After a three-month voyage, Anne arrived in Plymouth, per Bradford, on July 10, 1623 and Little James a week or ten days later.
[1][2][3][4] Of the 90-odd passengers, there were about 60 men, women and children total in both ships, many being former English Separatist residents of Leiden, Holland, and with about 30 others being part of an independent emigrant group led by John Oldham.
Bradford states that some of the new settlers were useful persons and became “good members to the body”, some being the wives and children of men there already, some since the Fortune came over in 1621.
But Bradford also related about those unfit for such a hardship settlement: “And some were so bad, as they were faine to be at charge to send them home again next year.” And the state of the passengers is relayed in an apologetic letter sent by Robert Cushman, former Leiden agent in London, to Bradford: “… It greeveth me to see so weake a company sent you, and yet had I not been here they had been weaker…Shuch and shuch came without my constente: but the importunitie of their freinds got promise of our Treasurer in my absence.”[7] From these statements it can be learned the reason that so many of the first arrivals disappeared from Plymouth after a few years of experiencing that hardship existence.
Many of the emigrants on the Anne and Little James would eventually be sent back to England as unfit for the task of living and working in a harsh colonial environment.