In November 1620 the Mayflower, carrying 101 passengers financed by the Company of Merchant Adventurers of London, was blown far north of its chartered destination in Virginia and anchored at the tip of Cape Cod in what is now Provincetown Harbor. The passengers were split between Separatist Puritans and the non-Puritan tradesmen and adventurers the Puritans called Strangers, and some Strangers argued that outside Virginia the charter was void and no one could command them. The episode connects that threat to Stephen Hopkins, who in 1609 had made the same jurisdictional argument after the Sea Venture wrecked in Bermuda and was sentenced to death for mutiny before being pardoned. The leaders brought him anyway for his survival experience in the Americas, including time at Jamestown.
Drawing on the spiritual covenants of their congregation in Leiden, the leaders wrote a civil covenant in which signers combined into a civil body politic and promised to obey just and equal laws, framed as a pledge of loyalty to King James I so the Strangers could not refuse without seeming disloyal. Forty-one men signed on November 11, old style, or November 21, new style. The original document is lost. Its text survives through Mourt’s Relation of 1622, William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation of 1646, and Nathaniel Morton’s New England’s Memorial of 1669, the only source for the list of signers.
- The Puritans had spent years in Leiden in the Dutch Republic before the voyage.
- Leadership judged it too dangerous to keep sailing south as provisions ran low and winter approached.
- Bradford’s two versions closely match, while Morton’s version differs in spelling, capitalization and punctuation.
- In 1736 historian Thomas Prince numbered the signers in Morton’s printed order and added titles such as Mr. and Captain, so the actual signing order is unknown.
- At the 300th anniversary in 1920, Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge praised the compact as the foundation of liberty under law.
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