born 1599?, England
died Sept. 12, 1687, Duxbury, Mass.
British-born American pilgrim.
He was hired as a cooper by the London merchants who funded the Mayflower 's expedition to the New World in 1620. Alden signed the Mayflower Compact and held various civic positions in the colony, including assistant to the governor (1623–41, 1650–86). He was mythologized as the first Pilgrim to set foot on Plymouth Rock and as the stand-in for Myles Standish in his suit for Priscilla Mullens's hand in marriage in the poem "The Courtship of Miles Standish" (1858) by Henry W. Longfellow . Alden in fact married Mullens in 1623.