On this date, 405 years ago, a ship anchored on the coast of what is now Massachusetts, in what is now known as Plymouth Bay. Of the 102 passengers who crowded aboard the Mayflower, just under half were English separatists who, having broken from the Church of England and attempted to settle in Holland, joined with a ragtag group of merchants to have their hand at settling the New World.
The journey across what Pilgrim leader William Bradford called “the vast and furious ocean” was arduous. The merchant ship designed less for transport of humans and more for hauling goods, afforded cramped and filthy conditions. For the 66 days at sea, most passengers were jammed in the lower, windowless deck, enduring sea-sickness and squalor. Remarkably, only one person on the Mayflower died and one pregnant woman gave birth to a baby named, aptly, Oceanus.
What these courageous travelers could not have envisioned was the nation that emerged from their voyage. Bradford wrote that “They had now no friends to welcome them, nor inns to entertain or refresh their weather-beaten bodies; no houses or much less town to repair to, to seek for succor. … And for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent, and subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search an unknown coast. Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness.”
What is most remarkable about the Mayflower is not even the hardiness and endurance that characterized its passengers, half of whom died that first winter of disease or starvation in New England. It’s the way in which they organized themselves as a people, drawing up the Mayflower Compact, a concise yet profound charter that would bind themselves to each other and to God. This, historian Rebecca Frasier remarks, “was the first experiment in consensual government in Western history between individuals with one another, and not with a monarch.” British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, in his multi-volume History of the English Speaking Peoples, declared it: “one of the remarkable documents in history, a spontaneous covenant for political organisation.”
Click Here to Read More (Originally Published at World Magazine)
Daniel is the director of the Land Center for Cultural Engagement at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is the author of several books, including The Dignity Revolution, Agents of Grace, and his forthcoming book, In Defense of Christian Patriotism. Dan is a graduate of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He and his wife, Angela, have four children.
