How Many Pilgrims Died During the First Winter?

About half of the passengers and crew died that winter

102 passengers sailed from England aboard the Mayflower in September 1620. One young passenger, an indentured servant named William Button, died during the stormy ocean crossing. One child, named Oceanus Hopkins, was born at sea. By the time the ship dropped anchor off the coast of Cape Cod in November, the passenger count stood at 102. Another child, Peregrine White, was born aboard the ship while it rested in the harbor.

When the bitter weather finally broke in April 1621, only 51 of those 102 passengers were still alive. That means 51 people died during that single season, cutting the colony exactly in half.

Our clearest count comes directly from William Bradford, who later served as the governor of Plymouth Colony. Bradford kept a detailed journal titled Of Plymouth Plantation. His writing is a primary source (a firsthand written account from someone who was actually there). Bradford wrote down the names of every person who arrived on the ship, along with notes on who survived and who passed away.

Many history books overlook the ship's sailors, but the Mayflower crew suffered just as badly as the settlers. Captain Christopher Jones had about 50 officers and sailors under his command. Roughly half of those crew members died before the ship returned to England in the spring. Key crewmen, including the boatswain, the ship's gunner, three quartermasters, and the cook, died from the same illnesses that swept through the passengers. If you combine both groups, approximately 75 to 80 people aboard the Mayflower died between December 1620 and April 1621.

If you see different numbers on school worksheets or internet pages, the difference usually comes down to three details:

• Some counts include the people who died at sea before the ship reached North America.
• Some counts stop at the end of February, while others follow the illness until the ship sailed away in April 1621.
• Some tallies combine the Mayflower sailors with the Pilgrims, while others count only the passenger families.

Sickness and poor food caused far more deaths than freezing

Many people assume the Pilgrims froze to death in heavy New England snowdrifts. Freezing winter storms certainly made life miserable, but cold weather was not the direct cause of most deaths. Instead, the true killers were severe malnutrition and infectious disease. The colonists arrived at the start of winter with worn-out bodies, poor food reserves, and immune systems that could not fight off ordinary germs.

The first major condition was scurvy (severe weakness and illness from a lack of vitamin C). The passengers spent over two months crossing the Atlantic Ocean eating hardtack (dry, rock-hard biscuits), salted beef, salted pork, and dried peas. They had no oranges, lemons, fresh vegetables, or fresh meat. Vitamin C keeps human tissue healthy. Without it, gums bleed, teeth loosen, old scars reopen, joints swell with fluid, and simple walking becomes agonizingly painful. Scurvy does not always kill a person on its own, but it leaves the body completely defenseless.

The second killer was pneumonia (a dangerous lung infection common in cold, wet quarters). The settlers spent weeks searching for a good place to build their town. Because coastal waters were shallow, men had to jump out of their small landing boats and wade waist-deep through freezing ocean water to get ashore. Their heavy woolen clothes absorbed gallons of icy salt water.

Today, anyone who studies how to keep warm in winter outdoors knows that wet clothes suck body heat away rapidly, making you sick fast. The Pilgrims had no change of dry clothing and no warm place to dry their wet coats. They slept in wet wool on the damp deck of the ship.

A general sickness took hold of the camp in January. Historians believe this wave was a combination of pneumonia, scurvy, and typhus (a bacterial infection spread by body lice in unwashed clothes). When a lung infection hit a person whose body was already broken by scurvy, the victim rarely survived more than a few days.

Women suffered the highest death rate of any group

The losses of that first winter were not spread evenly among the colonists. Adult women suffered by far the highest death rate of any group in the settlement. Out of the eighteen married women who boarded the Mayflower, fourteen died before the arrival of warm spring weather. Only four adult women lived to attend the famous harvest meal known today as the first Thanksgiving. That means nearly 78 percent of the adult women died in just four months.

This heartbreaking loss happened because of where women spent their time and how they cared for their families. Women stayed inside the crowded, unventilated hold of the ship with young children and the bedridden. When disease broke out, the women took on the job of nursing the sick, washing soiled clothes, and cleaning bedding. This put them in constant, direct contact with coughed-up bacteria and lice. On top of that, mothers routinely gave their own food rations to their children, starving their own bodies to keep their sons and daughters alive.

