How many pilgrims were on the mayflower

A ship that was too tall might tip over or sink. The crew sailors and officers of the ship lived on the upper decks. In , there were about crewmembers on Mayflower. The Master , in charge of sailing the ship, was Christopher Jones. He probably had his quarters , or living space, at the stern the back of the ship.

This was the driest and most comfortable area on the ship. The common sailors , or regular workers, had their quarters at the front of the ship, or bow , in a room called the forecastle. It was in a part of the ship constantly hit by waves, so it was always wet and cold. The sailors would have to get used to the swaying and pitching of the ship because it was at its strongest here. There were also officers on Mayflower. They were responsible for sailing and navigating the ship.

They probably lived in the space between the Master and the common sailors. Where did the passengers live on Mayflower? The ship carried men, women and children passengers on its only trip to New England. The agreement first called the Mayflower Compact in was a legal instrument that bound the Pilgrims together when they arrived in New England. The core members of the Pilgrims' immigrant group were Separatists, members of a Puritan sect that had split from the Church of England, the only legal church in England at that time.

Others in the group, however, had remained part of the Church of England, so not all of the Pilgrims shared the same religion. When the Pilgrims left England, they obtained permission from the King of England to settle on land farther to the south near the mouth of the Hudson River in present-day New York. Because they chose to remain where they landed in New England, they needed a new permission called a patent to settle there.

On November 11, , needing to maintain order and establish a civil society while they waited for this new patent, the adult male passengers signed the Mayflower Compact. The original document does not survive. The Separatist church congregation that the Mayflower pilgrims were members of was originally centered around the town of Scrooby, England. Scrooby is a small village in Nottinghamshire that borders South Yorkshire and Lincolnshire.

The group was so spread out across the area though that they formed two different groups, according to Bradford:. A preacher named John Smith was the pastor of one of the groups and a preacher named Richard Clifton was the pastor of the other.

The Mayflower pilgrims were members of a Puritan sect within the Church of England known as separatists. At the time there were two types of puritans within the Church of England: separatists and non-separatists. Separatists felt that the Church of England was too corrupt to save and decided to separate from it. Non-separatists felt that the church could still be reformed and remained in the church to do so.

The separatists refused to attend services at the Church of England and instead held their own services where their pastor preached that everyone had a right to discuss and interpret the Bible, that parishioners should take an active part in services and how anyone could depart from the official Book of Common Prayer and speak directly to God.

In , the Church introduced cannons, which was a sort of test to flush out nonconformists. These canons declared that anyone who rejected the practices of the Church of England excommunicated themselves and it required all clergymen to accept and publicly acknowledge the royal supremacy and authority of the Prayer Book. The pilgrims decided to leave England for Holland because they were being persecuted for their religion and felt they had no other choice but to leave, according to William Bradford in his book Of Plimoth Plantation:.

The group first attempted to leave for Holland sometime near the end of Due to a statute passed in the reign of Richard II, no one could leave England without a license, which the group did not have. They arranged for a Dutch ship to meet them at Scotia Creek at Boston, Lincolnshire, to sneak them out of the country, but the captain betrayed them and turned them into the authorities, according to Bradford:.

Bradford goes on to explain that after a month in prison, most of the group was released after their charges were dismissed, but seven members of the group, including William Brewster, remained in jail for a while longer. The group made a second and final attempt to leave England the following spring in The group again hired a Dutch ship to take them to Holland. The group traveled to the meeting place in Immingham, England into two separate boats, one with the women and children and one with the men.

The two boats arrived at the meeting place a day before the ship. The women and children were sea sick from the journey and entered a creek to rest in shallow water but their boat got stuck during low tide and had to wait for the tide to come back in. When the ship arrived, the captain began boarding the boat full of men but the authorities arrived in pursuit of the fleeing pilgrims and the captain decided to depart without the remaining passengers or cargo, according to Bradford:. It drew tears from their eyes, and any thing they had they would have given to have been a shore againe; but all in vaine, there was no remedy, they must thus sadly part.

The women were arrested but were not charged and eventually made the journey to Holland too and were reunited with their husbands in Amsterdam. Two separatists communities, one from London and the other from Gainsborough, already existed in Amsterdam when the pilgrims arrived but these groups were so torn with dissension that the pilgrims decided to move to Leiden in South Holland in in an effort to find peace.

After living in Holland for about 11 or 12 years, the group began to grow weary of living in the Netherlands. And they produced 57 grandchildren for Richard Warren. Eastaway says that even if we factor in high childhood mortality rates of the time, we might expect the latest generation of descendants to be around two million - from Richard Warren alone.

And when you consider both that more than one generation is alive at any one time and that there were another 21 families from the Mayflower with descendants, then perhaps 35 million seems like a plausible figure. But there's a problem with this calculation. Rob says those initial calculations are based on one huge assumption - that each marriage of a Mayflower descendant was to someone who was not themselves a Mayflower descendant.

But if a Mayflower person marries another Mayflower person and has two children, then the two descendants are simply replacing the two parents and there's no increase at all, he adds. This phenomenon is known as "pedigree collapse", and it was a big factor in the early years of Mayflower settlement.

Of the 27 marriages that produced children in the founding Mayflower generation, 16 of them were between Mayflower passengers or their descendants. But more ships did arrive bringing new, non-Mayflower people, meaning that the number of descendants expanded significantly.

Nevertheless, pedigree collapse was definitely a factor, as Rob Eastaway's family knows well. But not only that, they think that probably my wife and children are also descended from John Howland. So there's even an example of potential pedigree collapse in my own family. Well, these are always going to be ballpark figures. But using his two million descendant calculation for Richard Warren, Rob makes a rough estimate that the highest possible number of descendants for all 22 Mayflower families would be around 30 million.

But once you factor in the clear evidence of pedigree collapse, Rob estimates that the the actual number of descendants will be around a tenth of that - three million. But even if the true numbers are significantly lower than those that are often quoted, it seems unlikely that it would dent the power of the Mayflower story in American culture and society.

As Dr Lauren Working says, "There's something about Plymouth Rock, the firmness of it, the kind of idea of the Protestant Faith as the kind of foundation to a society that's really picked up on and that endures.

What we all get wrong about the Mayflower.