Contrary to their patent, the Pilgrims settle at Plymouth
The location where the Pilgrims planned to settle, and their rights to it, were directly related to their future livelihood. Bradford says that when they first made a landfall at Cape Cod they “resolved to stand for the southward ... to find some place about Hudson’s River for their habitation.” One of the earliest visitors to New Plymouth, John Pory, wrote they had set out for Virginia with letters for the Governor to “give them the best advise he could for trading in Hudson’s river.” He blamed the master’s faulty navigation for bringing them to Cape Cod, where the rough weather of early December forced them to decide not to go southward, but to select a sheltered site nearby.[8] This turned out to be New Plymouth.
The Pilgrims carried with them the patent John Peirce, an adventurer we shall meet again, had taken out from the Virginia Company in February 1620. Realizing that it did not apply as far north as New England, the chief colonists drafted the “Mayflower Compact” to avoid disputes over the colony’s powers of government. The leaders probably knew before they sailed that the old North Virginia Company had been revived under Sir Ferdinando Gorges as the Council for New England. His grant had been authorized in July 1620 but was not sealed until the Mayflower was at sea. If before its departure there was any discussion of heading north, Weston and his associates may have pointed out that later they could solicit a grant from the Council in the Pilgrims’ behalf. When the letters with the news of planting at Plymouth reached England the next spring, they promptly secured such a grant. John Peirce was again named as grantee in the indenture, dated June 1, 1621. Its terms permitted Peirce and his associates to lay out 100 acres of land for every person shipped over, and 1500 for public purposes. Besides giving freedom to fish and trade along the coast, it underwrote the colony’s authority to make laws. No boundaries were mentioned; a formal patent was expected to specify them at a later date.[9]