It Was 400 Years Ago Today
That the Pilgrims Signed their Lives Away.
November 11, 2020 marks the four hundredth anniversary of the Mayflower’s landing at Provincetown on Cape Cod. (The actual anniversary is November 21st in the Gregorian calendar) While newspapers, politicians, and historians debate the true origins of the United States. Loyal New Englanders have long traced their beginning to the arrival of the Pilgrims and the signing of the Mayflower Compact.
Far from a simple tale of intrepid voyagers in search of religious freedom, the actual pilgrims were a mixed lot who benefited from disease and their distance from England. Wampanoag homelands were devastated by a wave of epidemics between 1614 and 1620. Fishing voyages and earlier waves of exploration had introduced diseases like smallpox and plague. In 1614 Thomas Hunt, seized 10 residents of Patuxet for sale as slaves in Spain. Tisquantum, better known as Squanto, found his way back only to discover that his relatives and neighbors had succumbed to the diseases and that Pilgrims had taken over his village and renamed it Plymouth. When Squanto died in 1622 of the diseases he…
