Anecdotes

Far from being a womanizer, as depicted in the movie, Captain Christopher Jones was a happily-married family man. He and his wife had eight children, one of whom was born in March, 1621, while Jones was still at the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts, waiting for favorable weather to return home to England on the "Mayflower."

Spencer Tracy and Gene Tierney had an affair that lasted for the duration of filming.

The movie lost $1.8 million at the box office; the first Spencer Tracy movie to lose money since he joined MGM in 1935.

For once, the colonists are correctly shown building framed houses, and not log cabins as is commonly supposed - the latter were introduced by Swedish settlers along the Delaware in 1638, and did not become popular until the eighteenth century.

The Native Americans living in the area, the Patuxet, were totally wiped out by a series of epidemics between 1616-1619 caught from English fishermen who landed regularly in the area. Luckily for the colonists, they built in the cleared area where the Indian village stood and utilized the cleared farm land that the tribe had abandoned.