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The first governing document of the colony was the Mayflower Compact, drafted and ratified by the first group of colonists aboard their ship, the Mayflower, as it lay off-shore. On December 21, 1620, 102 Pilgrims from the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock on the western shore of Cape Cod Bay in southeastern Massachusetts.
The first settlement of the colony was New Plymouth, later Plymouth, Massachusetts. By the end of that winter almost half of the settlers were dead, including their leader John CarverJohn Carver born c. 1576, in either Nottinghamshire or Derbyshire, England and died on April 15, 1621 in what became Plymouth, Massachusetts, United States, was the first governor of Plymouth Colony. Carver was one of the Pilgrims who came over in the May. Thus began one of the best-intended, historically renowned, and yet strangely ill-fated colonial ventures in America. When the Massachusetts Bay ColonyThe Massachusetts Bay Colony (sometimes called by the name Massachusetts Bay Company for the institution that founded it) was the direct predecessor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay and then the state of Massachusetts. The colony was established under got its new charter in 1691, Plymouth ended its history as a separate colony.
William BradfordWilliam Bradford ( 1590 May 9, 1657) was a leader of the Pilgrim settlers of the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts, and became Governor of the Plymouth Colony. He was the son of William Bradford and his wife Alice Hanson, and was baptised on March 19, 1590 became governor in 1621 on the death of Carver, served for eleven consecutive years, and was elected to various other terms until his death in 1657Events January 8 Miles Sindercombe, would-be-assassin of Oliver Cromwell, and his group are captured in London February Admiral Robert Blake defeats the Spanish West Indian Fleet in a battle over the seizure of Jamaica. April 20 Admiral Robert Blake destr. On March 22, 1621, the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony signed a peace treaty with Massasoit of the Wampanoags.The colony contained roughly what is now Bristol County, Plymouth County, and Barnstable County, Massachusetts.