When the Mayflower first weighed anchor off Cape Cod on November 11, , of the passengers who had sailed from England on the Mayflower the Speedwell carrying 20 passengers had to turn back one had died, William Butten, apprentice to Samuel Fuller, and one had been born, Oceanus Hopkins, and so there were still as the result of one death and one birth.
So by the time that the Mayflower arrived at Plymouth Harbor on December 16, , there were 99 "first comers. After the Mayflower left on its return journey to England on April 5, , five more settlers died, including Governor John Carver and his wife, reducing the number of survivors to New York: Knopf, , pp. In Bradford told John Pory, a visitor to Plymouth, that "for the space of one whole year of the two wherein they had been there, died not one man, woman or child. Sydney V. James, Jr. In Thomas Weston sent a fishing vessel, the Sparrow, to Massachusetts Bay, with a small party of seven men to find the most suitable place for a colony.
They were to prepare for the arrival of a large group of single men whom he proposed to send out. Weston was one of the leaders of the London merchant adventurers who sponsored the establishment of Plymouth Colony, but who was now independently setting up his own. The site eventually chosen was at Wessagusset modern Weymouth, some thirty miles north of Plymouth.
The ship anchored at the Damaris Cove Islands off the coast of Maine, and a group of ten, including some crew from the Sparrow , sailed down to Plymouth in a shallop, arriving there on May 31, , just as Massasoit's men were demanding that Squanto be handed over to them for execution.
They brought letters to the Governor from Weston, but no provisions for which the settlement was in desperate need.
