 1608 for the more tolerant Netherlands. In 1619, however, concerned about the corrupting influence of Dutch prosperity, they secured from the Virginia Company a land patent in America. The
Mayflower sailed from Southampton, England, in September 1620 with some one hundred colonists aboard, about sixty‐five of them Pilgrims. Their intended landfall was somewhere north of
Jamestown, but by November storms had carried them far north, beyond the area where their patent was valid, to Massachusetts Bay. Concluding that the isolated location would discourage interference in their religious affairs, they settled on a protected harbor they called Plymouth. The
Mayflower stayed through the winter; while still on board, the adult males signed the
Mayflower Compact, the colony's basic governing framework.
More than half the population perished the first winter, but by the following autumn the survivors celebrated a day of thanksgiving with the local Indians, an event remembered in the present‐day Thanksgiving holiday. For the first generation, Plymouth provided what the founders sought: a place to practice their religion freely. Plymouth lost its independence in 1688 with the formation of the short‐lived Dominion of New England and was absorbed by the Massachusett Bay Colony in 1691. The often moving and quietly eloquent journal of the colony's first governor, William Bradford (1590–1657), published as
Historie of Plimouth Plantation, ranks as a classic of early American literature.
See also
Colonial Era;
Literature: Colonial Era;
New England;
Puritanism.
Bibliography
John Demos , A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony, 1970.
John D. Seelye , Memory's Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock, 1998.
Christopher Berkeley
