BAPTIZED: 26 January 1595 at Dorking, Surrey, England
DIED: 1633

Peter Browne was 25 years when he traveled alone on the Mayflower in 1620. Born in late 1594 or early 1595, he was baptized in Dorking, Surrey on January 26, 1595 to William Browne and an unknown mother. It is possible that Peter had connections with another Mayflower family, the Mullinses, also of Dorking. There is some evidence that Alice Mullins may have been Peter’s aunt on his father’s side. This as-yet-unproved connection may have been a factor in Peter Browne’s decision to travel on the Mayflower.

Peter Browne was one of the signers of the Mayflower Compact. He may have been the Colony’s first dog owner. In January of 1621, Browne and fellow passenger John Goodman became lost in the woods near the Plymouth settlement when the two dogs that were with them ran off to chase a deer and they pursued them. The men spent a fearful night in the woods, sheltering in a tree with the sound of “lions” roaring in the darkness, but found their way back the next day after spotting the bay from a tall hill.

Peter Browne first married, around 1624, the widowed Martha Ford, who arrived in Plymouth on the ship Fortune. She brought three children to the marriage, John and Martha, and an unknown child who died before the 1627 Cattle Division. Together the couple had two daughters named Priscilla and Mary, but Goodwife Browne likely died not long after the 1627 Cattle Division. He was married a second time to a woman named Mary (surname unknown), with whom he had two more children, a daughter Rebecca and another whose name is unknown, who died as a teenager.

Peter Browne was a weaver by trade and he eventually owned more sheep than anyone else in early Plymouth Colony. He died in 1633, between March 25th when he was taxed and October 28th of that year when an after-death inventory of his property was taken for the purpose of distribution among his dependents. He likely succumbed to the smallpox epidemic that killed many of the Plymouth colonists in 1633, including the colony’s physician Samuel Fuller, and seriously impacted the local Indigenous community.

Browne died without a will. On October 28, 1633, his widow Mary Browne presented the inventory of his estate to the Plymouth Court. The Court ordered money set aside for Peter’s daughters Mary and Priscilla, who were bound over to other community members for care, and the rest of his estate was allowed to Mary Browne to bring up her two children by Peter.

On the discovery of Peter Browne’s English origins, see Caleb Johnson, “The Probable English Origin of Mayflower Passenger Peter
Browne, and His Association With Mayflower Passenger William Mullins,” The American Genealogist, 79 (July 2004): 161-178.