On November 21, the Mayflower moored in what would come to be called Provincetown Harbor, in present-day Massachusetts. Although they had landed far north of where their land grant, issued by the London Company, stated they should settle the Puritans and non-Puritans chose to settle where they were. It was a bold act in that they no longer were under the jurisdiction of the London Company.
Before the decision had been made to remain where they were a mutiny had been nearly enacted by the non-Puritan of the ships members. These individuals quickly saw the advantage settling where they were because there were no laws to control them.
Realizing the uncontrolled position the Puritans had put themselves in the Puritan leaders quickly devised the first self-proclaimed form of government in the New World, calling it the Mayflower Compact.
On the surface it may appear that the Puritans, themselves, were performing a kind of mutiny against their European rulers and enacting an early form of revolution. Perhaps this was one of many Seeds of Rebellion, against English rule that would occur before the final breech came more than a century later.
But mutiny nor revolution was not what the Puritans intended when they constructed the Mayflower Compact. They were simply improvising rules to live by for the good of everyone concerned until a higher means of enacting law and order reached them. It was an occurrence that would be repeated many times over in America in the next two hundred years as more Europeans flooded the eastern seaboard then began to inch westward towards the Pacific.
The first declaration of the Compact bears out that the Pilgrims remained, after God, loyal to King James, their "dread soveraigne Lord, King James, by ye grace of God, of Great Britaine, Franc & Ireland." After further swearing of loyalty to God and king, the signers of the Compact declared to form themselves into a "civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid." The signers go on to promise to form and enact just and equal laws and ordinances, as well as constitutions and offices as the need arose.
The Mayflower Compact continued.
