The Pilgrims 1955 Encyclopaedia Britannica Films

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'Follows the Pilgrims from England to Holland and to New England. Discusses the Mayflower compact and the hardships in the New World.'

Originally a public domain film from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilgrims_(Plymouth_Colony)

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The Pilgrims were the English settlers who came to North America on the Mayflower and established the Plymouth Colony in what is today Plymouth, Massachusetts, named after the final departure port of Plymouth, Devon. Their leadership came from the religious congregations of Brownists, or Separatist Puritans, who had fled religious persecution in England for the tolerance of 17th-century Holland in the Netherlands.

They held many of the same Puritan Calvinist religious beliefs but, unlike most other Puritans, they maintained that their congregations should separate from the English state church, which led to them being labeled Separatists. After several years living in exile in Holland, they eventually determined to establish a new settlement in the New World and arranged with investors to fund them. They established Plymouth Colony in 1620. The Pilgrims' story became a central theme in the history and culture of the United States...

The core of the group called "the Pilgrims" was brought together around 1605 when they quit the church of England to form Separatist congregations in the north of England, led by John Robinson, Richard Clyfton, and John Smyth. Their congregations held Brownist beliefs—that true churches were voluntary democratic congregations, not whole Christian nations—as taught by Robert Browne, John Greenwood, and Henry Barrow. As Separatists, they held that their differences with the Church of England were irreconcilable and that their worship should be independent of the trappings, traditions, and organization of a central church.

The Separatist movement was controversial. Under the Act of Uniformity 1559, it was illegal not to attend official Church of England services, with a fine of one shilling (£0.05; about £19 today) for each missed Sunday and holy day. The penalties included imprisonment and larger fines for conducting unofficial services...

The Pilgrims moved to the Netherlands around 1607/08. They lived in Leiden, Holland, a city of 30,000 inhabitants...

the Pilgrims felt they had to leave...

Possible destinations included Guiana on the northeast coast of South America where the Dutch had established Essequibo colony, or another site near the Virginia settlements...

Weston did come with a substantial change, telling the Leiden group that parties in England had obtained a land grant north of the existing Virginia territory to be called New England. This was only partially true; the new grant did come to pass, but not until late in 1620 when the Plymouth Council for New England received its charter. It was expected that this area could be fished profitably, and it was not under the control of the existing Virginia government.

A second change was known only to parties in England who did not inform the larger group. New investors had been brought into the venture who wanted the terms altered so that, at the end of the seven-year contract, half of the settled land and property would revert to the investors. Also, there had been a provision in the original agreement that allowed each settler to have two days per week to work on personal business, but this provision was dropped from the final agreement without the knowledge of the Pilgrims...