Pilgrims Trivia
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This pilgrim trivia quiz has 89 free questions with answers and follows the Mayflower passengers from a Nottinghamshire manor house and a dozen years in Holland to the 66-day crossing, the Compact signed off Cape Cod, the deadly first winter and the alliance with Massasoit's Wampanoag. It covers the people (Bradford, Brewster, Standish, Squanto, Samoset, the Aldens, the babies born aboard), the ships and their fates, the 1621 harvest that later became 'the first Thanksgiving', and the myths: Plymouth Rock, black clothes and buckled hats. It suits classroom history rounds, Mayflower descendants, November pub quizzes and anyone who wants the story behind the holiday rather than the holiday itself. Easy questions cover the passenger count and the leaky companion ship; the hardest ask which book got a printer hunted across Europe and where the ship was last recorded. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia, Plimoth Patuxet Museums or Mayflower Society sources, and each question shows its citation once you have answered.
30 of 89 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which Nottinghamshire village did the future Mayflower Separatists meet secretly at a manor house?
Scrooby
Scrooby Manor belonged to the Archbishop of York, so the Separatists who met there in secret were defying the very churchman who was their landlord.
Q 02Before crossing the Atlantic, the Separatists spent about a dozen years living in which Dutch city?
Leiden
Leiden gave the Separatists work in its cloth trades, but after 11 or 12 years they left, fearing that their children were growing up Dutch and that war with Spain was about to resume.
Q 03Which pastor led the Pilgrims' congregation in Holland but never made the crossing, dying there in 1625?
John Robinson
John Robinson stayed because most of his flock did: only those ready to go sailed in 1620, the larger part of the congregation remained in Holland, and their pastor remained with them.
Q 04What were the London investors who financed the Pilgrims' voyage called?
the Merchant Adventurers
The Merchant Adventurers drove a hard bargain: the colonists were to ship home fish, timber and furs, and for seven years even their houses and land belonged to the joint venture.
Q 05Near the mouth of which river did the Pilgrims plan to settle when they sailed in 1620?
the Hudson River
The Hudson River's mouth then marked the northern edge of Virginia; dangerous shoals and contrary winds off Cape Cod turned the Mayflower back, and the Pilgrims stayed in New England.
Q 06What was the name of the leaky companion ship that twice forced the Mayflower back to port in 1620?
Speedwell
The Speedwell leaked so badly that both ships turned back twice; she was sold, and after refitting made several successful voyages for her new owners.
Q 07Which cargo did the Mayflower mainly bring home from the Continent in the years before the Pilgrims hired her?
Wine
Wine was her trade: she took English cloth out to Bordeaux and brought wine home, so the Pilgrims crossed the ocean packed into a merchant ship built for casks and bales.
Q 08How many passengers did the Mayflower carry across the Atlantic in 1620?
102
102 passengers crowded a cargo ship about 100 feet long, because the leaking companion vessel was sent back and those of its travellers who still wished to go were packed in with the rest.
Q 09About how long did the Mayflower take to cross the Atlantic in the autumn of 1620?
Two months
Two months: 66 days from Plymouth to Cape Cod, much of it through autumn storms. The voyage home the next spring took only about a month.
Q 10Who was the master, or captain, of the Mayflower on the 1620 voyage to America?
Christopher Jones
Christopher Jones meant to sail home as soon as the settlers had chosen a site, but so many of his crew fell sick or died that he wintered at Plymouth and left only in April 1621.
Q 11What did Mayflower passengers use to force a storm-cracked main beam back into place mid-ocean?
a great iron screw
A great iron screw the passengers had brought from Holland raised the cracked beam back into place; the company, which had been debating whether to turn back, then resolved to sail on.
Q 12Which passenger was washed overboard in a storm and hauled back aboard after grabbing a trailing rope?
John Howland
John Howland caught a trailing halyard, held on though dragged deep under, and was hauled in with a boat hook; the family he went on to found counts both Presidents Bush among its descendants.
Q 13Which Mayflower passenger served as Plymouth Colony's physician and a deacon of its church?
Q 21What was the first name of the first English baby born in New England, in 1620?
