Mayflower Compact signatories

The Mayflower Compact was the iconic document in the earliest history of America. It was ratified by forty-one men on board the Pilgrim ship Mayflower on November 11, 1620 while anchored at Cape Cod, now Provincetown Harbor in Massachusetts. The Compact was originally drafted as an instrument to maintain unity and discipline in this new land called Plymouth Colony but, over time, it has become one of the most historic documents in American History.

It was later published in London in Mourt's Relation in 1622, and the authors had added a preamble which clarified its meaning: "it was thought good there should be an association and agreement, that we should combine together in one body, and to submit to such government and governors as we should by common consent agree to make and choose."

On November 11, it was the intention of the Pilgrim leadership that each man must sign the Compact before anyone set foot on land—or mark with an X if he could not write.

The passengers probably assembled in the ship’s great cabin, about thirteen by seventeen feet, with two windows on the stern and one window on either side. Forty-one men signed the Compact, beginning with Governor John Carver and ending with Edward Lester. Nine adult males on board did not sign the document; some had been hired as seamen only for one year and others were probably too ill to write. No women signed it, in accordance with cultural and legal custom of the times.

What is known today of the wording of the Mayflower Compact comes from William Bradford’s manuscript, apparently copied from the original document. The original of the Mayflower Compact has long been lost, possibly stolen during Revolutionary War looting. The text was first published in 1622 and then in Bradford’s journal from about 1630. But Bradford did not have a list or even gave a suggestion of the names of the signers. Plymouth Colony secretary Nathaniel Morton provides both the Compact and a list of signers in his 1669 New Englands Memoriall, and many persons have thought that this list was an actual transcript of the names of all the signers and in the sequence of their signing.

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