by Earl King

Created on: October 15, 2008

UNDERSTANDING THE HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF
THE MAYFLOWER COMPACT

The Mayflower Compact is a document that has been hailed as the forerunner to the American Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution. To understand this we must turn back the clock to a storm tossed day on the north Atlantic in the year 1620.

As the Mayflower neared the new world, her master Christopher Jones became more concerned about his passengers. They were nearly 10 weeks into a voyage that should have ended in the summer time. It was now November. Because of the innumerable delays leaving Europe, they had left without enough supplies. Passengers and crew were not strong because of reduced rations and now the passengers were getting ill. He needed to reach land as soon as possible. Taking the only course open to him, he headed for what he believed to be the nearest land. This place was called Cape Cod.

Cape Cod was not unknown to ships captains in those days, especially if they were fishermen looking for good fishing grounds. He knew what latitude it lay on and also knew it was north of their destination, the mouth of the Hudson River. The Hudson was the area where their patent from the Virginia Company gave them the right to establish a colony. But that was unimportant now. They had to get to land.

About half of the passengers were a religious group known as Separatists. They had spent about ten years in Leiden, Holland after escaping from England. It was illegal then to leave the state sponsored Church of England.

In the Dutch city they found a religious tolerance that was sorely lacking in their native England. After a lengthy stay in Holland the tolerance began to grow thin and their children were becoming Dutch. The option they came up with was the New World. In America they could establish a new colony patterned on the English villages they had grown up with. Most importantly they could establish their own church under the guidance of their pastor John Robinson. And they could worship as they pleased.

The name Separatists was given because of their separation from the Church of England. They were actually a part of the Puritan movement. Puritans were unhappy about the churches rituals and the state control of religion in England. They sought to cleanse the Church of England and move it somewhere between the Catholic Church and the Protestant Church. Some considered them a radical part of that movement. The name "Pilgrim" is from some of the writings of William Bradford,

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