1. The term “Pilgrim,” while one Bradford used on one occasion to refer to the members of the Leiden congregation as, like all Christians, working to advance God’s will, began to be utilized in the nineteenth century to distinguish the Plimoth colonists from their fellow puritans who settled Massachusetts in the decades after 1630. Though this makes the differences between the two groups greater than it was, the term Pilgrim is so rooted in how people think of the Plimoth colonists that it will be used in this introduction and annotation of the text. Much of the material in this essay can be found in greater detail in Francis J. Bremer, One Small Candle: The Plymouth Puritans and the Beginning of English New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).

2. Robert Coachman [Cushman], The Cry of a Stone: A Treatise showing What is Right Matter, Form and Government of the Visible Church of Christ, ed. Michael R. Paulick, transcription and annotation by James Baker (Plymouth, 2016), 147.

3. Jeremy Dupertius Bangs, Strangers and Pilgrims, Travelers and Sojourners: Leiden and the Foundations of Plymouth Plantation (Plymouth, Mass.: General Society of Mayflower Descendants, 2009), 13.

4. Coachman [Cushman], The Cry of a Stone, 50.

5. Coachman [Cushman], The Cry of a Stone, 38; Bradford, “First Discourse” (MS, Massachusetts Historical Society); Edward Winslow, Hypocrisie Unmasked (London: Richard Cotes, for Iohn Bellamie, 1646), 97–98.

6. Parenthetical references to OPP in the introductory sections are to the MS page numbers, which are indicated in the main text in square brackets.

7. By far, the best study of the Pilgrims in Leiden is Bangs, Strangers and Pilgrims.

8. Timothy George, John Robinson and the English Separatist Tradition (Macon, Ga.: Mercer Univ. Press, 1982), 184.

9. Cushman, Cry of a Stone, 87.

10. The members of the congregation still in the Netherlands did not find a replacement, and many eventually merged with the English Reformed Church in Leiden in 1644.

11. Ethan Shagan, “The Emergence of the Church of England, c. 1520–1553,” in The Oxford History of Anglicanism, Volume I: Reformation and Identity, c. 1520–1662, ed. Anthony Milton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 38.

12. Stephen Geree, The Ornament of Women (London: Printed by T. B[adger], 1639), 20, as quoted in Diane Willen, “Godly Women in Early Modern England: Puritanism and Gender,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 43 (1992): 567.

13. See Francis J. Bremer, Lay Empowerment and the Development of Puritanism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

14. John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 10.

15. Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 266–67.

16. Stephen Goffe in the Hague to William Laud, 26 April 1633, SP 16/286/202.

17. Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism, 333–34.

18. George, John Robinson, 149–150.

19. Bangs, Strangers and Pilgrims, 167.

20. See Keith Thomas, “Women and the Civil War Sects,” Past & Present 13 (1958): 45; Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

21. Coachman [Cushman], Cry of a Stone, 139.

22. John Winthrop, The Journal of John Winthrop 1630–1649, ed. Richard S. Dunn, James Savage, and Laetitia Yeandle (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1996), 82.

23. Journal of John Winthrop, 82.

24. Williston Walker, The Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism (New York: Charles Scribner & Sons, 1893), 102–7.

25. Michael P. Winship, Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012); and Bremer, One Small Candle.

26. John Robinson, New Essays or Observations Divine and Moral ([London]: Printed [by the successors of Giles Thorp (Amsterdam) and Miles Flesher], 1628), 2–3.

27. This discussion of puritan beliefs is drawn from my larger treatment of the issue in Francis J. Bremer, Puritanism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), especially chs. 3–4.

28. Robinson, New Essays, 152–54.

29. Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana; or, the Ecclesiastical History of New-England (London: Thomas Parkhurst, 1702), Bk. I, 109–10.

30. Clyfton had served as rector of Babworth from 1586 until deprived of his living in 1605. He evidently moved to Bawtry, being cited before the ecclesiastical courts as “pretended minister or curate of Bawtry” in 1607. Bradford may have journeyed to hear Clyfton in Babworth, which was ten miles from Austerfield, but is more likely to have regularly attended the minister’s sermons when Clyfton had moved to nearby Bawtry.

31. Bangs, Strangers and Pilgrims, 285, 306–7. As with other weavers, Bradford occasionally produced fustian as well as serge.

32. Bangs, Strangers and Pilgrims, 281.

33. Bangs, Strangers and Pilgrims, 376.

34. Bangs, Strangers and Pilgrims, 322.

35. Winslow, A relation or journall of the beginning and proceedings of the English plantation setled at Plimoth in New England (London: Printed for Iohn Bellamie, 1622; otherwise known as Mourt’s Relation), 23.

36. The idea that Dorothy Bradford committed suicide was first suggested by Jane Goodwin Austin in an 1869 story in Harper’s Weekly. But it became popular with a 1950 novel and subsequent film which seemingly influenced Samuel Eliot Morison in his edition of Bradford’s OPP and was then repeated by various historians, all with no clear evidence. For a discussion of the historiography of this see David A. Lupher, Greeks, Romans and Pilgrims: Classical Republicanism in Early New England (Brill, Leiden: 2017), 281–84.

37. Those passages are included in the annotation of this edition.

38. Only eight leaves of the MS survive, in the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. When it was still intact, Bradford’s nephew Nathaniel Morton copied it into the Plymouth Church Records. But a comparison of the MS with Morton’s transcription show that in the process of copying it, Morton altered some of Bradford’s statements.

39. This is another MS volume that has been lost. John Willett, the son of one of the executors of Bradford’s estate, made a transcription of the poems that is in the Massachusetts Historical Society. Michael G. Runyan has edited and published The Collected Verse of William Bradford (St. Paul, Minn.: John Colet Press, 1974).

40. I thank Robert C. Anderson for bringing this to my attention.

1. See, for example, Robert Daily, “William Bradford’s Vision of History,” American Literature 44 (Jan. 1973): 557–69; Kenneth A. Hovey, “The Theology of History in ‘Of Plymouth Plantation’ and Its Predecessors,” Early American Literature 10 (Spring 1975): 47–66; David Read, “Silent Partners: Historical Representation in William Bradford’s ‘Of Plymouth Plantation,’” Early American Literature 33 (1998): 291–314; and Mark L. Sargent, “William Bradford’s “Dialogue” with History,” The New England Quarterly 65 (Sept. 1992): 389–421.

2. David Laurence, “William Bradford’s American Sublime,” PMLA 102 (Jan. 1987): 55–65; quote, p. 56.

3. For instances of these changes, see MS pp. 50, 63, 65, 71, 72, 98 (2x), 116 (2x), 129, 139, 160, 172, and 187.

4. See, for example, Andrew Delbanco, The Puritan Ordeal (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 163–66; and Michael J. Colacurcio, “Advancing the Gospel, Dividing the Church: Design and Vision in Bradford’s Plymouth,” in Godly Letters: The Literature of the American Puritans (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 72–104.

5. For studies of this theme, see Michael P. Winship, Seers of God: Puritan Providentialism in the Restoration and Early Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Nicholas Guyatt, Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607–1876 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

6. See, for example, E. Brooks Holifield, Era of Persuasion: American Thought and Culture, 1521–1680 (Boston: Twayne Pub., 1989).

7. Margaret E. Newell, Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2015); Wendy Warren, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (New York: Liveright Pub. Co., 2016); and Linford D. Fisher, “‘Why shall wee have peace to bee made slaves’: Indian Surrenders During and After King Philip’s War,” Ethnohistory 64 (2017): 91–114. For a regional comparison, see Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).

8. On King Philip’ War, see Jill Lapore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage Books, 1998); Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019); and Christine M. DeLucia, Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).

9. E.g., Jesper Rosenmeier, “‘With My Owne Eyes’: William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation,” in Typology and Early American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972), 69–106; Mason I. Lowance, The Language of Canaan: Metaphor and Symbol in New England from the Puritans to the Transcendentalists (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980).

10. Martha Finch, Dissenting Bodies: Corporealities in Early New England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 9–11. See also Kathleen Donegan, “‘As Dying, Yet Behold We Live’: Catastrophe and Interiority in Bradford’s “Of Plymouth Plantation,” Early American Literature 37 (2002): 9–37.

11. In 1627, the group bound for Virginia but shipwrecked at Plimoth was composed mostly of servants, “many of them being Irish” (148). For indentured persons in Plimoth, see the Conditions of 1620, which include the provision that “persons transported . . . shall continue their Joint stock, & partnership together”; and note that in the list of Mayflower passenger that at least one servant went on to marry and raise a family at Plimoth.

12. Minor W. Major, “William Bradford versus Thomas Morton,” Early American Literature 5 (Fall 1970): 1–13. Michael Zuckerman, “Pilgrims in the Wilderness: Community, Modernity, and the Maypole at Merry Mount,” New England Quarterly 50 (June 1977): 255–77; Richard Drinnon, “The Maypole of Merry Mount: Thomas Morton & the Puritan Patriarchs,” Massachusetts Review 21 (Summer 1980): 382–410.k

13. Peter C. Mancall, The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).

14. The exception being his verso-side interpolation of 1646 in which he celebrates the downfall of the bishops.

15. On same-sex relations in colonial New England, see Richard Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), esp. 107–9; Richard Godbeer and Douglas Winiarski, “The Sodomy Trial of Nicholas Sension, 1677: Documents and Teaching Guide,” Early American Studies 12 (Spring 2014): 402–57. And in Plimoth Colony, see Eugene A. Stratton, Plymouth Colony: Its History & People, 1620–1691 (Salt Lake City: Ancestry Publishing, 1986), ch. 12, esp. 200–201.

16. Records of the Colony of New Plymouth, Court Orders, Vol. 1, 1633–1640 (Boston: William White, 1855), 64 (entry for 6 Aug. 1637 on Allexander and Roberts); Vol. II, Court Orders, 1641–1651, 28 (entry for 7 Dec. 1641 on Kersley), 35–36 (entry for 1 Mar. 1641/2 on Michell, Preston, Hatch, and Keene).

17. See John M. Murrin, “‘Things Fearful to Name’: Bestiality in Colonial America,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 65 (1998): 8–43. For discussions of Granger, see George D. Langdon Jr., Pilgrim Colony: A History of New Plymouth, 1620–1691 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 64–65, who points out Granger’s status as a servant; and Stratton, Plymouth Colony, ch. 12, 200–201.

