By Jay Jamison
Four hundred four years ago — on November 21, 1620 (November 11, Old Style) — a ship rode at anchor just off the coast of the New World. The Mayflower carried 102 passengers, most of whom left England in search of religious freedom for their sect. There were other passengers on board who also intended to help colonize the mysterious new world. They planned to land in what is now New York, but bad weather, typical for this time of year, forced the little ship to seek shelter in a cove (today’s Provincetown Harbor, Massachusetts) off the coast of what is now known as Cape Cod.
Before disembarking, it was determined that they should draw up an agreement, declaring what kind of basic doctrine would govern the new colonists. What they agreed to, and most of the male passengers signed, is now known as the Mayflower Compact. Keeping with the traditions of that era, women did not sign the Mayflower Compact, so there were only 41 signatures on the document. In the Congregationalist tradition it was considered a covenant, a mutual agreement about some of the broad principles of how they would act as a society once they landed.
This was an unusual act of governance for people who still considered themselves to be loyal subjects of the English king. They came to America from a nation and society that was largely governed by birthright and tradition, where a person’s place was prescribed by who they were in the strata of social class. The Mayflower Compact was a departure from a societal organization based on the happenstance of birth and the laurels of nobility. The Mayflower Society website, themayflowersociety.org, notes that “due to the distance between the Pilgrims and the centralized English government, ordinary men found themselves in leadership positions they wouldn’t have otherwise held.”
The document was rather brief, just under 200 words. For comparison purposes, the column you are now reading runs about 560 words. The original Mayflower Compact document has been lost. However, a rendition of it is cited in a publication called “Mourt’s Relation,” published in 1622.
The passengers on the Mayflower were about to land on a hostile coast, hostile in the most basic sense. The Mayflower passengers were about to disembark into uncharted wilderness, where the most basic elements for survival needed to be procured by themselves. There was no local authority for their mutual protection, no English neighbors to appeal to for help. Clearly, they wanted to avoid the possibility of reverting to a state of nature, as philosopher Thomas Hobbes described three decades later. In the state of nature, there are no laws or moral obligations, and people are free to act as they please. But the Pilgrims must have known that persons really weren’t free under those circumstances. Hobbes spelled it out in 1651, stating that in such circumstances the life of man is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” Hobbes’ thesis was published over thirty years after the Mayflower Compact was signed. This small band of congregants did not have a hierarchy of officers. There was no pope, no bishops nor other authorities, outside of the Bible. So, they chose to agree among themselves how they would govern the group and survive.
The Mayflower Compact is the first documented agreement among people freely choosing their direction of governance in the New World, but it would not be the last.
