Okay: History Saturday.
It may have escaped most Americans that the so-called Pilgrim-Fathers who chose to leave England after getting into a hissy-fit with Oliver Cromwell on topic of religious tolerance within his army (and there alone), that they had NOT primarily left for specifically North America to settle there.
Instead they took a far less ambitious course and just crossed the North Sea and settled in the Netherlands.
The Netherlands were, while emerging from a bloody eighty years war of independence from the Spanish yoke and the Catholic Inquisition, a very strict and extremely Calvinist society. Some may have called it a fundamentalist protestant theocratic republic.
After eleven years of putting up with the 'Pilgrim Fathers' (whose church, btw. exists to this date.) the Dutch had enough of the strident presence of this particularly malcontent, utterly unproductive and embarrassingly backward group of religious extremists and the Dutch politely suggested that they (the Pilgrim Fathers) had outlived Dutch hospitality and it would be appreciated that they take their leave from the Lowland shores.
It tells you something when even the Dutch Calvinists got fed up with religious shenannigans that the Pilgrim Fathers visited upon them.
Only when it became clear that there were going to be very strict and unpleasant repercussions upon not accepting some basic adherence to the Dutch constitution at the time, the Pilgrim Fathers found it to their expedience to mount a colonization attempt on the (then) still relatively pristine shores of the North American continent.
This was done upon a suggestion from the Dutch since it was partly under Dutch rule and control at the time.
From the Dutch point of view, it was a very convenient and practical solution.
The Pilgrim Fathers would be out of their hair and at the same time the Dutch could from a safe distance keep an eye on them and their sincerely hoped for demise.
After the more or less peaceful transfer of the Dutch colonies to the British, the Pilgrim Fathers became a British head-ache once again and were treated as such.