18. See, for instance, Robert Daly, “William Bradford’s Vision of History,” American Literature 44 (Jan. 1973) 557–69. In his article, “Silent Partners: Historical Representation in William Bradford’s “Of Plymouth Plantation,” Early American Literature 33 (1998): 291–314, David Read argues that, with Bk. 2, Bradford is purposely not writing a providential but rather a secular and specifically an economic history.

19. See Abraham van Engen, Sympathetic Puritans: Calvinist Fellow Feeling in Early New England (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

20. Journal of John Winthrop, 213.

21. Charles Deane discusses the discovery of the MS and his efforts to have a copy made, and Morison (xxvii-xl) gives an account of the story from there. “Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation,” ed. Charles Deane, Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society III (4^th ser.), iii-viii.

22. These items, tipped-in before transfer, are followed by leaves containing: a poem by “A.M.” on the death of Mrs. Bradford; Samuel Bradford’s description of the descent of the volume to him, dated Mar. 20, 1705; pasted-in items by Thomas Prince, one his summary of how he came to have the volume along with several others by Bradford, the other the printed stamp stating “This Book belongs to The New-England-Library. . . ,” at the bottom of which a later hand has written, matter-of-factly, “It now belongs to the Bishop of London’s Library at Fulham”; and Prince’s further note that Bradford’s descendant, Major John Bradford and his family are the “Right Owners,” followed by Prince’s affirmation that folio 243 was missing when the book came to him.

23. Bradford’s History “Of Plimoth Plantation”: From the Original Manuscript: With a Report of the Proceedings Incident to the Return of the Manuscript to Massachusetts (Boston: Wright & Potter Printing Co., State Printers, 1898), xiii-lxxvii.

24. In this chart, the MS pages are divided into five parts from top to bottom, a-e.

25. The final sentence below the deleted passage, giving directions on where it is to be placed, is in a grey ink.

26. Ink and handwriting changes within the Hebrew vocabularies indicate that the first two pages, titled “Some Hebrew words englished,” were written at a different time and in a different ink from [7v], beginning “Though I am growne age, . . . ,” through [10r]. Either Bradford completed the first two pages and then ceased the project for a time, or, more likely, he began with [7v], and when he ran out of room (only one blank verso separates the end of the Hebrew lists from the opening of OPP), he turned to the empty pages prior. The ink in which the first two pages of Hebrew are written is similar to that which Bradford used in corrections commencing with the annal of 1630.

27. As found in compilations such as “Variant Spelling of Indian Names,” in The Correspondence of Roger Williams, ed. Glenn La Fantasie (2 vols., Providence: Rhode Island Historical Society, 1988), 1:lxxxvii-xcii; “A Glossary of Tribal Names,” in Steven F. Johnson, Ninnuock (The People): The Algonkian People of New England (Marlborough, Mass.: Bliss Pub. Co., 1995), 238–44; Jerome D. Segel and R. Andrew Pierce, The Wampanoag Genealogical History of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts (2 vols., Baltimore: Genealogical Pub. Co., 2003), vol. 1, Appendixes 10–12; and Arthur H. Hughes and Morse S. Allen, Connecticut Place Names (Hartford: Connecticut Historical Society, 1976); or in studies including Kathleen J. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1500–1650 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996).

28. Douglas Anderson, William Bradford’s Books: Of Plimmoth Plantation and the Printed Word (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

29. See also Mark L. Sargent, “Thomas Prince’s Bookplate: A Pilgrim, Progress, and The Chronological History of New England,” Studies in Puritan American Spirituality 6 (1997): 1–24, who overstates the case when he claims that “Bradford’s revered manuscript had become Prince’s personal notebook” (2).

1. The word “saint” is used by Bradford to refer to those who were among God’s “chosen,” or true followers.

2. Bradford here appears to be referring to the supposed arrival of Christianity in England in the first century CE, which is a perspective he would have gained from John Foxe’s Actes and monuments of matters most speciall and memorable, happening in the Church with an universall historie of the same (London: Company of Stationers, 1610). A copy of this edition was in the 1670 inventory of the possessions of Alice Carpenter Bradford, William Bradford’s second wife. Jeremy D. Bangs, Plymouth Colony’s Private Libraries (Leiden: Leiden American Pilgrim Museum, 2016; rev. ed., 2018), 281.

3. In his “Third Conference” Bradford writes that “the true church and the proper government of the same, is to be known by the scriptures, and to be measured only by that rule, the primitive pattern; which church & the government of the same is sufficiently described and layed down in the writings of the apostles and the evangelists” (MS, Massachusetts Historical Society, 2-3).

4. Following Foxe, Bradford appears to be referring to the Lollard followers of John Wycliffe (1330-1384), whose martyrdom anticipated the martyrs of his own time.

5. Bradford uses “professors” to refer to those who believed and professed the truth of the Christian gospel.

6. Reference to the canons (laws) of the church and decrees enforcing ceremonies that the puritans found unscriptural, such as the wearing of ecclesiastical vestments and signing with the cross in baptism. See The Anglican Canons, 1529-1947, ed. Gerald Bray, Church of England Record Society, Vol. 6 (1998). Of particular concern were the Canons of 1604, adoption of which was followed by an intense crackdown on those who would not subscribe, leading some to separate from the church.

7. Socrates of Constantinople, also known as Socrates Scholasticus, was a fifth century CE church historian whose Historia Ecclesiastica covered the history of Christianity from 305 to 439 CE, continuing the history written by Eusebius. The passage quoted by Bradford is from a 1577 English translation, The ancient ecclesiastical histories of the first six hundred years after Christ, written in the Greek tongue by three learned historiographers, Eusebius, Socrates, and Euagri, Bk. 2, ch. 22, in this English edition (ch. 27 in the Greek). A London, 1619 edition of this work, The Ancient Ecclesiastical Histories of the First Six Hundred Years after Christ, written in the Greek tongue by three learned historiographers, Eusebius, Socrates, and Euagrius, is listed in the inventory of Thomas Willett’s estate (Bangs, Plymouth Colony’s Private Libraries, 306); another copy of this edition may have been in Ralph Partridge’s library (206). In his “Third Conference,” Bradford referred to Socrates as “that famous historian” (MS, Massachusetts History Society, 28).

8. The underlining indicates to a typesetter that the direct quotation is to be set in italics (assuming the main text is set in fraktur), or at least in a contrasting typeface. This is one of several indications that Bradford conceived his book to be issued in printed form (see Douglas Anderson, William Bradford’s Books: Of Plimmoth Plantation and the Printed Word [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2003]). Alternately, he may have anticipated scribal publication, that is, dissemination of the work as a manuscript, though Anderson discounts this (12).

9. A reference to 2 Thess. 2:3, “Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a departing first, and that that man of sin be disclosed, even the son of perdition.” (Unless stated otherwise, all biblical quotes by Bradford, and verses provided in the annotations, are from the Geneva version.) A change of ink at this point from black to medium brown indicates a new “sitting” by Bradford, that is, a subsequent compositional occasion.

10. I.e., operation, use, or practice.

11. Queen Mary Tudor (1553-1558) sought to restore England to Catholicism.

12. A reference to the contention among the Protestants who went into exile during Mary’s reign, described in the following passage. The standard work on the exiles remains Christina Garrett, The Marian Exiles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938). This should be supplemented with the first chapter of Andrew Pettegree’s Marian Protestantism: Six Studies (Aldershot, Hants, England: Scholar Press, 1996), which focuses on Emden, and the fifth chapter of Karl Gunther’s Reformation Unbound (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2014), which analyzes the disputes at Frankfort.

13. Bradford is quoting from the second edition (2 vols., London: Printed for the Company of Stationers, 1610) of the Actes and monuments of matters most speciall and memorable. As noted above (n. 2), a copy of this edition was listed in the inventory of Alice Carpenter Bradford’s estate in 1670 (Bangs, Plymouth Colony’s Private Libraries, 282).

14. [William Whittingham,] A brieff discours off the troubles begonne at Franckford in Germany anno Domini 1554 Abowte the Booke off off [sic] common prayer and ceremonies (Heidelberg: M. Chirat, 1575). Disputing the attribution of this work to Whittingham is Patrick Collinson, “The Authorship of A brieff discours off the troubles begonne at Franckford,” in Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism [London: Hambleton Press, 1983], 191-211, as cited in Anderson, William Bradford’s Books, 255, n. 26.

15. This was the lineup of church officers, ministers (pastor and teacher) and lay leaders (elders), set forth by John Calvin.

16. The dispute among the exiles was between those who wished to preserve the key elements of the Church of England as it existed at the death of Edward VI, for which many of their former colleagues were suffering martyrdom, and those who wished to pursue further reforms, inspired in some cases by the practices of the churches they had settled amidst on the continent. Intervention by Geneva’s John Calvin, who was the continental Protestant leader from whom the English increasingly drew inspiration, was unsuccessful.

17. Bradford is referring to the congregational polity.

18. Bradford again references 2 Thess. 2:3 (see above, n. 9), in discussing the efforts of the bishops of the Church of England to force believers to submit to ceremonies and practices that were deemed unscriptural by puritans.

19. The reference is to the 1577 English translation, The auncient ecclesiasticall histories of the first six hundred yeares after Christ, Bk. 6, ch. 42 (pp. 117-19), in which Eusebius discussed the Novatians, an early Christian sect that held a strict view that refused readmission to baptized Christians who had denied their faith under persecution. The Novatians called themselves puritans, and Bradford objects to the application of that term to those such as the Scrooby congregation who were seeking religious reform.

20. William Perkins (1558-1602) was an English Calvinist theologian. While he conformed to the practices of the Church of England during his lifetime, his positions were consistent with those generally identified as puritan and he was a strong opponent of those who sought to modify Calvinist doctrines. Bradford here is referring to Perkins’ A faithfull and plaine exposition vpon the 2. chapter of Zephaniah by that reuerend and iudicious diuine, M.W. Perkins. Containing a powerful exhortation to repentance: as also the manner hovve men in repentance are to search themselues, first published in 1605 (in which the quote is from pp. 60-61) but consulted by Bradford in The Works of that Famous and Worthy Minister of Christ in the University of Cambridge, Mr. W. Perkins. The third and last volume. Newly corrected and amended (London: Printed by John Haviland, for James Boler, 1631), 421. Multiple volumes of Perkins’ collected works were in the inventories of William and Alice Bradford (Bangs, Plymouth Colony’s Private Libraries, 219-20, 271).

