John Carver William Bradford Edward Winslow William Brewster Isaac Allerton John Alden Myles Standish Samuel Fuller Christopher Martin William Mullins William White Richard Warren John Howland Stephen Hopkins Edward Tilley John Tilley Francis Cooke Thomas Rogers Thomas Tinker John Rigdale Edward Fuller John Turner Francis Eaton James Chilton John Crackston John Billington Moses Fletcher John Goodman Degory Priest Thomas Williams Gilbert Winslow Edmund Margeson Peter Brown Richard Britteridge George Soule Richard Clarke Richard Gardner John Allerton Thomas English Edward Doten Edward Lester The “Compact” was succeeded, in law, if not in the respect of the colonists, by a regular patent taken out in the name of one of the Adventurers (the English investors) in 1621. This is now in Pilgrim Hall. It was superseded by another, also to the Adventurers; and finally, in 1629, after the colonists had bought out the English investors, by one to “Wm. Bradford and associates,”--that is, the freemen of the colony. By thus transferring the “home office” of the company from London to America, the colony became an all but independent government. Consciously or unconsciously, it had from the beginning exercised most of the functions of a sovereign state, and continued to do so, except during the “tyranny” of Sir Edmund Andros, until it merged with the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1691. [Illustration] From Plymouth, England _to_ Plymouth, Massachusetts [Illustration] _In England_: “On the 25th of August 1620 From the West Quay near this spot The famous Mayflower began her voyage Carrying the little company of Pilgrim Fathers Who were destined to be the founders Of the New England States of America.” Memorial tablet at Southampton, England. Placed by the Massachusetts Society of the Colonial Dames of America. _At Provincetown_: “They established and maintained on the bleak and barren edge of a vast wilderness, a state without a king or a noble, a church without a bishop or a priest, a democratic commonwealth the members of which were ‘straightly tied to all care of each other’s good, and for the whole by every one.’ “With long suffering devotion and sober resolution they illustrated for the first time in history the principles of civic and religious liberty and the practices of a genuine democracy. “Therefore the remembrance of them shall be perpetual in the vast republic that has inherited their ideals.”