Plymouth Colony: Mayflower Strangers, a Cattle Crash and an Invented Rock

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Plymouth Colony ran as an independent settlement for 72 years, from 1620 to 1691. Its Separatist Puritan founders fled persecution in England for Leiden in the Netherlands around 1608, where 14-hour textile shifts and the fear of their children becoming Dutch pushed them to sail again. London investors called the Merchant Adventurers financed the voyage in exchange for seven years of colonists' labor. After the leaking Speedwell, possibly sabotaged with oversized masts, was abandoned, 102 passengers crowded onto the Mayflower. Only about 40 percent were the religious Saints; the rest were Strangers recruited for skills, such as Miles Standish. Landing at Cape Cod outside their Hudson River patent, 41 men signed the Mayflower Compact to stop the colony from breaking apart.

The coast was already mapped by John Cabot, Samuel de Champlain and John Smith, and the settlers built on a Patuxet village emptied by a 1617 to 1619 epidemic now thought to be leptospirosis. Forty-five of the 102 died that first winter. Samoset, Squanto and an alliance with Massasoit kept the colony alive until Standish's killing of Massachusett leaders at a parley wrecked the fur trade. Plymouth went on to give women unusual legal standing, treat marriage as a civil contract and avoid witch hunts, before cattle speculation, illegal coinage and King Philip's War in 1675 drained it. Without a royal charter, it was absorbed into Massachusetts Bay in 1691.

• Squanto had been kidnapped by Thomas Hunt for sale in Spain, escaped to England and came home to find his village wiped out.
• Massasoit brought 90 men and five deer to the 1621 harvest feast with the 53 surviving colonists.
• Widows were guaranteed a third of family property, and women sat on an inquest jury in 1678.
• A cow worth 28 pounds in 1638 fetched 5 pounds after immigration stopped in 1640.
• Plymouth Rock was first named as the landing site in 1741 by 90-year-old Thomas Faunce, and Thanksgiving became national in 1863 after Sarah Josepha Hale's campaign.