The ships Anne and Little James
third and fourth ships financed by the London-based Company of Merchant Adventurers to travel together to North America in support of the Plymouth Colony
In 1623, Anne and Little James were the third and fourth ships financed by the London-based Company of Merchant Adventurers to travel together to North America in support of the Plymouth Colony, following Mayflower in 1620 and Fortune in 1621. Anne carried mostly passengers, while the much smaller Little James carried primarily cargo, albeit with a few passengers as well. After a stormy three-month voyage from England, Anne arrived at New Plymouth in early July 1623, with Little James arriving a week or so later.
Between them the ships brought 90-odd new settlers, along with about thirty others who were not part of the core emigrant group. Many of this emigrant contingent would serve the colony well in the coming years, while others would be judged unfit for the hardships of colony life and be sent back to England.
Anne
Anne was a supply ship of about 140 tons displacement which was used in 1623, along with Little James, to deliver a large party of new settlers to the newly founded Plymouth Colony. Anne was the larger of the two ships and most of the passengers traveled in her. Anne's master was William Peirce, a young man of Ratcliffe, London who was a member of the Adventurers investment group and had made many trans-Atlantic voyages. William Bradford, quoted by author Charles Edward Banks, gives the date of arrival of Anne at Plymouth as being July 10, 1623, with the pinnace Little James's arrival being, per Bradford, “..about a week or so after came in the pinnass (sic).” Author Caleb Johnson reports that Little James arrived in Plymouth on August 5, 1623.
Soon after arrival, the crew of Anne went to work loading whatever timber and beaver skins could be provided as cargo and sailed straight back across the Atlantic to home.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “The ships Anne and Little James” is third and fourth ships financed by the London-based Company of Merchant Adventurers to travel together to North America in support of the Plymouth Colony. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through ships, Anne and Little, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “third and fourth ships financed by the London-based Company of Merchant Adventurers to travel together to North America in support of the Plymouth Colony” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16934284. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1623, 1620 and 1621.
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This entry incorporates text from “The ships Anne and Little James” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.