Having crossed a brutal Atlantic winter and signed the Mayflower Compact weeks earlier, the Pilgrims finally set foot at Plymouth on December 21 (Old Style December 11), beginning construction of the colony that would become a foundation myth of American identity. Half the settlers would die within months from disease and exposure.
The Mayflower had spent weeks probing the New England coastline for a defensible, fresh-watered site before the shallop finally put ashore at what the Pilgrims named Plymouth, matching a spot already mapped by earlier English explorers. The ground was frozen, the harbor shallow, and the nearest Wampanoag communities had been devastated by epidemics years before, leaving cleared fields the newcomers could use without displacing living villages.
Winter closed in almost immediately. Scurvy, pneumonia, and general exposure killed roughly half of the 102 passengers and crew by spring, including governor John Carver. Yet the survivors' first anxious months, aided crucially by Wampanoag diplomat Tisquantum (Squanto), set in motion the English colonization of the region and a story later mythologized into the Thanksgiving narrative — one far messier and more desperate than the tidy legend suggests.