From the start, the trip was a disaster waiting to happen. The voyage
was delayed by the leaky Speedwell(which turned back), so that Robert
Cushman wrote before they left, “Our victuals will be half eaten up, I think,
before we go from the coast of England, and if our voyage last long, we shall
not have a month’s victuals when we come in the country.” The passage
was beset by storms in which “the winds were so fierce and the seas so
high, as they could not bear a knot of sail, but were forced to hull [heave to]
for divers days together.” When they finally sighted land, “they fell amongst
dangerous shoals and roaring breakers.” Trying but failing to reach their
intended destination, the Hudson River, they turned into Cape Cod.
Fearing worse weather and the onslaught of winter, they decided to go
ashore.
What they saw terrified them. “For summer being done, all things
stand upon them, with a weather-beaten face,” wrote their leader, William
Bradford, “and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a
wild and savage hue. If they looked behind them, there was the mighty
ocean which they had passed and was now as a main bar and gulf to sepa-
rate them from all the civil parts of the world.” They had arrived at a place
where, under British law, they had no right to be, and in which there was
no fixed community authority. Worries about these two problems led them,
on the last day of their voyage, to draw up one of the most famous docu-
ments in American history, the Mayflower Compact.
A remarkable document, the Mayflower Compact effected the transi-
tion postulated by the great French and English philosophers of the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries from “the state of nature” to organized
society. After confirming their loyalty to “our dread Sovereign Lord King
James,by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France,andIreland,King,
Defender of the Faith”—but not, as their move had made clear, their faith—
the Pilgrims entered into a social contract with one another, to “Covenant
and Combine ourselves together into a Civil Body Politic.”
As sophisticated as their beginning was politically, their physical
prospects were dim. Since their first landfall was not acceptable, they spent
precious days at the beginning of winter exploring in their tiny shallop until
they found Plymouth harbor on December 11. There, like the settlers at
Jamestown, they soon fell out with one another. As William Bradford wrote,
Early Days in the Colonies 121