Pilgrims were the early English settlers of New England. The name Pilgrims refers to the entire group of colonists who founded Plymouth Colony along Cape Cod Bay in Massachusetts in 1620. Pilgrims also refers to the Separatist Puritans, who constituted a minority within the larger group.
The core of the first Plymouth colonists was a group of Separatists or Separating Puritans. The Puritan movement in England consisted of Protestant reformers who wished to purify the English (or Anglican) Church of what it believed to be the last traces of Catholicism. Most Puritans believed that the church could be reformed from within. Separatists, however, believed that the English Church had become too corrupted to be reformed from within. They established their own independent congregations outside of the Anglican Church.
In 1606, William Brewster helped form a small Separatist congregation in Scrooby, England. Separatist groups were illegal in England, and in 1607, the Scrooby congregation tried to flee to Amsterdam, the Netherlands, to avoid arrest. They were caught, but most of them left England the next year. In 1609, the congregation settled in the Dutch town of Leiden.
After several years in the Netherlands, some Separatists began to fear that their children would be corrupted by the “great licentiousness of youth in that country” and would grow up to be more Dutch than English. The Separatists were frustrated that, particularly as foreigners, it was difficult to obtain land or work in skilled trades. They were also concerned by the prospect of war between Spain and the Netherlands. They obtained a patent (charter) from the Virginia Company of London to settle lands within the company’s jurisdiction in North America. Navigational errors, however, would lead them farther north to New England instead. They obtained financial backing from a group of London merchants who required them to include a large number of non-Puritans so that the group would be big enough to start a colony capable of surviving. In September 1620, the colonists sailed for America on the Mayflower. The group reached what is now Provincetown Harbor on November 21 (November 11 according to the calendar then in use). They decided to settle at what is now Plymouth on Dec. 21, 1620 (December 11 according to the calendar then in use).
Early settlers referred to “Saints” and “Strangers” to differentiate between Puritans and non-Puritans. The term “Pilgrim,” however, was not commonly used to describe the early Plymouth settlers until after the American Revolution (1775-1783).