21. This following observation, inserted in 1646, contains Bradford’s reflections on the recent religious changes resulting from the English Puritan Revolution. The conflict had begun in 1638 when an attempt by King Charles I to impose English-style religious practices, including a new liturgy, on the Church of Scotland led to riots and a rebellion in that northern kingdom. After a parliament, dubbed the Short Parliament, was dismissed when it refused to grant the king the funds he demanded to put down the rebellion, a new (Long) Parliament used its powers to take actions against some of the king’s advisors and set forth demands for reforms in state and church in a Grand Remonstrance (1641). In August 1642 the king raised his standard and declared Parliament in rebellion. In 1643 Parliament signed a Solemn League and Covenant allying themselves with the Scots in a pledge that included a pledge to reform the Church of England in accord with “the best reformed churches in Christendom.” That same year saw Parliament convene an assembly of divines to propose church reforms. In early May 1646, the king surrendered to the parliamentary forces. When Bradford wrote this addenda to his manuscript, it appeared that the long hoped-for further reformation of the church would occur.

22. Psa. 118:23, “This was the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.”

23. The Jebusites were a Canaanite tribe that occupied Jerusalem prior to the initiation of the conquest by Joshua and completed by King David.

24. Decendants of Anakim, formidable warriors who inhabited the southern portion of Palestine in the time of Abraham, expelled by Joshua.

25. MS: “travel,” which in early modern English was often used interchangeably with “travail.”

26. In the late 1580s a number of preachers in the North of England, including Richard Clyfton at Babworth, Nottinghamshire, began to attract men and women who were drawn to a puritan message. In his “First Dialogue,” Bradford would later refer to Clyfton as one who had done “much good . . . in the Country where he lived, and Converted many to God by his faithful and painful ministry, both in preaching and Catechizing; sound and orthodox, he always was and so Continued to his end” (Plymouth Church Records, Volume I, 1620-1859 [New York: New England Society in New York, 1920], 139). After his return to Scrooby, William Brewster journeyed on occasion to hear Clyfton and repeated that divine’s sermons to some at Scrooby. William Bradford also became one of those “enlightened by the word of God.”

27. The means used by the authorities to crack down on religious practices that violated the canons of the church was the Consistory Court, which had jurisdiction over clergy and laity in ecclesiastical matters. The presiding judge was appointed by the diocesan bishop. Functioning with the court were apparitors, who were designated to serve the summons, to arrest a person accused; and pursuivants, who would pursue those who sought to escape the court’s jurisdiction.

28. It is generally assumed that Bradford here refers to Edward Grimeston, A Generall Historie of the Netherlands: With the genealogie and memorable acts of the Earls of Holland, Zeeland, and west-Friseland, from Thiery of Aquitaine the first Earle, successiuely vnto Philip the third Kiung of Spaine: Continued vnto the present yeare of our Lord 1608, out of the best authors that haue written of that subiect (London: A. Islip and G. Eld., 1608), a copy of which was in the inventory of William Bradford’s estate (Bangs, Plymouth Colony’s Private Libraries, 223). However, no edition of this work, which has only 16 books, contains this passage as cited; Bradford is actually translating directly from one of van Meteren’s works, either Commentarien ofte Memorien van den Nederlandtschen Staet, Handel, oorloghen ende Geschiedenissen van onsen tyden (‘s Graven-Haghe, 1608, rep. 1610) or Historie der Neder-landscher ende haerder na-buren oorlogen ende geschiedenissen, tot den iare M. VI.c XII, in 32 books (s’Graven-Haghe: Hillebrant Jacobssz, 1614, rep., with additions, 1623, 1635, 1636, and in 10 vols., 1748-63). Both are divided into books by year, with bk. 25 covering 1603. Yet, in the Commentarien (which seems the likely source, since Bradford refers to the author’s “Dutch commentaries”), the passage quoted is not on fol. 119 but on fol. 86 (recto, cols. 1-2); and in the latter, the passage is found in the 1614 ed. on fol. 504 (recto, col. 2) and in the expanded 18th-century reprint in vol. 8, p. 308: “De nieuwe Koning, . . . vond daar den hervormden Godsdienst gerigt naar de hervorming van Koning Eduard den VI^den, en door de laatste Koningin en ‘s Lands Parlement bevestigd, behoudende nog den geestlyken staat der Bischoppen, Deekenen en regeering der Geestlyke, naar Kerklyke wetten, op den ouden voet, eenigzins verschillende in de plegtigheden en het gebruik der hervormde Kerken in Schotland, Vrankryk, Nederland, Embden, Geneve an andere, welker hervorming meer beschaffd was, en nader over een kwam met de Christen-Kerken ten tyde der Apostolen.” In none of the editions of these works that could be consulted was this passage found on fol. 119, which leads to the conclusion that Bradford must have been consulting an unknown printing (or, less likely since the handwriting seems almost certainly to be that of Bradford, that the marginal reference was made by a later owner of the MS).

29. Bradford here notes that the English church under James I rejected the primitive pattern of church order adopted by other reformed churches in favor of continuing a structure with governing bishops with courts and canons. In his “Conference” or “Third Dialogue” Bradford would make the point that “bishops, such as are mentioned in the holy scriptures, are of divine institution and with sole spiritual power and the ordinance of God, . . . but lord bishops, invested with sole spiritual power and government, and exercising sole authority, power, and government over the churches . . . is strange from the scriptures, no institution of Christ, but a human device and intrusion” (MS, Massachusetts Historical Society, 22).

Regarding the concluding word of the marginal comment on “the reformed churches,” Charles Deane (9n) reads “pertains,” while Ford (1:20n) notes this word as “uncertain,” suggesting that in the interim the corner of the page was damaged. (“Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation,” ed. Charles Deane, Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society III, 4th ser.: 1-476; hereafter “the Deane ed.”)

30. This is a paraphrase of the covenant drawn up and attested to by members at the formation of the Scrooby congregation.

31. By 1607 there were two covenanted congregations that had formed. One was in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, and led by John Smyth. The other was in Scrooby, Nottinghamshire, and led by Richard Clyfton, who had been deprived of his living in Babworth on April 12, 1605.

32. John Smyth (d. 1612) was a graduate of Christ’s College, Cambridge and ordained to the ministry in 1594 or 1595. He soon was in trouble for failing to wear the surplice (an ecclesiastical vestment seen by puritans as a holdover from Catholicism). He was preaching at Gainsborough as early as 1604. In 1607 he left the Church of England and soon thereafter emigrated to the Netherlands, where he joined the Ancient Church of English believers in Amsterdam led by Francis Johnson. Disputes over the powers of the congregation and over baptism led to his departure from that congregation and his rebaptizing himself. He soon split with the new Baptist congregation he had formed and aligned with a Mennonite congregation in Amsterdam. In his “First Dialogue” Bradford described him as “an eminent Man in his time and a Good preacher, and of other good parts, but his Inconstancy and unstable Judgment and being so suddenly Carried away with things did soon overthrow him” (Plymouth Church Records, 1:137).

33. Richard Clyfton (c.1553-1616) was instituted to the rectory of Babworth in 1586. First warned by the church authorities for nonconformity in 1591, he was removed from his living in 1605. He continued to preach despite this, at Bawtry (near Scrooby). He accepted a call to minister to the separatist congregation that had formed at Scrooby and then emigrated with that group to Amsterdam. When most of the Scrooby believers moved on to Leiden in 1609, he remained in Amsterdam. Bradford called him “a Grave and fatherly old man when he Came first into Holland, having a great white beard” (Plymouth Church Records, 1:139).

34. John Robinson (1575/6-1625) was a graduate of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (BA, 1596; MA, 1599). After leaving Cambridge he was invited to preach at St. Andrew’s, Norwich, where he spoke vehemently against the abuses in the church and especially in the government of the church. In 1606 he renounced his ordination and espoused a separatist position, shortly thereafter joining Richard Clyfton in the ministry of the Scrooby congregation. He emigrated with that group and settled as their pastor in Leiden. Though he intended to emigrate to America he never did. Bradford described him in his “First Dialogue” as “of a solid judgment and of a quick and sharp wit; so was he also of a tender conscience and very sincere in all his ways, a hater of hypocrisy and dissimulation, and would be very plain with his best friends. He was very courteous, affable, and sociable in his conversation and towards his own people especially; he was an acute and exact disputant, very quick and ready, and had much bickering with the Arminians. . . . [H]e was never satisfied in himself until he had searched any cause or argument he had to deal in . . . and was ever desirous of any light, and the more able, learned, and holy the persons were the more he desired to confer and reason with them.” Plymouth Church Records, 1:138.

35. This sentence, clearly a later addition by Bradford, is written in a darker ink; the next paragraph is written in the lighter ink of the preceding. William Brewster (1566/7-1644) studied at Peterhouse, Cambridge, but did not graduate. He entered the service of Sir William Davison, accompanying that diplomat on his embassies to the Netherlands in the mid 1580s. After Davison’s disgrace following his role in the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, Brewster returned to Scrooby where he succeeded his father as postmaster and bailiff of Scrooby Manor. He was called before the church courts for repeating and commenting on sermons to a collection of local believers, and later offered the manor house for meetings of the covenanted separatist congregation. (See Ronald A. Marchant, The Puritans and the Church Courts in the Diocese of York, 1560-1642 [London: Longmans, 1960], 241-42; and Jeremy D. Bangs, “William Brewster’s Preaching in St. Wilfrid’s Church, Scrooby, 1598,” The Mayflower Quarterly 72 [2006]: 239-43). He journeyed with those believers to the Netherlands and served them as church elder. In Leiden he started the Pilgrim Press, which published religious polemical pieces that were smuggled into England. (See Ronald Breugelmans, ed., The Pilgrim Press, A bibliographical & historical memorial of the books printed at Leyden by the Pilgrim Fathers by Rendel Harris and Stephen K. Jones, With a chapter on the location of the Pilgrim Press in Leyden by Dr. Plooij; Partial reprint with new contributions by R. Breugelmans, J. A. Gruys & Keith L. Sprunger [Nieuwkoop, The Netherlands: De Graff, 1987].) He helped negotiate the emigration of the Pilgrims to America and as elder led the congregation’s religious services for most of the 1620s. Bradford’s evaluation of him is found in various places throughout this history, especially in the annal for 1643.

