American History- The Pilgrims
Created | Updated Oct 12, 2005
Many early English settlements of the new world of North America territory came and went, the Jamestown Colony, and the Puritans went to the New World to escape religious persecution and the Puritans established the Massachussets Bay Colony. Eight years before that, there was the much more famous, similar Pilgrims.
Plymouth
In November of 1620, a group of 102 Pilgrims from England stepped off of the tiny, crowed Mayflower.1 These people had been persecuted for their religious beliefs in England and sook asylum in the New World. This expedition was originally set for Virginia in September, but winds and storms propelled them northward, to what is now Massachsetts. When they drew up a government and vowed to abide by the will of their majority. They named this new home Plymouth, after the port that they had left from in England.
A Hard Winter
Over the cold winter, half of the colonists died off from hunger and disease. With a great deal of help from the friendly, indigenous Native Americans, the rest survived the hard winter and planted crops. The natives helped their farming methods a great deal, and in Autumn, several Pilgrims and natives met for a huge feast, now celebrated as Thanksgiving
1Aboard this ship, that was no larger than a tennis court, many incidents of death and birth occured.
