The Mayflower was an old ship, built to carry cargo such as wine casks and wool. That was its intended purpose for the voyage from England to the Virginia Company’s Territory in America, scheduled for the summer of 1620. Another ship, the Speedwell, would sail alongside carrying many of the passengers. But the plan had to be amended after the Speedwell returned to port twice due to repeated leaks. On September 6, the Mayflower set sail alone with 102 passengers on board.

The group was made up broadly of two distinct communities. Roughly half of the passengers were “separatists,” or “Saints” as they called themselves, and Pilgrims as history would later name them — religious dissenters who had risked fines, imprisonment, and other forms of persecution to break away from the Church of England because they believed it was beyond reform. Many had been living in exile in Leiden, a city in the Dutch Republic known for its relative religious tolerance. There, they found freedom to worship, but not much more. Jobs were few and wages meager. More troubling still to them was the fact that their children were growing up with the language and customs of Dutch life. They feared that with time, their Englishness and perhaps their religious views would vanish.

So they planned something audacious. They would cross the ocean to the New World, just as other small communities of religiously persecuted groups had already done. They would start a new life in a new land, one where they could preserve both their religious ideals and their cultural identity.

The problem was that they didn’t have the means to achieve their goal without help. They needed financing. And that’s where the second group came in.

The other half of the passengers were “strangers” — laborers, artisans, and adventurers. They had been recruited by English investors who supported the Pilgrims’ voyage. This group was not bound by religious persecution, but rather by the possibility of land, work, and perhaps a better life in the New World.

Together, the two communities formed a fragile partnership of mutual hopes despite differing motives.

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The journey across the Atlantic Ocean was brutal. Storms battered the ship. The late departure meant they sailed into colder weather. Cramped in dark, swaying quarters below deck, passengers suffered from seasickness, hunger, and injury. One man died. A baby, appropriately named Oceanus, was born. The strangers were suspicious of the religious passengers, mocking their piety. The separatists, in turn, distrusted the strangers’ coarse language and irreverence. Still, together they persisted. And on November 9, after more than two months at sea, land appeared…

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