Peregrine
Peregrine comes from the Latin peregrinus, a wanderer or foreigner, the same root that gives English 'pilgrim'; he was born aboard the Mayflower at anchor off Cape Cod.
Q 22Roughly what share of the Mayflower's passengers died during the first winter of 1620-21?
about half
About half the passengers died that winter, and about half the crew as well; at the worst, Bradford wrote, only six or seven people were well enough to nurse all the rest.
Q 23Those who died in the first winter were buried on which rise opposite Plymouth Rock?
Cole's Hill
Cole's Hill, just above the harbour, took the first winter's dead; the town's better-known Burial Hill, further up the slope, only came into use as a graveyard later.
Samuel Fuller
Samuel Fuller was lent to the new settlement at Salem in 1629 to treat its sick; four years later the colony's own doctor died in a fever that swept Plymouth.
Q 14What name was given to the baby boy born aboard the Mayflower during the crossing?
Oceanus
Oceanus was born at sea, and his birth offset the one death among the passengers, though he did not live past early childhood.
Q 15Which Mayflower passenger had been shipwrecked in Bermuda in 1609 en route to Jamestown?
Stephen Hopkins
Stephen Hopkins was sentenced to death for mutiny while marooned on Bermuda, pleaded his way to a pardon, and a decade later crossed the Atlantic again on the Mayflower.
Q 16The Mayflower first dropped anchor on 11 November 1620 in which Cape Cod harbour?
Provincetown Harbor
Provincetown Harbor sheltered the Mayflower for about five weeks and saw the Compact signed aboard, which is why the tall Pilgrim Monument stands in Provincetown rather than Plymouth.
Q 17What did the Mayflower Compact's 41 signers pledge to obey?
Their own laws
Their own laws: the signers formed a 'civil body politic' and promised 'all due submission and obedience' to the laws it would make, while still calling themselves loyal subjects of King James.
Q 18What did the Separatists call the fellow passengers who had been recruited by the Mayflower's investors?
Strangers
The Separatists called them Strangers; some talked of going their own way once ashore, since the patent had no force this far north, which is why the Compact was drawn up before landing.
Q 19Who was the first signer of the Mayflower Compact and the colony's first governor?
John Carver
John Carver, the first signer, was chosen governor aboard ship; he died in April 1621 after collapsing in the fields on a hot day, and his wife followed within weeks.
Q 20What chore sent the Mayflower's women ashore on their first Monday at Cape Cod, 'as they had great need'?
Washing clothes
Washing clothes: after the long weeks at sea, the women went ashore to wash on Monday 13 November, two days after the Mayflower anchored.
Q 24Which Pilgrim elder sailed with his wife and two sons named Love and Wrestling?
William Brewster
William Brewster, the congregation's ruling elder, led worship at Plymouth until the first ordained pastor, Ralph Smith, arrived in 1629.
Q 25What did a Pilgrim leader secretly run in Holland that sent King James's agents hunting for him in 1619?
A printing press
A printing press in his house turned out banned religious books for readers in Britain; after a 1619 tract attacking the king's church policy in Scotland, he hid for a year until the Mayflower sailed.
Q 26Which Abenaki man startled the colonists on 16 March 1621 by greeting them in English?
Samoset
Samoset, an Abenaki sagamore from the Maine coast, had picked up his English from the fishing crews who worked there each season, and knew most of their captains by name.
Q 27Who is said to have saved Squanto from slavery in Spain in 1614?
Friars
Friars took the captives from their kidnapper to teach them Christianity, an early English account says; Squanto later reached England and got home in 1619.
Q 28What did Squanto tell the colonists to bury with their corn seed as fertiliser?
dead fish
Squanto showed them to bury dead fish in each corn hill; herring ran up the brook beside the settlement every April, just as the corn went in.
Q 29'Massasoit', the colonists' name for the Wampanoag leader, was a title meaning what?
Great Sachem
Great Sachem was his rank, not his name: Ousamequin, as his own people knew him, made a treaty with Plymouth in 1621 and kept it for the rest of his life, some forty years.
Q 30Which Pilgrim leader nursed Massasoit back to health in 1623?
Edward Winslow
Edward Winslow tended the gravely ill Massasoit in March 1623, feeding him broth until he rallied; the grateful leader then revealed a plot against the colony.