Mayflower Ship Sailing Coloring Page with PDF Sheet

Mayflower Ship Sailing: History & Fun Facts

The 1620 Crossing from England

Departing Plymouth, England in September 1620, this three-masted vessel carried 102 passengers and roughly 30 crew members across the North Atlantic, originally aiming for land near the Hudson River. Rough autumn weather pushed the ship off course, and after weeks of battling storms the crew instead anchored off Cape Cod in present-day Massachusetts, hundreds of miles from where the passengers had planned to settle.

The 66-day crossing was cramped and grim, with most passengers confined to a single dim deck below the main cargo hold for the entire voyage. One passenger died at sea and another was born during the crossing, a baby named Oceanus Hopkins, a small reminder that the ship carried entire families rather than soldiers or explorers traveling alone.

A Cargo Ship Pressed Into New Duty

This vessel was never built to carry passengers. Records suggest it spent its working years before 1620 hauling wine and other goods between England and continental Europe, which explains the rounded hull visible in this scene, a shape built for cargo capacity rather than speed.

Estimates put its length at around 100 feet with a cargo capacity near 180 tons, rigged with square sails typical of English merchant ships of the period. The raised structure at the stern, visible behind the portholes in this illustration, housed the captain's quarters and gave officers a lookout point above the main deck.

The Mayflower Compact and a Ship That Lives On

Before anyone stepped ashore, 41 of the adult male passengers signed what's now called the Mayflower Compact, a short agreement to form a self-governing body and follow shared rules for the colony's good. The document mattered because the ship had landed outside the territory covered by its original charter, leaving the group without a clear legal framework until they wrote one themselves.

No original vessel survives today, but a full-size, historically researched replica named Mayflower II has sailed and been docked in Plymouth, Massachusetts for public viewing since the 1950s. Visitors can walk its deck and see firsthand how little space more than a hundred people actually had for two months at sea.

Reading the Sails and Rigging in This Scene

The three masts shown leaning into the wind here each carried multiple square sails stacked one above another, a rigging style that let a small crew adjust speed by raising or lowering individual sails rather than hauling one giant sheet of canvas. A flag flying from the highest mast, visible at the very top of this illustration, typically marked a ship's home country or the merchant company that owned it.

Rows of small round portholes along the hull, also visible in this scene, let a limited amount of light and air reach the crowded decks below, though most passengers still spent the crossing in near darkness once storms forced the crew to seal the hatches. Gulls trailing a ship like this usually meant land was getting closer, since the birds rarely ventured far out over open ocean, giving anxious passengers one of their few visual clues that the long crossing was nearing its end.