20. John Alden and Priscilla Mullins
John Alden was not among the religious dissenters known to Americans as the Pilgrims. He was a carpenter and cooper, both skills highly valued on long ocean voyages. Mayflower’s captain, Christopher Jones, hired the young man for the voyage. He made the decision to remain in the New World at some point before the first huts of the colony were erected, as evidenced by his signature on the Mayflower Compact. During the first winter hunger and disease ravaged the settlers, and one – Priscilla Mullins – lost her entire family, both parents and a brother. Priscilla married John Alden, likely in 1622, since the division of land in 1623 listed John Alden, but not her.
The romantic story regarding John, Priscilla, and Miles Standish is almost certainly entirely fictional. It stems from the poem The Courtship of Miles Standish written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, (a direct descendant) one of a series of works which fictionalized American history. Standish was married when the Pilgrims arrived, his wife Rose was one of the casualties of the first winter. His second wife, Barbara, arrived in late 1623, they were married in the spring of 1624. By that time, John and Priscilla were residing in the house he built at the foot of Burial Hill. Eventually, John and Priscilla had ten children together. She died sometime around 1685, in Duxbury, where they moved in 1627. John Alden died in 1687, one of the longest-lived of the original voyagers on the Mayflower.
