In September 1620 the Mayflower departed from Southern England bearing approximately 70 Separatists bound for the New World. They carried a charter authorizing the founding of a colony on the coast of Virginia that carried with it the assumption by both the English monarch and the pilgrims that they were entitled to settle there. As we have seen the background of this assumption was the doctrine of discovery which had spread from Roman Catholic nations of southern Europe to the primarily Protestant nations of the north. A hasty and unwise departure from England in August subjected them to inclement weather. Consequently they arrived in November far to the north with winter storms ruling out the planned landfall on the Virginia coast, and as historian Samuel Eliot Morison noted, the patent they brought with them was now invalid (1952, 75, n. 1). If the coastal tribes of Native Americans had equated land occupancy with ownership, they might well have regarded all charters issued in England as invalid, but ownership was a European concept with no Native American equivalent.

After several days of exploration in what is now Cape Cod Bay, these Separatists created their own “Civic Body Politic” in the Mayflower Compact (Morison 1952, 75–76), then landed on the coast to establish the first permanent English colony in the New World, which they named Plimouth after their English port of departure. A decade later, the Arabella landed to the north at Massachusetts Bay bearing the first load of Puritans with a settlement charter. They were followed by thousands, more than 40,000 by 1641. Over the following decades, they established settlements across most of Eastern Massachusetts. These colonizing events were not unlike those by Europeans in Africa, Asia, South America, and Australia through the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, but the Separatists and Puritans developed a unique self-aggrandizing narrative that, over the rest of the seventeenth century, was progressively enhanced. Its central themes raised these colonists to God-directed heroes not seen since biblical times.

Their motivations for leaving England were several, though most were to escape from religious conflict.