36. I.e., with difficulty.

37. The “Low Countries,” the term Bradford uses to refer to the Dutch provinces of Holland and Zeeland, had been a refuge for English puritans, and particularly Separatists, since the late sixteenth century, beginning after the execution in England of the Separatists Henry Barrow, John Greenwood, and John Penry in 1593. Those who maintained their connection with the Church of England were found in churches that served English merchant communities abroad, which had considerable freedom in determining how their worship was conducted until the 1620s. Those who denied all contact with the Church of England, known as Brownists to the Dutch, formed separate congregations in Amsterdam and elsewhere. The largest of these was that first established in Amsterdam in 1596 after London refugees had spent a few years at Kampen and Naarden. Francis Johnson settled with the congregation around 1597; Henry Ainsworth joined the church around the same time and was later chosen teacher of the congregation. John Smyth had left Gainsborough ahead of the Scrooby congregation and by the time that Brewster and Robinson arrived he was worshipping with the Ancient Church. Numbering around three hundred adult communicants the congregants were known as the “Ancient Brethren.” Initially the Dutch authorities, prompted by Amsterdam’s Reformed minister Jacobus Arminius, were skeptical of the English Brownists, but by the time the Scrooby group arrived in Amsterdam toleration had been granted. For the overall story of English puritans in the Netherlands, see Keith Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism: A History of English and Scottish Churches of the Netherlands in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 1982). For the congregation of the Ancient Brethren and the experiences of the Scrooby congregation in the Netherlands, see Jeremy D. Bangs, Strangers and Pilgrims, Travellers and Sojourners: Leiden and the Foundations of Plymouth Plantation (Plymouth: General Society of Mayflower Descendants, 2009).

1. 2 Tim. 1:12, “For the which cause I also suffer these things: but I am not ashamed: for I know whom I have believed, and I am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed to him against that day.”

2. Since the early 1540s, licenses to pass overseas had been required by the English government, in part to prevent those who still clung to Catholic views from enrolling in seminaries on the Continent. In 1606 a royal proclamation had required an oath of allegiance of anyone leaving the country and a license for any women or children under the age of twenty-one desiring to emigrate to be acquired. Licenses could be obtained from agents in the ports of London, the Cinque Ports, Harwich, Yarmouth, Hull, and Weymouth. These requirements were intended to control the flight of Catholics as part of a crackdown following the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot. The following July another royal proclamation, citing precedents from the reigns of Edward I and Edward III, forbade all save lords of the realm, “notable merchants,” soldiers, and mariners to leave the country without a special license from the king or four members of the Privy Council. This was modified by the Privy Council in December 1608. The Council required all travelling abroad to be examined and registered and passage restricted to certain ports. Customs officials stationed in each port to check on the passage of goods would have also been on the lookout for those seeking to leave without a license. These procedures would have raised difficulties for the separatist emigrants, though as it would become evident, local officials were not always aware of what was expected of them and how to handle offenders.

3. Originally a term used to describe tax collectors in medieval England, catchpole officers in this period were agents of the sheriff.

4. The Privy Council was a body of magnates, clergy, and officers of the crown appointed by the king to advise him and assist him in exercising his authority. Since the men and women captured had been violating orders of the Privy Council, the Boston magistrates sought guidance from the Council on how to handle those in their custody. In the meanwhile, the group was kept in jail cells in the Boston Guild Hall.

5. At least some of the Boston magistrates were sympathetic to puritan ideals. John Cotton would serve as rector of St. Botolph’s parish in Boston from 1612 until shortly before his own migration to America.

6. The Assize courts were quarterly sessions at which selected justices of the national courts joined all of the local justices of the peace to dispense justice. By the late sixteenth century, all felony offenses were held over for the assizes. Those members of the congregation who were to be tried at the assizes were likely transferred to the prison in Lincoln Castle, where such trials in that region were held.

7. I.e., happened upon.

8. Bangs, Strangers and Pilgrim (p. 52, n. 100), points out that Sacrement! is not known from other sources as a typical Dutch expletive. It could be that this Zeelander was using a Flemish or French expletive. Bradford’s relating of this indicates he may have been one of those aboard the ship at the time.

9. Variant: “travails.”

10. In all it is estimated that some 125 believers from the Scrooby vicinity reached the Netherlands.”

1. Cotton Mather relates the story that, on arrival in Holland, Bradford was apprehended by an officer to whom a fellow passenger had reported him for having illegally fled England. The officer brought him before the magistrates, who on learning of the basis of his immigration, let him rejoin his fellow congregants in Amsterdam (Magnalia Christi Americana; or, the Ecclesiastical History of New-England [London: Thomas Parkhurst, 1702], Bk. II, 3).

2. MS: “custumes.” Variant reading: “costumes,” though this word did not come into common usage until the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. But compare Bradford’s use of “custome” later in this chaper (“Yea they would Strive to get their custom”), to mean “commerce.”

3. Pro. 24:34, “So thy poverty cometh as one that travaileth by the way, and thy necessity like an armed man.”

4. As described above in Chapter One (p. 101, n. 37), the Ancient Church had been constituted in Amsterdam in 1597 with Francis Johnson as pastor. Various controversies had troubled the Church and would continue to do so. One dispute had split the church and led to the excommunication in 1598 or 1599 of Francis Johnson’s brother George over his wife’s proper dress and deportment. In 1601, a group of members sought to remove Henry Ainsworth as teacher because he had previously held clerical positions in the Church of England. A zealous minority not only rejected any interaction with the English national church as apostasy, but believed anyone who had been guilty of such behavior in the past should be barred from office in the congregation. The faction attacking Ainsworth was unsuccessful, but considerable acrimony remained. In 1606, the congregation was in turmoil over charges that one of the deacons, Daniel Studley, had molested his step-daughter and beat his wife. Another controversy erupted in 1608 when John Smyth published a tract in which he outlined The differences of the churches of the seperation contayning a description of the leitourgie and ministerie of the visible church (Middelburg: R. Schilders, 1608), taking issue with some of the positions of the Ancient Church. In later years William Bradford recalled in his “First Dialogue” that he had heard Smyth warn that those who had arrived in the Netherlands, “being now come into a place of liberty are in great danger if we look not well to our ways, for we are like men set upon the ice, and therefore may easily slide and fall” (Plymouth Church Records, 1:137). But, as Bradford concluded, “it appears it is an easier matter to give good counsel than to follow it,” because Smyth himself soon disrupted the Ancient church by espousing controversial views. Smyth argued that the congregation should reject donations from well-wishers in England because a church should be solely supported by its members; in addition, while he did not explicitly reject lay prophesying, he asserted that anyone who preached should be able to read the Scriptures in the original languages and explain their meaning to his listeners. Anticipating somewhat the later views of Roger Williams, Smyth claimed that no true church existed. He believed that baptism was essential for salvation, and with no true church to perform it, he baptized himself and then offered to baptize all those who followed him. Early in 1609, Richard Clyfton engaged Smyth in a discussion on baptism. All of this would have been noted by Robinson and his followers.

5. In January 1609, Robinson and Brewster journeyed to Leiden where they met with Jan Van Hout, the town secretary whom Brewster knew from his stay in the town during the mid-1580s. Robinson, “Minister of God’s Word, together with some members of the Christian Reformed Religion, born in the kingdom of Great Britain, and numbering one hundred persons or thereabouts, men and women,” petitioned the Leiden authorities for permission “to come to live in this city” (Leiden officials’ response to petition, Feb. 12, 1609, quoted in Bangs, Strangers and Pilgrims, 85). The petition was granted and entered into the records by Van Hout.

6. In 1574, Leiden had withstood a lengthy siege by the Spanish forces during which thousands had died of starvation and thousands more of the plague. In the following year, William of Orange commemorated that victory by establishing a university there. Surrounded by town walls and defensive towers, the city was one of brick houses and large stone churches. In the countryside were fields where cattle grazed, and grain and vegetables were grown; there were orchards, and even vineyards. The city was a textile center that depended largely on refugee labor, particularly after its growth had been stunted by a significant loss of lives during an epidemic in the first few years of the century. There was a substantial population of French-speaking Reformed Protestants known as Huguenots or Walloons. The university was intended to train both clergy and jurists. Its strong theology faculty, which included Franz Gomarus, Johannes Polyander, Simon Episcopius, and Jacobus Arminius (from 1603 until his death in 1609), attracted students from around Europe.

7. While most of the congregation moved to Leiden, some, including their pastor Richard Clyfton, remained in Amsterdam. Thus, following their arrival in their new home, the congregation elected Robinson as pastor, Brewster as elder, and Samuel Fuller (1580-1633) and John Carver (c. 1585-1621) as deacons.

8. Brewster was chosen lay Elder of the congregation. Puritans referred to the principal officers of the church as elders. Both the Pastor, who was the Preaching Elder, and the Teacher, who was the Teaching Elder, were clergy. Lay elders were referred to as Ruling Elders, and this is the post Brewster held.

9. It is believed that about 100 adults who had emigrated to the Netherlands made the further journey to Leiden. Over the following decade they were joined by other separatists who came from Kent, London, East Anglia, and other regions of England, as well as by some Dutchmen and French Walloons (Huguenots). By 1620 the congregation had grown to three or even four times its original size.

10. Bradford here is referring to Antonio de Guevara’s Libro aureo de Marco Aurelius Emperador (Sevilla: Ioannes Grapheus, 1528). This was translated into French and then into English by John Bourchier, Lord Berners, as The Golden Boke of Marcus Aurelius, Emperor and Eloquent Oratour (London: In aedibus Thomae Bertheleti regii impressoris, 1535). The passage Bradford referred to was, “It was a great thing to see the honour that the people gave to the Emperour and the good renoune that the emperor gave to the people” (56v.-57r.). See Lupher, Greeks, Romans and Pilgrims, Classical Republicanism in Early New England (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 264-65.

11. A change in ink and handwriting suggests a new sitting, or, more simply, that Bradford’s ink needed to be stirred or refreshed.

