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Colonial America Was a Wild and Difficult Place to Be

Khalid Elhassan October 27, 2021 35 min

The seizure and destruction of tea in colonial Boston. Encyclopedia Britannica

‘The Embarkation of the Pilgrims’ by Robert Walter Weir, 1857. Google Cultural Institute

The Pilgrims Ended Up in Massachusetts Because They Ran Out of Beer

There are not that many things that can put a damper on festivities or ruin a party and harsh up the attendees’ buzz more quickly than if the hosts manage to run out of beer. It is a bummer, but seldom does the lack of beer produce results as consequential as what occurred in the summer of 1620, when the Pilgrims ended up in Massachusetts because they were about to run out of beer. Today, that might strike us as a trivial reason for such a momentous decision, but that’s because we’re not colonial Pilgrims.

To the Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower back then, beer was a serious matter. It began on August 5^th, 1620, when they departed Plymouth, England, for a journey across the Atlantic to the newly established Virginia Colony. In other words, when they set out, the Pilgrims’ destination had not been Massachusetts, but a point significantly further south. The vagaries of weather, the hardships of crossing an ocean in a seventeenth-century sail ship, coupled with low levels of beer, made them change their minds about where to settle.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.