Sam Fitzgerald - The Pilgrims

On the morning of Thursday, November 9, 1620, an ungainly, boxy ship arrived in the New World. A hundred feet long, tall fore and aft, broad in the middle with square riggings, the Mayflower crossed the storm-wracked North Atlantic from England in sixty-five harrowing days. Although she careened harrowingly in any kind of running sea, her captain and crew found the ship unusually stable in bad weather. With her sails furled and laying ahull in heavy seas, the Mayflowers high sides at the bow and stern steadied her in the wind. Now at last, with land in sight, the weather was fair and the northwest breeze agreeable. The ships passengers, who had spent the voyage confined in the cramped, foul-smelling space beneath the main deck just above the cargo hold, came up and breathed in the fresh autumn air. There were 102 of them, the same number as had embarked in England - one person had died and one baby had been born during the crossing. Directly ahead was a long ribbon of sand that stretched north and south a beach, backed by high dunes and, beyond these, forested hillsides. After inspecting the shoreline for an hour or so, Christopher Jones , master and part-owner of the Mayflower, announced that they had reached an arm of land called Cape Cod.

As elated as the passengers were to be on the threshold of North America, Cape Cod was not their destination. They had signed a patent - an employment contract between the passengers and their backers in London by which the colonists would eventually own their settlement in the New World - that called for them to land in a region then referred to as Virginia, at the mouth of the Hudson River near Manhattan Island. Satisfied that he knew where he was, Captain Jones headed south. With the wind at her back, the Mayflower sprang forward over a quiet, green sea, with the gentle sound of the surf breaking along the beach to starboard.

But as the Mayflower came to the elbow of Cape Cod where it turned west toward the mainland, everything changed. The sounding lines - deployed continuously as Jones felt his way along an unfamiliar shore - hit shallow water that became shallower by the minute. The Mayflower had drifted into a treacherous rip, an area of perilous shoals and vicious currents where wind and tide turned the fifteen-mile stretch of ocean between the Cape and Nantucket Island into a graveyard for errant mariners. The passengers were alarmed, and Captain Jones slowed to consider his options even as the wind pinned the Mayflower against the rip. By now, it was late afternoon. As darkness came, sinking seemed imminent, but the Mayflowers fortunes changed again. The wind shifted to the south, and Jones fled northward back to deeper, calmer waters.

Two days later, the Mayflower rounded the northern end of Cape Cod, curled behind the protective arc of its outermost tip, and anchored snugly in what is now Provincetown harbor. A small party went ashore. On wobbly legs, they trudged across the beach and explored a short distance into the dunes, finding groves of hardwood. They collected red cedar for a fire that night aboard the Mayflower. The land looked deserted. One member of the party later likened their arrival to being shipwrecked: Weak and sick from the voyage, they found themselves in a forbidding land with no shelter and fearful of encountering the barbarians known to live in the vicinity. They all had good reasons for venturing into the unknown, but their motivations were soon swallowed up by a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men, who had yet to show themselves.

The looming winter was intimidating. The colonists had hoped to land in America in summer, but the Mayflowers departure had been delayed, and the voyage had taken far longer than anticipated. They had landed north of their intended destination at the end of the dying year, and the odds seemed against their survival.

But these people were accustomed to hardship. Half of them were Separatists, British expatriates whose extreme religious convictions - the Church of England regarded them as heretics and fanatics - had forced them into exile in Holland. The rest - known to the contingent from Holland as Strangers - were mostly Londoners recruited by the expeditions investors. The two groups mistrusted one another, and there were many frictions, but in their common plight in the New World, they united. And although these groups had gone by different names at different times, they came to be known by only one: Pilgrims.

The Pilgrims were not the first Europeans to establish a settlement in North America - they werent even the first group to come from England, which had long trailed Portugal and Spain in gaining footholds in the New World. The Spanish had built a permanent settlement at St. Augustine, in what is now northeast Florida, in 1565. Twenty years later, England - under the enlightened rule of Elizabeth I , who was looking to catch up with her European rivals in laying claim to the New World - made several attempts to establish a colony on Roanoke Island, in present-day North Carolina.

The queens plan ended in disaster when, in 1590, a resupply force arrived at Roanoke Island and found no trace of the more than 100 colonists who had been left there three years earlier. A message carved in a tree trunk hinted that the colonists might have fled to nearby Hatteras Island, but any search was forestalled by bad weather. Roanoke forever afterward was known as the lost colony.

England finally succeeded in setting up a colony at Jamestown , near Hampton Roads in present day Virginia, in 1607. Five years later, the English had a second colony in the New World St. Georges, on the island of Bermuda.

The voyage of the Mayflower, however, and the arrival of the Pilgrims in what would become New England, represented something new. For the first time, a colony in the New World was conceived as something more than an extension of European economic interests. The Spanish had plundered the Americas for treasure. The first English settlements were dominated by entrepreneurs seeking to establish trading businesses in tobacco, furs, and other goods. The Pilgrims, too, had financial obligations to their backers in London, but the contingent from Holland was on the second leg of a long journey out of England in search of a life in which they could freely practice their religion. Out of necessity, they also adopted certain democratic principles - such as the concepts of civil governance and laws designed to ensure justice and equality - that later bolstered a new nation, the United States.

Their path was not smooth. Many Pilgrims did not live through their first year in the New World. And within decades of their arrival, their quest for religious freedom transformed into fierce and sometimes violent religious intolerance directed at others, as more colonists came to America and settled an ever-larger area of Massachusetts.

But something began on that chilly November day that, a century and a half later, left its mark on a revolution and all that was to come. The people of the United States have since migrated to this country from every corner of the world. And all of them have followed in the footsteps of those Pilgrims who on their arrival, stood cold and trembling on the sands of Cape Cod.

In their Mayflower voyage of 1620, the Pilgrims abandoned a homeland rocked by civic and religious struggles that would persist another two centuries before freedom won out. That age of turmoil that scattered them to the shores of a New World was called the Reformation .