12. Jan Ziszka (1376-1424) was the commander of the Hussite military forces in Bohemia. Jan Hus (d. 1415) was a reformer who broke with the Roman Catholic Church over disputes regarding the sacrament of the eucharist (he believed recipients should receive wine as well as bread) and the relative roles of the Bible and tradition in determining theological truths. His followers established the city of Tabor (named after Solomon’s luxurious desert resort) on a mountainside near Prague. Under Ziszka, the Hussites captured Prague but were eventually defeated in 1453. Bradford’s interest was possibly prompted by the identification of the Protestant champion Frederick of the Palatine as the second Ziszka following Frederick’s election as King of Bohemia in 1618. Jeremy Bangs discusses where Bradford may have learned of Ziszka and why that Hussite leader would have been of interest to him, in Strangers and Pilgrims, 575-77.

13. Many members of the Pilgrim church, originating from Scrooby and Gainsborough, have been identified as skilled or semi-skilled laborers and artisans, whose “callings” included woolcomber, baker, weaver, cobbler, bricklayer, and, as in the case of William Brewster, printer. Bangs, Strangers and Pilgrims, 280-88; Anderson, William Bradford’s Books, 5-11; and Breugelmans, ed., The Pilgrim Press.

14. The Walloon church’s consistory minutes indicate several types of misbehavior among the members, including repeated cases of drunkenness, quarrels, fighting, wife-beating, unpaid business debts, and sexual misconduct. “Archives de L’Eglise Wallonne de Leyde, 41: Le Seconde Livre du Consistoire . . . 1611-48,” Leiden Regional Archives, as cited in Bangs, Strangers and Pilgrims, 171-75. In 1646, Edward Winslow (1595-1655) countered claims that dissension in the Leiden congregation was the reason for the 1620 emigration. Rejecting the argument that the foundations of Plimoth were laid upon “schism, division, or separation,” he asserted that the congregation had been founded “upon love, peace, and holiness,” and that there was “such love and mutual care of the Church of Leiden for . . . the welfare of each other, and their posterities to succeeding generations, as is seldom found on earth” (Winslow, Hypocrisie Unmasked: by a true relation of the proceedings of the Governour and company of the Massachusets against Samuel Gorton (and his accomplices) a notorious disturber of the peace and quiet of the severall governments wherein he lived [London: Richard Cotes, for Iohn Bellamie, 1646], 92).

15. These professors were Simon Episcopius (1583-1643) and Johannes Polyander (1568-1646), the former an Arminian Remonstrant, the latter a Calvinist in the manner of William Ames, who emphasized federal or covenantal thought. The doctrinal difference between the two may seem minor several centuries later, but was considered major at the time. Arminians were followers of Jacobus Arminius, a Dutch theologian who had been a professor at the university until his death in 1609. In contrast to Calvinist determinism and assertions of total human depravity, Arminius asserted that while God had determined to save those with faith, he had not determined who would accept the grace of faith, thus allowing some greater role for human agency in the process than more rigid Calvinists accepted. Supporters of Arminius had in 1610 presented a petition to the States-General in support of Arminius’ views, from which they became known as “Remonstrants.” In a deliberate effort to have professors on its faculty from both sides of the debate, the University of Leiden had appointed Polyander in Sept. 1611 and Episcopius in Feb. 1612 (Bangs, Strangers and Pilgrims, 490 ff.). The Dutch city of Dordrecht would host the famous Synod in 1618-19 at which the teachings of Arminius were refuted, but the Arminian-Calvinist debate would continue on through the early modern period and affect the religious culture of the British North American colonies.

16. By “taught” here, Bradford means that Robinson preached to his congregation twice on Sunday and once at a weekday lecture.

17. The first of two pages that Bradford labels “15.”

18. Robinson objected to the Arminian position on grace and salvation, but also opposed the Arminians on the relationship between church and state, the Arminians asserting the authority of the state to determine doctrinal matters.

19. Theses were propositions which would be posted in a public place to challenge others to debate.

20. For an understanding of the Leiden University system of disputes. (which Bradford evidently lacked), see Keith Stanglin, Arminius on the Assurance of Salvation: The Context, Roots, and Shape of the Leiden Debate, 1603-1609 (Leiden: Brill, 2007); and Bangs, Strangers and Pilgrims, ch. 12, “Assaults on Toleration.”

21. Robinson had matriculated at the University of Leiden in Sept. 1615, and his debates with Episcopius probably occurred afterwards. “Archieven van Senaat en Faculteiten der Leidsche Universiteit,” 7 (Vol. 1, 1575-1618), 321, as cited in Bangs, Strangers and Pilgrims, 504, n. 90. In these debates, Robinson defended predestination; the contents of his arguments on the topic are in his A defence of the doctrine propounded by the synode of Dort (Amsterdam: Successors of G. Thorp, 1624). But Bangs (Strangers and Pilgrims, 507) argues that Robinson more likely defended the separation of church and state, since the theological dispute was bound up with issues of religious toleration under supervision of the civil government. See also Timothy George, John Robinson and the English Separatist Tradition (Macon, Ga.: Mercer Univ. Press, 1984), 176.

22. This refers to an offer to welcome the congregation in Zeeland, which came from Willem Teelinck (1579-1629). Teellink was a Dutch minister who had studied law and theology at Aberdeen and Pontiers (France) before spending some time in England between 1603 and 1605, including at least eight months at Banbury, where William Whately was the local puritan minister. He was strongly influenced by English puritan pietism and admired both William Ames and William Perkins. Returning to the Netherlands, he pursued his studies for the ministry at the University of Leiden. Though he left Leiden shortly before the Robinson congregation settled there, he continued to have contacts in that city. Teellinck ministered to different parishes, including Middleburg from 1613-1629. He translated works of English divinity, especially those of Whately, and contributed many works of his own to what became known as the Nadere Reformatie, or “Further Reformation.” Like Robinson, Brewster, and John Durie he was committed to efforts to break down barriers between godly believers. See Willem J. op ‘t Hof, “The eventful sojourn of Willem Teellinck (1579-1629) at Banbury in 1605,” Journal for the History of Reformed Pietism 1 (2015): 5-34; and Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2002), 360-61. Later, in 1628, Teelinck and others in Middleburg contributed to the education of Robinson’s son John.

1. This interlineation is a later addition by Bradford in a darker ink.

2. Referring to the Treaty of Antwerp between Spain and the Netherlands, which ushered in a period of peace from 1609-21. See Randall Lesaffer, ed., The Twelve Years’ Truce: Peace, Truce, War, and Law in the Low Countries at the Turn of the Seventeenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2014).

3. The second page Bradford labelled “15.”

4. Bradford at a later time interlineated a more standard spelling of this word, which he originally rendered “prewdend.”

5. The story of Orpah, Ruth, and Naomi is from Ruth 1.

6. Bradford is here alluding to an account originally in Plutarch’s Lives of the faint-hearted response of the supporters of Cato the Younger, who commanded part of Pompey’s army, when Julius Caesar was closing in on his forces in the North African city of Utica. David Lupher discusses this reference (Greeks, Romans, and Pilgrims, 260-61) and suggests that it derived not from Bradford’s direct reading of an edition of Plutarch, but rather from something said by John Robinson, who frequently referred to Plutarch.

7. Archaic for accustomed to anything; experienced.

8. Lam. 3:27, “It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth.”

9. An archaic form of “some others”; for examples, see Nathaniel Morton, New-Englands memoriall: or, A brief relation of the most memorable and remarkable passages of the providence of God manifested to the planters of New-England in America [Cambridge: Samuel Green and Marmaduke Johnson for John Vsher, 1669]: “other-some worse courses” (3); and Acts 17:18, “. . . other some, He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods” (KJV).

10. A later interlineation by Bradford in a darker ink.

11. A later interlineation by Bradford in a darker ink.

12. One of the members of the congregation, Edward Winslow, offered additional insight into the concerns of the congregation in Hypocrisie Unmasked, noting “how hard the Country was where we lived, how many spent their estate in it, and were forced to return for England; how grievous to live from under the protection of the State of England; how like we were to lose our language, and our name of English; how little good we did, or were like to do to the Dutch in reforming the Sabbath; how unable there to give such education to our children, as we our selves had received, &c.” (89). Nathaniel Morton (1616-1685), Bradford’s nephew, who arrived in Plimoth in 1623, also pointed to a concern regarding the Sabbath, writing, “in ten years’ time, whiles their Church sojourned amongst them, they could not bring them [the Dutch] to reform the neglect of Observation of the Lord’s-day as a Sabbath” (Morton, New-Englands memoriall, 3). A sense of one element of Dutch Sabbath observance was provided by an English traveler of the time, Sir William Brereton, in Travels in Holland, the United Provinces, England, Scotland, and Ireland (Remains Historical and Literary Published by the Chetham Society, 1844): “Here is little respect had to sanctify the sabbath: the young children girls [sic] walked all the Sabbath in the afternoon with cups or tuns in their hands; they were about five or six years of age; others elder, about ten, and thirteen, and fourteen years of age, guided these little ones, and sung, screaming and squeaking, and straining their voices. Such as they met gave them money, which they put into cups, which was intended to buy a wassail-cup, a carouse” (6).

13. Bradford’s description of America as “unpeopled” reflects not the true demographic history of North America but his providential worldview in which God, through various means, removed the inhabitants in order to make way for European, and especially English, colonists. The idea that the North American continent was “vacant” and that the inhabitants who were there were “savage” was critical to the European justifications for the colonization of the New World. Following the voyages of Columbus, writers drew on a tradition that was already centuries old that denied rights of self-rule to peoples whose cultures were different from that of Christian Europe. To buttress its own right to lands it had “discovered” in South America, Portugal appealed to the Pope, who in 1493 issued a papal bull entitled Inter Caestera, which divided the world of countries and islands recently and yet to be discovered between Spain and Portugal, presumably as a step to Christianize those lands. Though this was disputed by the Spaniards Francisco de Vitoria and Bartholome de Las Casas, both of whom rejected the notion that the pope could bestow the property of natives peoples on whom he wished, both countries drew upon the papal pronouncement to assert full sovereignty over the lands they colonized. This bull was, of course, not acknowledged by nations that rejected papal authority after the Reformation. Of importance to the settlement of Plimoth are the views of the Dutch lawyer Hugo Grotius, with whose views the Plimoth leaders would have been familiar. In the anonymously published Mare Liberum (Leiden: Lodewijk Elzevir, 1609) he expressed the view that there was no right to take possession of Native lands on the basis of the fact that the Natives were not Christians. This became the basis for the Dutch practice of purchasing Native lands that they desired, a practice that the English colonists at Plimoth and elsewhere in New England generally followed, though the value offered and the terms of the sales in treaties are subject to question. However, the situation was different where there appeared to be no settled owners of the land. Purchase was not necessarily required when the land fitted the European concept of vacuum domicilium, which identified some land as “vacant.” Natives lands that did not have fenced fields and European style permanent structures were considered to be free for the taking of anyone who would “improve” it by planting, fencing, building, and otherwise transforming it according to European standards. Due to the ravages of epidemic disease introduced by European fisherman and traders prior to 1620, much of the land along Cape Cod gave the appearance of being bereft of living persons. It should be noted that the depopulation of the landscape was known to Bradford when he wrote this, but would not have been well known when the congregation was debating emigration.

