The Pilgrims or rather Pilgrim Fathers were some of the early settlers of the Plymouth Colony in present-day Plymouth, Massachusetts, United States. They started out in the religious congregations of Brownist English Dissenters but ended up having to flee the political environment of England as they maintained the concept of separation from the English state church.

With eyes originally set on the relative calm and tolerance of 16th–17th century Holland in the Netherlands, they began to worry that if they emigrated to the Netherlands they would eventually lose their English cultural identity. As a result they decided to make agreements with English investors in order to establish a new colony in North America.

This film examines the challenges they faced in making their goal of starting a fresh in the New World a reality and how these challenges still resonate almost 400 years later.