Mayflower Day

What the day is

Mayflower Day is observed on September 16, marking the ship's departure from Plymouth in England in 1620.

Origin and background

The date is itself a small lesson. England was still using the Julian calendar in 1620 and did not adopt the Gregorian one until 1752, by which point the two were ten days apart at the time of the sailing. Contemporary English records give the departure as September 6; converted to the calendar now in use it becomes September 16. Both dates are correct, in different systems, which is why sources disagree and why historians label dates Old Style or New Style.

The voyage took just over two months in a ship built for cargo rather than passengers, carrying around 102 of them plus crew. Roughly half were religious separatists; the rest were travelers recruited by the investors financing the venture, and the tension between those groups is the practical reason for the agreement signed on arrival, in which the passengers bound themselves to abide by laws made for the general good. It was a device for holding together a company that had landed well north of where its patent applied.

The first winter was catastrophic. About half the passengers died, mostly of disease and exposure aboard the ship while shelter was being built.

They also arrived into a landscape recently emptied by epidemic. Diseases introduced by earlier European contact had killed a very large share of the Wampanoag people in the preceding years, and the site chosen for the settlement was a village abandoned in that collapse. The man who became the colonists' interpreter had been kidnapped and sold into slavery in Europe years before, and returned to find almost everyone he knew dead.

How to take part

• Note which calendar a source is using before trusting a seventeenth century date.
• Read the compact itself, which is short and more pragmatic than its reputation.
• Read the Wampanoag account of the same events alongside the English one.
• Look up the ship's actual dimensions, which are smaller than most people picture.