14. The views of Natives that Bradford expresses in this sentence, written decades after his arrival in America, are consistent with many other statements found in this work and in his poetry, and are of a piece with conventional European thought at this time. On the stereotypes and apprehensions with which Europeans operated towards indigenous inhabitants of the New World, see, for example, Karen O. Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2000).

15. Bradford was possessed of contemporary European attitudes about the unhealthiness of drinking water, preferring alcoholic beverages at every meal, though he and his fellow colonists came to realize how good the water in southeastern New England was. See Bruce C. Daniels, Puritans at Play: Leisure and Recreation in Colonial New England (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 142.

16. A later interlineation by Bradford in a darker ink.

17. Though it was not published at the time, the leaders of the venture would have been familiar with reports such as that of George Percy, who in a letter relating his experiences in the Virginia colony described an incident in 1609 in which Natives had set upon some Englishmen, whose “brains were cut and scraped out of their heads with mussel shells.” George Percy, “A True Relacyon,” in Captain John Smith: Writings, with other Narratives of Roanoake, Jamestown, and the First English Settlement of America, ed. James Horn (Library of America, 2007), 1096.

18. Among the many failed colonial ventures that the colonists would have been aware of at this time were the Roanoke (Lost) colony of the 1580s, and Francis Johnson’s effort in 1597 to establish a Separatist outpost on the Magdalen Islands, in what is now Newfoundland.

19. A later interlineation by Bradford in a darker ink.

20. The formal truce between the Dutch and Spain was due to expire in 1621. Furthermore, in 1618 conflict began in Bohemia, which quickly evolved into the major European clash between Catholic and Protestant forces that we know as the Thirty Years’ War. It took little imagination to realize that the Netherlands would be drawn into that struggle.

1. During the Anglo-Spanish War (1584-1604), Sir Walter Raleigh led an expedition in February 1595 to Guiana, seeking to explore the Orinoco River on the northeast tip of South America in an attempt to find the fabled city of El Dorado. He went up the river for four hundred miles but failed to find any such city. The following year he published an account of The Discovery of the large, rich and bewtiful empire of Guiana. Following the war, Ralegh led another expedition to the region in 1617, during which his son was killed in a clash with the Spaniards. The descriptions of a lush region and the possibility of finding gold made the region attractive to some of the Leiden congregation.

2. In 1605, following the end of the Anglo-Spanish War, there was renewed English interest in colonization. In April 1606 King James granted charters to two groups of merchants, one being incorporated as the Virginia Company of London and the other as the Virginia Company of Plymouth. The latter group never accomplished anything of substance. The London Company was permitted to establish a colony between the 34th and 45th parallels, approximately between Cape Fear and Long Island Sound. In May 1607, the Company dispatched an expedition that established a settlement along the James River that was named Jamestown. At the time when the Leiden congregation was considering emigration, they would have been aware of the struggles of that outpost.

3. In 1564, French Huguenots established a settlement along the St. John River in modern Florida, which they called Fort Caroline. This was viewed by Philip II of Spain as an infringement on Spanish lands and a possible threat to Spanish commerce in the New World. He charged General Pedro Menéndez de Aviles with removing the French. In 1565, Menendez established St. Augustine as a base of operations and in September of that year attacked Fort Caroline, killing most of the men. Shortly thereafter he surrounded 127 Frenchmen who had been stranded on a beach south of St. Augustine and, following their surrender, executed 111 of them as a warning to others, particularly Protestants, who would settle on lands claimed by Spain.

4. In an effort to attract settlers after over a decade of struggles, the Virginia Company of London had adopted a policy of allowing “particular” or private plantations within their jurisdiction. Those granted patents to establish such particular plantations raised funds, attracted and shipped settlers, and in return were granted privileges that made them virtually independent of the Company. James P. P. Horn, 1619: Jamestown and the Forging of American Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 2018), 48-49.

5. There were a number of investors in the Virginia Company of London who were sympathetic to puritan reform, including Sir Maurice Abbott and Sir Thomas Wroth, both members of the parish of St. Stephen’s Coleman Street; and William Cavendish, first Earl of Devonshire. Foremost of these was Sir Edwin Sandys, the second son of Archbishop Edwin Sandys, whom William Brewster’s father had served as bailiff and receiver of Scrooby Manor. Brewster knew Sandys from this connection and also from his time working for Sir William Davison. Sandys (1561-1629) was a major figure in Parliament starting with the Parliament of 1604; he was active in overseas projects as a member of the East India Company, the Somers Island Company, and the Virginia Company. Sandys had become the foremost figure in the Virginia Company by 1618; he promoted particular plantations and was sympathetic to various separatist groups seeking such patents.

6. In 1617 Brewster, along with Robert Cushman, travelled to England to explore what might be possible. Over the following months another member of the congregation, Robinson’s brother-in-law John Carver, along with Sabine Staresmore, a member of Henry Jacob’s congregation, also representing the congregation in London, joined in the negotiations. Cushman (1578-1625) had lived in Canterbury, Kent, where he was for a time apprenticed to a grocer. He ran afoul of the religious authorities there and relocated to Leiden in 1609, where he found work as a wool-carder and joined the Robinson church, being chosen a deacon. He was a key agent of the congregation in negotiations with the Virginia Company and the merchant backers of the enterprise. When the Speedwell had to be abandoned, he was unable to emigrate in 1620, and continued to represent the colonists in London. He was in the colony briefly in 1621, when he preached a sermon later published as A sermon preached at Plimmoth in Nevv-England December 9. 1621 In an assemblie of his Maiesties faithfull subiects, there inhabiting. VVherein is shevved the danger of self-loue, and the sweetnesse of true Friendship (London: Iohn Dawson for Iohn Bellamie, 1621). He also wrote a tract entitled The Cry of a Stone, or, a treatise; shewing what is the right matter, forme, and government of the visible church of Christ (London: R. Oulton and G. Dexter, 1642) that described the practices of the congregation; written no earlier than 1618, it was published under the name of Robert Coachman.

On John Carver’s (c. 1585-1621) background before 1609, see p. 127, n. 15. He presumably was a merchant who had emigrated to the Netherlands, where he became a member of a Walloon (Huguenot) congregation near the Belgian border. In 1609, the year when the Robinson congregation settled in Leiden, Carver joined the Leiden Walloon (Huguenot) church in a transfer from the church near Belgium. Within a year or so he joined the Robinson church, and, his first wife having died, married the sister of John Robinson. He served the congregation as a deacon and played a large role in the preparations for the departure for America. Carver was chosen the new colony’s first governor, but would die in May 1621.

Sabine Staresmore (fl. 1616-47) was a merchant who moved frequently between England and the Netherlands and at various times worshipped with the Ancient Church in Amsterdam, Robinson’s congregation in Leiden, and Henry Jacob’s semi-independent congregation in Southwark. At a point when he was engaged in negotiations on behalf of the Leiden congregation, he was arrested at a secret meeting of the Jacobs congregation. He published a tract entitled The vnlavvfulnes of reading in prayer. Or, the answer of Mr. Richard Maunsel preacher, vnto certain arguments, or reasons, drawne against the using, or communicating, in, or with the Booke of Common Prayer (Amsterdam: G. Thorp, 1619). In it, he wrote of an interview with Maunsel in which he asked the clergyman if he would discuss these matters with John Robinson, whom he anticipated would come to England to negotiate with the Virginia Council; Maunsel declined because he deemed Robinson a Brownist.

7. How the decision was reached is described by Edward Winslow in Hypocrisie Unmasked: “Now these their private thoughts [by leaders such as Robinson and Brewster] upon mature deliberation they imparted to the Brethren of the Congregation, which after much private discussion came to public agitation, till at length the Lord was solemnly sought in the congregation by fasting and prayer to direct us, who moving our hearts more and more to the work, we sent some of good abilities over into England to see what favor or acceptance such a thing might find with the King” (89).

8. Sir Robert Naunton (1563-1635) was a political figure from Suffolk who was a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge. He first achieved success thorough the patronage of Sir Robert Cecil. In January 1618, King James I made Naunton a secretary of state and a member of the Privy Council. He was known as being sympathetic to godly reform and would in the 1620s be close to John Winthrop. Edward Winslow later wrote in Hypocrisie Unmasked (89-90) that Naunton had approached the king about granting the Leiden group their wish. During that conversation King James asked how the colonists would make their living. Told by Naunton that they intended to do so by fishing, the King responded, “So God have my Soul ‘tis an honest Trade, ‘twas the Apostles’ own calling.” But the monarch would not grant them the toleration sought.

9. The archbishop of Canterbury at the time was George Abbot, who held that post from 1611-1633.

10. I.e., pretend ignorance of, take no notice of.

11. I.e., presently.

12. Archaic variant of “enow,” or “enough.”

13. These were John Carver and Robert Cushman.

14. A later interlineation by Bradford in a darker ink.

15. John Carver was baptized at Great Bealings, Suffolk, on 12 March 1581, which places him in the midst of a separatist community active in the 1590s and early 1600s in an arc of small parishes to the north and west of Ipswich. He disposed of his property in Suffolk in 1608 and disappears from English records at that time. Other members of this community were Isaac Allerton and Elizabeth Barker, the first wife of Edward Winslow. The will of Elizabeth (Barker) Winslow, drawn up in Leiden, names Winslow and Carver as executors. John Crackstone was also from this same area. Desire Minter, Carver’s servant, was related to him through marriage. See Caleb Johnson, Sue Allan and Simon Neal’s article on the register, in the Norfolk Record Office, of recusants for the Diocese of Norwich, 1595-1615, in New England Historic Genealogical Register 173 (Winter 2019). Thanks to Robert C. Anderson for providing this information and reference.

