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The eagerly-awaited final title in National Geographic's popular American Documents series completes the broad sweep of the collection by casting all the way back to our country's original document of record, the Mayflower Compact. The date is November 10, 1620. After 66 days at sea crammed into a space about the size of a basketball court, the Pilgrims—as the 101 surviving passengers of the Mayflower became known—arrived on America's shores. They were an ocean away from their home country and hundreds of miles from where they were supposed to settle in the Virginia Colony. To survive in the wilderness of this strange, new land, they would need some rules for governing themselves and their community. The document they wrote is known as the Mayflower Compact.