The Mayflower T-Shirt

During the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the group calling themselves Puritans, arose. They were thus called as they were said to call for a purifying of the Church. At first they did not intend to form a new sect, but in 1580, Rev. Robert Brown urged them to separate from the Church of England. Those who did were called Separatists or Brownists. They boldly asserted their right to worship as they pleased and suffered many unspeakable persecutions as a result. In 1608, a party, led by William Brewster and John Robinson, fled from Crooby, a little village in Northern England to Ansterdam, Holland, but soon went on from there to Leyden, where they lived for eleven years. Discontented that their children would forget their native land, their native speech and their national traditions, they determined to remove to some land where they might continue to be Englishmen. Thus they set their eyes on America. Brewster and Bradford and Miles Standish, with a small band of settlers, sent out as an advance guard, sailed from the Dutch port of Delf haven in July, 1620 in the ship Speedwell. The first run was to Southampton, England, where some friends joined them in the "Mayflower" and on 5 August, they sailed for America. The Speedwell proved so unseaworthy that the two ships put back to Plymouth, where twenty people gave up the voyage.. on 6 September 1620, such as remained steadfast...102 in number, re-embarked on the "Mayflower". The weather was so foul and the sea so boisterous that nine weeks pased before they beheld land. Their first sight of land was Cape Cod. Having no right to settle there, as the capw was far to the northward of the lands owned by the London Company, they turned southward and attempted to go on, but the head winds drove them back and forced them to shelter in Provincetown harbour at the end of Cape Cod. On 21 November 1620, in the cabin of the "Mayflower", a compact was drawn up and declared that they were loyal subjects of the King, that they had undertaken to found a colony in the northern parts of Virginia, and now bound themselves to form a "civil body politic", that they would frame such just and equal laws, from time to time as might be good, and that to these laws they promised "all due submission and obedience." Source: "School History of the United States" John Back McMaster, 1897