Plymouth wasn’t the first or

the largest or most successful of the English settlements. But it has taken an outsize place in the American story.

“Regardless of anything that came before or after, Plymouth is the ‘once upon a time’ to the story of the United States — the symbolic, if not literal, birthplace of our Nation,” declares the website for Plimoth Plantation, a reconstructed Pilgrim settlement and living history exhibit.

But the 102 passengers aboard the Mayflower — equal numbers “saints” and “strangers” — did not cross the Atlantic to establish a democratic society. When they set sail from Plymouth, England, on Sept. 16, 1620, they were escaping religious persecution — and looking for a place where they could prosper.

After more than two months at sea, the Pilgrims landed at the place the Wampanoags called Patuxet, meaning “at the little falls.” When they disembarked from the leaky, fetid carrack, they stepped foot on a land already cleared by death’s scythe.

In the years preceding the Pilgrims’ arrival, the Native inhabitants of southern New England had been ravaged by what some scientists refer to as a “virgin soil” epidemic. The unidentified disease, perhaps introduced by European fishermen who plied the waters from Maine to Narragansett Bay, burned through village after village, killing up to 90% of some tribes.

“I passed along the coast where I found some ancient (Native) plantations not long since populous, now utterly void; in other places a remnant remains, but not free of sickness,” Capt. Thomas Dermer wrote in a 1619 letter to a friend in London.

Dermer’s guide was Tsquantum — the Native interpreter better known as Squanto, who had been among 20 Wampanoags kidnapped by English explorers in 1614 and sold into slavery.

Dermer wrote that “my savage’s country” was once home to roughly 2,000 souls.

“All dead,” he said. “Portions of coastal New England that had once been as densely populated as western Europe were sud