The Plymouth Colony Was Not All Fine and Dandy

Hello wonderful humans and welcome back to another episode of Hysterical Histories! This week we’re gonna talk about the Plymouth colony that wasn’t even originally at Plymouth and that wasn’t as nice as all the Thanksgiving stories made it out to be. Yes, I am here to crush all of your historic idealistic realities. But that’s beside the point. Let’s GO!

So after the disaster that was Jamestown, the Puritans were the first to take on the colonization challenge. After Jamestown, the monarchy decided to take a step back from actual colonizing but invited companies who wanted to try it to sail out and try to found a colony.The Puritans weren’t businessmen, but they used it to escape religious persecution.

We always seem to think of the Puritans as these prudish, kind of stuck-up people who were die-hard traditionalists, but they were actually of the opinion that the Anglican church was too much like the Catholic one. Sure, they were tied to tradition, but it was their own one. Many of the Puritans remained in England and tried to change the faith from within, but others, called the Separatists, wanted to separate from the Church of England entirely and start their own faith.

King James had a pretty strict hand over the country when it came to religion. The Separatists had to lay low and practice their religion in secret, and the few times they got called out they were persecuted severely. At some point they left for more tolerant Holland, where they stayed for many years. However, they realized that they were dirt poor and it was hard to be English in Holland, so they sought a better solution.

Eventually, they signed a deal with the Virginia Company to help expand the colony on the Chesapeake Bay. They created the Mayflower Compact, which said they were citizens under James but they had some self-government power for the good of the colony. They sailed off and after three attempts to get out there they finally did and landed a little south of Plymouth.

They quickly found an abandoned spring home of one of the Indian tribes in the area. Not knowing what it was, they dug up corn and other food and stole it for their own use. From that time onward the natives weren’t very nice to them. They also started to starve, so they needed a better place to stay.

Lucky for them, a few colonists sailed north and found Plymouth. It was surprisingly barren and unpromising, but it was out of the range of the natives who were giving them trouble and it had some potential. The colonists hopped on this chance to start again. They moved north and became friends with the Indian tribe that did occupy that area, because they knew they needed them to survive. And a few months later, Thanksgiving did happen, although whether or not the Indians were even invited is another debate.

And that's it for this time! Thanks so much for reading!