There is the Compact. Freedom within due limits set by the consent of the governed, these men who had chosen exile rather than submission to a tyrannous reading of the law proclaimed as the rule of their future, a principle vital to the spirit of the nation that was to be. And their Compact signed, and John Carver chosen governor for the ensuing year, the captain anchored offshore and they proceeded upon the next step of their adventure. After the cramped wretchedness of the Mayflower, they must have been eager for release. “Being pestred nine weeks in the leaking unwholsome shipe, lying wet in their cabins, most of them grew very weake and weary of the Sea,” John Smith wrote of their passage thither. In any case there could be no question as to the necessity of landing: they must have wood and water; the women wanted to wash, the men to stretch their legs and replenish the larder with fish and game and corn. If in the process they found a spot suitable for settlement and offering a prospect of fair return on the investment made by their financial backers, the “Merchant Adventurers” of London, so much the better. That first day, November 11, Old Style, after the Compact was signed, some fifteen men landed rather to gather firewood than to explore. They saw no Indians, and found the “sand hills much like the downs of Holland, but better, the crust of the earth a spit’s depth excellent black earth all wooded with oaks, pines, sassafras, juniper, birch, holly, vines, some ash, walnut; the wood for the most part open and without underwood, fit either to go or ride in.” Comment which would ill describe the present appearance of Provincetown and Truro; but then the whole inner shore of the Cape, at least, seems to have been wooded to the water’s edge. The party returned with a boatload of juniper, “which smelled very sweet and strong.” The Sunday they kept aboard ship, with what thankful hearts for their “preservation on the great deep,” and steadfast hope of the future as we may imagine. On Monday the men went ashore to do some boat-building, and the women to wash. These landing parties had an uncomfortable time of it, for the water was too shallow to beach a boat, and they “were forced to wade a bow-shot or two in going a-land, which caused many to get colds and coughs, for it was many times freezing weather.”