[Footnote 1:  Eggleston’s Beginners of a Nation, pp. 159-176.]

This done, Brewster and Bradford and Miles Standish, with a little band, sent out as an advance guard, set sail from the Dutch port of Delft Haven in July, 1620, in the ship Speedwell.  The first run was to Southampton, England, where some friends from London joined them in the Mayflower, and whence, August 5, they sailed for America.  But the Speedwell proved so unseaworthy that the two ships put back to Plymouth, where twenty people gave up the voyage.  September 6, 1620, such as remained steadfast, just 102 in number, reembarked on the Mayflower and began the most memorable of voyages.  The weather was so foul, and the wind and sea so boisterous, that nine weeks passed before they beheld the sandy shores of Cape Cod.  Having no right to settle there, as the cape lay far to the northward of the lands owned by the London Company, they turned their ship southward and attempted to go on.  But head winds drove them back and forced them to seek shelter in Provincetown harbor, at the end of Cape Cod.

[Illustration:  The Mayflower[1]]

[Footnote 1:  From the model in the National Museum, Washington.]

[Illustration:  THE MASSACHUSETTS COAST (map)]

%33.  The Mayflower Compact%.—­Since it was then the 11th of November, the Pilgrims, as they are now called, decided to get permission from the Plymouth Company to remain permanently.  But certain members of the party, when they heard this, became unruly, and declared that as they were not to land in Virginia, they were no longer bound by the contracts they had made in England regarding their emigration to Virginia.  To put an end to this, a meeting was held, November 21, 1620, in the cabin of the Mayflower, and a compact was drawn up and signed.[1] It declared

1.  That they were loyal subjects of the King.

2.  That they had undertaken to found a colony in the northern parts of Virginia, and now bound themselves to form a “civil body politic.”

3.  That they would frame such just and equal laws, from time to time, as might be for the general good.

4.  And to these laws they promised “all due submission and obedience.”

[Footnote 1:  The compact is in Poore’s Charters and Constitutions, p. 931, and in Preston’s Documents Illustrative of American History, pp. 29-31.  Read, by all means, Webster’s Plymouth Oration.]

[Illustration:  Plymouth Rock]

%34.  The Founding of Plymouth%.—­The selection of a site for their home was now necessary, and five weeks were passed in exploring the coast before Captain Standish with a boatload of men entered the harbor which John Smith had noted on his map and named Plymouth.  On the sandy shore of that harbor, close to the water’s edge, was a little granite bowlder, and on this, according to tradition, the Pilgrims