Plymouth Colony
From Freepedia
The Plymouth Colony was an English colonial venture in North America from 1620 until 1691. The colony was founded by a strict, fundamentalist separatist Puritan sect of Protestant Christians, who, after separating from the Anglican Church, left England for Holland; then later sailed from Holland to the New World and North America. The Pilgrim colonists obtained a land patent from the London Virginia Company in 1620, before that company was dissolved. They founded the colony in a location the company did not have rights to, and later reached an agreement with the Plymouth Council for New England, which had been granted a charter for the land in 1620.
The first governing document of the colony was the Mayflower Compact, drafted and ratified by the first group of colonists aboard their ship, the Mayflower, as it lay off-shore upon arrival. On December 21, 1620, 102 Pilgrims from the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock on the western shore of Cape Cod Bay, in southeastern Massachusetts. Many believe that the Pilgrims undertook preliminary surveys elsewhere, before landing and settling near Plymouth Rock.
The first settlement of the colony was "New Plymouth", later Plymouth, Massachusetts. By the end of that winter, almost half of the settlers were dead (probably from starvation and disease), including their leader John Carver. Thus began one of the best-intended, historically renowned, and yet strangely ill-fated colonial ventures in America (after the Roanoke Island Settlement and Jamestown). When the Massachusetts Bay Colony got its new charter in 1691, Plymouth ended its history as a seperate colony.
William Bradford became governor in 1621 upon the death of Carver, served for eleven consecutive years, and was elected to various other terms until his death in 1657. The patent of Plymouth Colony was surrendered by Bradford to The Freemen in 1640, minus a small reserve of three tracts of land. On March 22, 1621, the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony signed a peace treaty with Massasoit of the Wampanoags.
The colony contained roughly what is now Bristol County, Plymouth County, and Barnstable County, Massachusetts.
Plymouth was the second permanent English settlement in the Americas, the first being Jamestown, Virginia. Early, abandoned settlements include the Popham Colony (present-day Maine), the "Lost Colony" of Roanoke Island (present-day North Carolina), and Cuper's Cove and Bristol's Hope in present-day Newfoundland.
See also
- European colonization of the Americas
- British colonization of the Americas
- British Empire
- Colonial America
- Thanksgiving
- List of Mayflower passengers who died in the winter of 1620 - 1621
