Which ship carried the Pilgrims to America in 1620?

The Mayflower, an unremarkable cargo ship of about 180 tonnes that normally carried wine and cloth, chartered for a voyage it was not designed for. It took 66 days to cross with 102 passengers plus crew, and arrived at Cape Cod in November - the worst possible month to begin building shelter in New England.

About half of them died in the first winter, mostly of scurvy, pneumonia and exposure, and the settlement survived largely because of Tisquantum, known as Squanto, who taught them to plant maize. He could do so because he spoke English, and he spoke English because he had been kidnapped years earlier and sold into slavery in Spain, made his way to England, and returned to find his entire village dead of an epidemic brought by earlier European contact.

They also had not intended to land there. The patent was for the mouth of the Hudson, and being outside their legal jurisdiction with no authority is what prompted the Mayflower Compact - a document agreeing to submit to laws made by common consent, signed before anyone stepped ashore. It is regularly cited as an ancestor of American constitutional government, which is a large weight for a piece of improvised crisis management to carry.