Pilgrims Quiz - MSN Encarta

About how long did it take for the Pilgrims -- early English settlers who founded the first settlement in New England -- to sail from Plymouth, England, to where they dropped anchor near Provincetown, Massachusetts?

Three weeks

Over two months

About four months

Almost seven months

The Mayflower -- which, at about 27 m (90 ft), was just a bit longer than a standard tennis court -- had 102 passengers, plus a crew of 30. There were far too many people on board; why was the ship so overloaded?

The 'Mayflower' (Image credit: Philip Gendreau/Bettmann/Corbis)

There were more than 20 stowaways who were not discovered until the ship was out at sea.

The Pilgrims did not give the ship's captain a correct account of its passengers.

The Pilgrims forgot to add the 37 children to the ship's passenger roster.

The other ship on the journey, the Speedwell, was leaking; all but 20 passengers on this ship were moved to the Mayflower.

Once the Pilgrims had decided to settle in an abandoned Wampanoag village near the harbor, they began building homes. What were the Pilgrim houses modeled after?

The wooden, thatch-roofed English cottage

The river rock and mud homes found in rural parts of England

The circular, grass- or bark-roofed homes of the Wampanoag Indians who lived nearby

The finely crafted and spacious dwellings of the Dutch Colonial style

When the Pilgrims first began exploring the Cape Cod area, they found and stole large baskets of food that the Wampanoag Indians had buried on a big hill. What was in the baskets?

Dried fish

Barley and wheat seeds

Sweet potatoes

Corn kernels

Early life in Plymouth Colony was quite hard, with more than half the Pilgrims dying by the end of their first winter. What caused this to happen?

Inadequate housing

Poor nutrition

Diseases such as scurvy and pneumonia

All of the above

Squanto (or Tisquantum) was a Native American who became associated with the Wampanoag tribe after his own Patuxet tribe was decimated by a plague. He helped the Pilgrims immeasurably. What did Squanto not do for the Pilgrims?

Teach them how to plant corn

Teach them how to build an indoor cooking pit

Act as a guide and interpreter

Teach them how to fish and hunt in the area

Home building was a long and arduous task for the Pilgrims; after a year in Plymouth, only seven homes had been completed. Where did the Pilgrims live while building more homes?

In makeshift tents or shacks in the colony

Aboard the Mayflower

Several families crammed into each of the available homes.

In the caves they found on the hills above Plymouth

Life in the colony included a lot of physical labor for all the Pilgrims, including the children. What was a daily chore for all households in the colony?

Cutting and fetching wood; tending the fire

Hunting, gathering and preparing food

Fetching water in wooden buckets

All of the above

Which statement regarding the "First Thanksgiving," during the autumn of 1621, is true?

Thanksgiving in America (Image credit: THE BETTMANN ARCHIVE)

The Wampanoag Indians brought 14 wild turkeys as a gift to the Pilgrims.

Between meals, the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag played games.

It was a large sit-down feast with the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians all together.

The Pilgrims still had very little food to eat, so the Wampanoag brought most of it.

What eventually happened to the Plymouth Colony?

The Pilgrims left and moved to larger outlying colonies.

The colony was annexed to Provincetown, Massachusetts, in 1702.

England united it with the Maine and Massachusetts Bay colonies in 1691.

A smallpox epidemic in 1635 wiped out most of the Pilgrims.