William Mullins (Mayflower passenger)
William Mullins (c. 1572 – 21 February 1621) and his family traveled as passengers on the historic 1620 voyage to America on the Pilgrim ship Mayflower.
[3][4][5] William Mullins is first named in a Dorking record on 4 October 1595, when he was fined two pence, apparently for not attending the manorial court session of that year.
Mullins may have moved from Dorking to Stoke near Guildford, co. Surrey (a parish about ten miles to the west), where a man of that name appears on the militia list of 1596.
He married sometime around this date, but (most unfortunately again) the parish registers of Stoke near Guildford have been lost for the period prior to 1662, so his marriage record, and the baptisms of his children, are not to be found.
On 1 May he appeared before the Lordships of the Privy Council and was continued technically in their custody "untill by their Honours' order hee be dismissed."
In a letter written by many of the Pilgrims to the Adventurers, they mentioned that many of the passengers had already invested in the company based on the previous terms, and therefore it was unfair to change them.
Although Robert Cushman, who had been the Leiden agent for Mayflower voyage preparations, came to Plymouth in November 1621 to try to settle the differences between the Pilgrims and the Adventurers, they parted ways without coming to an agreement on the terms by which they would work—the beginning of a rift that would pull apart the company in later years when the Pilgrims bought out the Adventurers and formed their own investment company.
After several days of trying to get south to their planned destination of the Colony of Virginia, strong winter seas forced them to return to the harbor at Cape Cod hook, where they anchored on 21 November 1620, and William Mullins, with 40 other male passengers, signed The Mayflower Compact.
[16][17][18] William Mullins, his wife Alice and son Joseph all died within months of arriving in the New World, along with their servant Robert Carter.
Per Stratton, Alice, her son Joseph and servant Robert Carter were all alive on 5 April 1621 when the Mayflower set sail on its return voyage to England, but all had died before the arrival of the ship Fortune in mid-November of that year.
[2][19][self-published source][20] In the March 2012 Mayflower Quarterly, noted Mayflower researcher and biographer, Caleb Johnson, presented a hypothesis that William Mullins first married Elizabeth Wood who gave birth to his first four children, and died sometime prior to 1604; whereupon, he married Alice_____ who gave birth to his youngest child, Joseph.
In that article, he stated, “I here put together this very speculative hypothesis, and leave it up to future research to determine if there is any further evidence to support, or disprove, this possibility.
“Recent research into her origins, undertaken by Caleb Johnson and Simon Neal, has focused on the Browne, Dendy, Gardinar, Hammon, and Wood families of Dorking and Holy Trinity, Guildford.
[23] As previously stated above, on 29 April 1616, William Mullins was called before the Lordships of the Privy Council and held for an unknown reason for a period of time.
It was written for him on his deathbed by Governor John Carver and witnessed by Dr. Giles Heale, surgeon of the Mayflower and its captain, Christopher Jones.
He also divided his shares in the joint-stock company among family members as well as stipulating that if his son William should ever come to Plymouth – which he eventually did – he would inherit his property there.
[1] William Mullins' wife Alice and son Joseph are believed to have died sometime after the departure of the Mayflower for England on 5 April 1621 and before the arrival of the ship Fortune in mid-November 1621.
