BAPTIZED: November 13, 1614/Shipton, Shropshire, England
DIED: Between March 19, 1693/4 and April 20, 1696/Salem, New England

When the Mayflower sailed, at least 30 of the passengers were children. The most tragic may have been the four More siblings:  Ellen (age eight), Jasper (age seven), Richard (age six), and Mary (age four).

Their presence on the Mayflower resulted from a scandalous divorce between their parents, Katherine and Samuel More. After several years of marriage, Samuel suspected Katherine of having a long-term affair with a neighbor, Jacob Blakeway. Believing that the four children were not actually his, Samuel More sued for divorce and eventually won. Though apparently not the natural father, Samuel was given full parental custody. The children were forcibly taken from their mother and shuffled from place to place, despite her efforts to reclaim them.

Samuel More then sent the children away by consigning them to a risky colonial venture. Through connections with Puritan reformers, he placed them in the care of John Carver and Robert Cushman as they embarked on the Mayflower in 1620. Jasper More became a ward of John Carver; Richard and Mary were placed with Elder Brewster, and Ellen was taken in by Edward Winslow.

Only six-year-old Richard More survived the first winter in Plymouth. Taken from his home and set among strangers, he watched his three siblings die within weeks of each other in the new colony. It is unknown if Richard More ever saw his mother again.

Richard More appears to have lived in Plymouth until sometime in the early 1640s, when he moved to Salem, becoming a freeman there in February 1642/3. He worked as a mariner, and later became a ship’s captain and innkeeper.

More married twice, first in Plymouth in 1636 to Christian Hunt, who died in Salem in 1676. The widow Jane Crumton of Salem became his second wife in 1678. She was about 46; he was 64. After her death in 1686, he did not remarry.

Richard More is one of the few Mayflower Pilgrims who are documented as owning slaves. He had an enslaved woman of color named Judith in his household in November 1678, when she was sentenced to be whipped or fined for relations with an enslaved man, David Geffard;  see Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County, Massachusetts, Volume 7 (1678-1680):141.

In his later years, a few years after the death of his second wife, Captain More was suspected of “lasciviousness” and censured for “gross unchastity” in 1688; see Richard D. Pierce, ed., The Records of the First Church in Salem, Massachusetts, 1629-1736 (Salem, 1974), 166.

Richard More died sometime between 1693 and 1696. His original gravestone survives in the Charter Street Cemetery in Salem, with the text: HERE LYES BURIED Ye BODY OF CAPt RICHARD MORE AGED 84 YEARS.” In the early 20th century, an inscription was added to the old stone: “DIED 1692 MAYFLOWER PILGRIM.”  The added death date is incorrect.