Adult men had a lower mortality rate, though their losses were still devastating. Out of seventy-eight adult men and older teenage boys, about half died. Men faced brutal daily labor in snow and sleet, chopping down trees and hauling heavy timber. But working outdoors gave them fresh air, which spared them from breathing the stale, germ-choked air of the ship's lower deck all day long.

Children and young teenagers had the best survival rate of the entire colony. Out of roughly thirty children and youths on board, about twenty-five survived the winter. Parents shielded their children as much as possible by keeping them warm, giving them the best pieces of food, and protecting them from the worst physical strain. Younger bodies also had healthier blood vessels, which helped them survive the lack of fresh vitamins better than their aging parents.

Staying aboard a damp ship allowed illness to spread quickly

Many readers wonder why the Pilgrims did not move onto land immediately to escape the sick ship. The delay came down to bad timing, brutal storms, and sheer physical exhaustion. The Mayflower arrived at Provincetown in November 1620, but the settlers did not select Plymouth until late December. By then, winter was in full force, bringing blinding blizzards and freezing rain.

Building wooden homes from raw forest timber took immense physical labor. The men had to chop down large trees by hand, square the logs with axes, dig footings into frozen soil, and thatch roofs with dry marsh reeds. Short winter days and frequent storms stopped work for days at a time. The colony planned to build nineteen private family homes and a common storehouse. By the end of winter, they had finished only the single common house and a few tiny wooden huts.

Because there were almost no finished cabins on land, the vast majority of families had to remain living aboard the Mayflower throughout January, February, and March. The living conditions on the ship were miserable. Passengers lived between decks in a dark, drafty space with ceilings barely five feet high. More than eighty people were crammed together into narrow wooden bunks.

Modern homeowners look for practical ways on how to keep warm in winter in the house by sealing drafts and keeping rooms dry, but the Pilgrims had no such options. Seawater leaked through the deck seams, soaking blankets and clothes. There was no indoor plumbing, so chamber pots sat in open living quarters. People coughed, vomited, and suffered from severe diarrhea just inches from one another. Germs spread from bunk to bunk like wildfire.

The death toll peaked in January and February 1621. During those two months, two to three people died almost every single day. At the lowest point of the winter, only six or seven people were healthy enough to stand on their feet. Governor Bradford recorded that these few healthy people, including Captain Myles Standish and elder William Brewster, worked day and night without complaint. They chopped firewood, tended hearths, cooked simple broth, washed filthy clothes, and gently cleaned the sick and dying until help arrived.

Warmer weather and local Native help saved the remaining colony

The deadly wave finally began to slow down in late March 1621. As the frozen ground thawed and temperatures climbed, the physical environment changed dramatically. Colonists who were sick began to heal once they could leave the dark belly of the ship and breathe warm, fresh air on dry land.

The colony's survival was secured through crucial contact with local Indigenous leaders. In mid-March, an Indigenous man named Samoset walked boldly into the Plymouth settlement and greeted the colonists in English, which he had learned from English fishermen along the coast of Maine. A few days later, Samoset returned with Tisquantum, widely known as Squanto, who belonged to the Patuxet band of the Wampanoag nation.

Tisquantum introduced the Pilgrims to Massasoit, the supreme leader (sachem) of the Wampanoag confederacy. The two groups established a formal peace treaty and mutual defense agreement that lasted for decades. This alliance removed the immediate fear of conflict, allowing the weakened colonists to focus all their energy on staying alive.

Several concrete changes helped the surviving fifty-one colonists turn the corner that spring:

• Moving completely out of the Mayflower into dry, ventilated huts on land, which stopped the spread of airborne ship infections.
• Harvesting fresh wild greens, groundnuts, and spring clams, which restored vitamin C levels and quickly cured scurvy.
• Learning local planting methods from Tisquantum, who taught the settlers to plant native flint corn in dirt mounds with herring fish buried underneath to fertilize the rocky New England soil.
• Securing a steady supply of clean, boiling spring water instead of drinking contaminated water or sour ship beer.
• Drying out wet clothes, blankets, and footwear under the warm spring sun, preventing further cases of pneumonia.

When Captain Jones prepared the Mayflower to sail back across the Atlantic to England on April 5, 1621, he offered free passage to any colonist who wanted to give up and return home. Despite losing half their family members and friends over the preceding four months, not a single surviving Pilgrim chose to leave Plymouth.