16. The Seven Articles subscribed by Robinson and Brewster were not included in this MS, but was printed in a footnote to the Ford edition of History of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647, ed. Worthington C. Ford (2 vols., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1912), 1:72-73n, from a copy in the Public Records Office. The text is as follows:

Seven Articles which the Church of Leiden sent to the Council of England to be considered in respect of their judgments occasioned about their going to Virginia, Anno 1618.

1. 1. To the confession of faith published in the name of the Church of England and to every article thereof we do with the reformed churches where we live and also elsewhere assent wholly.
2. 2. As we do acknowledge the doctrine of faith there taught so do we the fruits and effects of the same doctrine to the begeting of saving faith in thousands in the land (conformists and reformists) as they are called with whom also as with our bretheren we do desire to keep spiritual communion in peace and will practise in our parts all lawful things.
3. 3. The King’s Majesty we acknowledge for Supreme Governor in his Dominion in all causes and over all persons, and that none may decline or appeal from his authority or judgment in any cause whatsoever, but that in all things obedience is due unto him, either active, if the thing commanded be not against God’s word, or passive if it be, except pardon can be obtained.
4. 4. We judge it lawful for his Majesty to appoint bishops, civil overseers, or officers in authority under him, in the several provinces, dioceses, congregations or parishes to oversee the churches and govern them civilly according to the Laws of the Land, unto whom they are in all things to give an account and by them to be ordered according to godliness.
5. 5. The authority of the present bishops in the Land we do acknowledge so far forth as the same is indeed derived from his Majesty unto them and as they proceed in his name, whom we will also therein honor in all things and him in them.
6. 6. We beleive that no synod, classis, convocation or assembly of Ecclesiasticall Officers hath any power or authority at all but as the same by the magistrate given unto them.
7. 7. Lastly, we desire to give unto all Superiors due honor to preserve the unity of the spirit with all that fear God, to have peace with all men what in us lieth and wherein we err to be instructed by any. Subscribed by

John Robinson and William Brewster.

17. This was likely Sabine Staresmore.

18. The following was later added by Bradford on the verso, keyed to the asterisk on MS p. 21 beside pt. 4 in the list of 7 Articles.

19. I.e., “subtle”; the spelling here preserves the archaic pronunciation.

20. MS: “Wor∫∫enham.” Sir John Wolstenholme (1562-1639) was a merchant and financier who was active in overseas ventures, and a member of the Council of the Virginia Company from 1611.

21. The French Confession of Faith of 1559, which was the joint work of Theodore Beza, John Calvin, and Peter Viret.

22. The Oath of Supremacy, as re-enacted in 1559, required all who held office in the church or state to swear allegiance to the monarch as the supreme head of the church.

23. Sabine Staresmore.

24. Fulke Greville (1554-1628), a strong Calvinist, became chancellor and under-treasurer of the exchequer in 1614.

25. A cue mark by Thomas Prince follows, pointing to his comment on MS p. [22v]: “In Governour Bradford’s Collection of Letters, this Letter is more large, & subscribed Sabine Staresmore.” Since the extant fragment of the Letter Book begins in 1624, we can surmise that Prince had access to the complete original. For what survived, see Governor William Bradford’s Letter Book (Boston: Massachusetts Society of Mayflower Descendants, 1906; hereafter, Letter Book).

26. William Brewster.

27. Sir Thomas Smith (c.1558-1625) was a merchant and long-time governor of the East India Company. Smith had interested himself in Virginia as early as 1589, and in 1609 he obtained a second charter for the Virginia Company, of which he was treasurer until 1619. There was always conflict within the company between the big city merchants, led by Smith, and the more numerous small adventurers who found leadership in Sir Edwyn Sandys and the Earl of Southampton.

28. Robert Johnson was a prosperous London merchant, alderman, and a member of the Virginia Company who served as deputy-treasurer. He was a supporter of Sir Thomas Smith in the company disputes.

29. Archaic for “meanwhile.”

30. Cushman was from Kent.

31. Sir Samuel Argall (bap. 1580-1626) was a cousin of Sir Thomas Smith whom the Virginia Company entrusted with numerous voyages to the colony. He served as governor of the colony from May 15, 1617 to April 10, 1619, being replaced by Sir George Yeardley.

32. Sir George Yeardley (bap. 1588-1627) was appointed governor of Virginia in November 1618, entrusted with implementing many of the reforms that had been advocated by Sir Edwin Sandys.

33. Francis Blackwell had served as an elder of the Ancient Church in Amsterdam, but then moved to London. Planning to emigrate to Virginia, Blackwell and other separatists, including some members of the Jacobs congregation, were arrested during a fast they were conducting. Blackwell obtained his freedom by betraying a fellow separatist, Sabine Staresmore, who was representing the Leiden congregation at the time. In the fall of 1618, Blackwell set sail for Virginia on the William and Thomas along with approximately 180 others. Their crossing was horrendous and Blackwell, along with 130 of the passengers, died before they reached Virginia.

34. Dysentery.

35. In about 1612, Francis Johnson had moved with his followers to Emden after his dispute with Henry Ainsworth in the Amsterdam’s Ancient Church. He later returned to Amsterdam, where he died in January 1618.

36. A reference to Blackwell’s betrayal of Staresmore and other separatists in order to obtain his own freedom to go to Virginia.

37. William Brewster, who at this time was being sought by the English authorities. In 1616 he had joined with Thomas Brewer in establishing the Pilgrim Press, assisted by John Reynolds and Edward Winslow. The press published close to two dozen books that promoted religious reform (see Breugelmans, ed., The Pilgrim Press). A few volumes, such as John Dod and Robert Cleaver’s Exposition of the Ten Commandments, were noncontroversial; others were reprints of popular puritan works. But some were more controversial, including two books by David Calderwood, De Regimine Ecclesiae Scoticanae Brevis Relatio and Perth Assembly. Calderwood was a Scottish divine who had opposed the efforts of the king to introduce episcopacy to Scotland and personally challenged the king in a meeting at St. Andrew’s in 1617. When De Regimine Ecclesiae Scoticanae was published in 1618, King James, infuriated by the work, ordered Dudley Carleton, his ambassador in the Netherlands, to find and punish those responsible. Both Brewster and Brewer were initially placed in custody in the Leiden town hall, but Brewster, reportedly ill, was allowed to leave through the collusion of friends in the town government. At the time Cushman wrote this letter Brewster was avoiding the English authorities. The “northern part”—perhaps where he had friends near Scrooby—would have been one temporary hiding place.

38. I.e., made a pretence or false show.

39. Sabine Staresmore.

40. John Carver. This and the following underlinings in the letter are in a different ink, whether drawn by Bradford or someone else is uncertain.

41. Richard Masterson (c.1594-1633) had been excommunicated at Sandwich, Kent, in 1614 and settled in Leiden, where he became a wool-comber and a member of the Robinson congregation. It is likely that he continued to visit England and join in the type of clandestine religious services as that in which Staresmore was arrested, being saved from the same fate only because his residence was unknown. He was chosen a deacon of the Leiden congregation after the sailing of the Mayflower, but later emigrated to Plimoth, probably in 1629 or 1630.

42. This officer’s identity is unknown.

43. Sir Edward Coke (1552-1634) was a lawyer, legal writer, and long-time member of the Privy Council despite his opposition to many of the king’s actions. In 1613 King James had appointed him Chief Justice of the King’s Bench. He was noted for his many friendships with puritan divines, which would explain why Staresmore was appealing to him. He was a sponsor to the young Roger Williams.

44. A small prison in London initially opened in 1555. It was primarily a debtors’ prison, but also housed prisoners guilty of minor offenses.

45. It is possible that Wincop——who had been recommended to the Virginia Company in the previous month by the fourth Earl of Lincoln——was a tutor in the Earl’s household. In later years the Earl, Theophilus Clinton, would himself become known for his opposition to the policies of Charles I and for his promotion of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

46. Among them, as Bradford’s marginal comment specifies, Thomas Weston, a London ironmonger who had been engaged in trading cloth and other items in the Netherlands in violation of the monopoly held by the Merchant Adventurers of London, activity that was halted by the Privy Council. But it was through these efforts that he presumably became known to members of the Leiden congregation. In particular his agent in Amsterdam was Edward Pickering, a merchant married to a member of the Leiden congregation. Weston organized a group of fellow merchants interested in investing in a venture to the New World and engaged the Leiden group with an offer to finance their proposed settlement.

47. This concluding sentence appears to be a later addition by Bradford, perhaps inserted as he reviewed this chapter in preparation to write the next.

1. V. 4 in its entirety in the Geneva Version reads, “Then David asked counsel of the Lord again. And the Lord answered him, and said, Arise, go down to Keilah: for I will deliver the Philistines into thine hand.”

2. According to Winslow, “Our Agents returning; we further sought the Lord by a public and solemn Fast, for his gracious guidance” (Hypocrisie Unmasked, 90). It is on this occasion that Robinson would have preached on the text from 2 Samuel.

3. A small “x” in the left margin, whether drawn by Bradford or someone else is uncertain, highlights the following part of the sentence.

4. In his treatment, Winslow alluded to two Dutch offers, one being “to have removed unto Zealand,” which refers to the invitation organized by Teelinck to relocate near Middleburg; and the other, “if we would go on such adventures, to go under them to Hudson’s River (where they have since a great plantation, &c.) and how they would freely have transported us, and furnished every family with cattle, &c.” (Hypocrisie Unmasked, 91). In February 1620, a company of Dutch traders, now known as the Van Tweenhuijsen Company, proposed to Prince Maurits that the Robinson congregation should be supported in an effort to establish a colony in Dutch territory in America. They explained that “It is the case that a certain English minister is living at Leiden, well versed in the Dutch language, . . . would be well inclined to move his residence” to the Dutch colony, and told the Van Tweenhuijsen Company “that he knows means to obtain more than four hundred families both from these lands and from England, if they would be protected and preserved in those same lands from all violence from other potentates, by the authority and under the protection of your Princely Excellency and their High Mightinesses the Lords Estates General, to plant there the true, pure Christian religion, and to instruct the wild [Natives] of those same lands in the true teaching and to bring them to belief.” (Quoted by Jeremy Bangs, Stranger and Pilgrims, 590n, citing a copy of the document in an article published by H. J. Trap, “Een Reis die niet Doorging,” in Jaarboekje voor Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde van Leiden en Omstreken 91 [1998]: 54-57). See also the translation of this document from the National Archives in the Hague, published in Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New York, ed. E. B. O’Callaghan (Albany, 1856), I:22-23. The petition was rejected, in effect making the offer moot.

5. A small “x” in the left margin, whether drawn by Bradford or someone else is uncertain, highlights the following part of the sentence.

6. In 1620, Sir Ferdinando Gorges and others who had been members of the Virginia Company of Plymouth (which had failed in attempts to establish a colony) organized as the Council for New England and petitioned for a charter that would give them the right to establish colonies roughly between modern Philadelphia and the St. Lawrence River. Knowledge of this group’s efforts were known while the Leiden group was still deliberating their destination. Because of challenges to their petition due to the definition of fishing rights, that charter was not officially issued till November 1620, when the Leiden congregation had already embarked on their journey.

7. A small “x” in the left margin, whether drawn by Bradford or someone else is uncertain, highlights the following part of the sentence.

8. Here Bradford, writing years later, is using the new definition of “Virginia” to refer to the Jamestown colony, rather than the former definition by which Virginia referred to the entire coastal claims of England from Florida to Canada.

9. Robert Cushman and John Carver.

10. Bradford himself, along with others, had sold their estates in Leiden in 1619, putting themselves in a precarious position if the enterprise was cancelled.

11. The adventurers were those who invested money in the enterprise; the planters were those who actually emigrated, though many of the planters also had a financial investment in the company. In a description of the Plymouth Adventurers written in around 1624, John Smith indicated that they were not incorporated as such but were a group “knit together by a voluntary combination in a society without constraint or penalty, aiming to do good and to plant religion.” There were “about 70, some Gentlemen, some Merchants, some handy-crafts men, some aduenturing great summes, some small.” They met annually to elect a President and Treasurer (Smith, Generall Historie [London: John Dawson and John Haviland for Michael Sparkes, 1626], 247, as cited in Ford ed., 1:104n).

12. Thomas Prince drew a manicule in the left margin, referring to his comment on MS p. [28v]: “June 14 NS is June 4 OS, which is Lord’s day; & therefore here is doubtless a mistake: It seems more likely to have been June 24 NS, which is June 14 OS. Especially since this Letter is plainly Dated June 24, both at the Beginning & End in Governour Bradford’s Collection of Letters, & also observing there that the Figure 1 in 14 seems to have been altered on the Paper.” As the surviving fragment of the Letter Book begins midway through 1624, the details of Prince’s assertions cannot be verified.

13. Edward Pickering was a London merchant who had left England for religious reasons and acted as Thomas Weston’s agent in Amsterdam. He had married Mary Stubbs, a member of the Leiden congregation, in 1612.

14. George Morton (c.1587-1624) was a merchant originally from York. He joined the Leiden congregation by 1612, when he was married, and emigrated to the colony. His son, Thomas Morton, would become an important member of the Plimoth community and write of its history.

15. Thomas Brewer was William Brewster’s partner in the Pilgrim Press and an investor in the colonization enterprise, though he did not emigrate.

16. Thomas Nash was a member of the Leiden congregation; he did not emigrate to the colony. The pilot was Robert Coppin, who was at the helm of the Speedwell from Delftshaven to Southampton. When the Speedwell had to be left behind, he transferred to the Mayflower.

17. Thomas Prince drew an asterisk, referring to his note on MS p. [30v]:

In Gov. Bradford’s Collection of Letters, these subscribers are thus wrote out at Length:

• Samuel Fuller
• William Bradford
• Isaac Allerton.
• Edward Winslow.

This note indicates that Prince had access to the entirety of the Letter Book, since the fragment that has survived begins in 1624.

18. A later owner of the MS deleted “is” and inserted “are.”

19. This is likely a mistake for John Ferrar and his brother Nicholas Ferrar, sons of Sir Nicholas Ferrar, a merchant and leading investor in the Virginia Company, who died in April 1620. John Ferrar (c.1588-1657) was also a merchant and engaged in various overseas ventures, including the Virginia Company. He was a supporter of Sir Edwin Sandys and became deputy-treasurer of the Company when Sandys assumed its leadership as Treasurer in 1619. His brother Nicholas (1593-1637) succeeded him as deputy-treasurer when John’s three-year term expired.

20. MS: “Rob:” at the deckle edge of the page.

21. I.e., “following my own inclination I did what I wanted.”

22. I.e., damages, injuries, disastrous changes.

23. As told in Jonah 1, the prophet tried to elude his mission to Nineveh by hopping a boat to Tarshish, but was prevented by a storm (and a great fish) sent by Jehovah.

24. A manicule in the left margin beside the beginning of this paragraph was most likely drawn by Prince.

25. Evidently there had been some discussion of members of the Ancient Church in Amsterdam joining the migration, which Cushman discounts based on the more rigid separatist views of their congregation.

26. Prince’s note on MS p. [33v] regarding the dating of this letter reads: “June.11 OS is Lord’s day: & therefore ‘tis likely the Date of this Letter should be June 10, the same with the Date of the Letter following.”

27. John Turner (c. 1590-1620) was admitted a citizen of Leiden in 1610. He emigrated with his two sons and a daughter on the Mayflower. He and his sons died in the first year in the colony.

28. Presumably Thomas Weston.

29. A last equals twelve barrels, so this ship could hold up to 720 barrels.

30. The Speedwell.

31. Conquered, defeated.

32. The underlining is in a slightly darker ink, possibly not by Bradford. Captain Reynolds was master of the Speedwell; his first name is unknown.

33. The underlining is in a slightly darker ink, possibly not by Bradford. John Clarke had been employed by the Virginia Company to transport Irish cattle to the Virginia colony. He had been associated with Christopher Jones, the master of the Mayflower, and was named master’s mate and one of the pilots for the Mayflower.

34. A reference to I Cor. 9:26, “I therefore so run, not as uncertainly: so fight I, not as one that beateth the air.”

35. Cushman is suggesting that if the congregation wanted to replace him, he could go back to being a wool-comber.

36. Christopher Martin (c.1582-1621) was from Great Bursted, Essex. While not a member of the Leiden congregation, he had been brought before the ecclesiastical authorities in 1612 and again in March 1620 for activities critical of the established church. He was chosen as the financial agent for both the Mayflower and the Speedwell, responsible for supplying both ships. His conduct as a purchasing agent and disparaging comments about the Leiden congregants were criticized by Cushman and others. He journeyed on the Mayflower with his wife and two servants; all died in 1621.

37. In the left margin is the notation, not written by Bradford, “omitt,” apparently a direction to leave out this letter in transcribing.

38. Perhaps an allusion to Luke 14:28-30, “For which of you minding to build a tower, sitteth not down before, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to perform it, lest that after he hath laid the foundation, and is not able to perform it, all that behold it, begin to mock him, saying, This man began to build, and was not able to make an end?”

39. Over half of a line follows that is struck through to the point of illegibility in a later, darker ink, whether by Bradford or someone else is unascertainable.

40. A single word is struck through in the same later, darker ink as in the line previous.

41. Crabe was an unidentified minister who did not actually emigrate.

1. The Speedwell.

2. The Mayflower.

3. Edward Winslow gave an account of this sermon in his Hypocrisie Unmasked, indicating that Robinson

used these expressions, or to the same purpose; We are now ‘ere long to pass asunder, and that the Lord knoweth whether ever he [Robinson] should live to see our faces again: but whether the Lord had appointed it or not, he charged us before God and his blessed Angels, to follow him no further than he followed Christ. And if God should reveal any thing to us by any other instrument of his, to be as ready to receive it, as ever we were to receive any truth by his Ministery: For he was very confident the Lord hath more truth and light yet to break forth out of his holy Word. He took occasion also miserably to bewail the state and condition of the Reformed Churches, who were come to a period in Religion, and would go no further than the Instruments of their Reformation: As for example, the Lutherans they could not be drawn to goe beyond what Luther saw, for whatever part of God’s will he had further imparted and revealed to Calvin, they will rather die than embrace it. And so also, saith he, you see the Calvinists, they stick where he left them: A misery much to be lamented; For though they were precious shining lights in their times, yet God had not revealed his whole will to them; And were they now living, saith he, they would be as ready and willing to embrace further light, as that they had received. Here also he put us in mind of our Church Covenant (at least that part of it) whereby we promise and covenant with God and with another, to receive whatsoever light or truth shall be made known to us from his written Word: but withal exhorted us to take heed what we received for truth, and well to examine and compare, and weigh it with other Scriptures of truth, before we received it; For, saith he, It is not possible the Christian world should come so lately out of such thick Antichristian darkness, and that full perfection of knowledge should break forth at once.

Another thing he commended to us, was, that we should use all means to avoid and shake off the name of Brownist, being a meer nickname and brand to make Religion odious, and the professors of it to the Christian world; and to that end, said he, I should be glad if some godly Minister would go over with you, or come to you, before my coming; For, said he, there will be no difference between the unconformable Ministers and you, when they come to the practise of the Ordinances out of the Kingdom: And so advised us by all means to endeavour to close with the godly party of the Kingdom of England, and rather to study union rather than division; viz., how near we might possibly, without sin close with them, than in the least measure to affect division or separation from them. And be not loath to take another Pastor or Teacher, saith he, for that flock that hath two shepherds is not endangered, but secured by it (97-98).

Robert Browne (c. 1550s-1633) was the first to secede from the Church of England, setting up a separate church on congregational principles. His followers, as well as many who were not but whose ideas and practices only resembled Browne’s, were called “Brownists.” By 1585, Browne had reconciled with the Church of England and became a schoolmaster and an Anglican priest.

4. In Hypocrisie Unmasked, Edward Winslow wrote that those who stayed at Leiden “feasted us that were to go at our Pastor’s house being large, where we refreshed our selves after our tears, with singing of Psalms, making joyful melody in our hearts, as well as with the voice, there being many of the Congregation very expert in Music; and indeed it was the sweetest melody that ever mine ears heard” (90-91).

5. A Dutch port near Rotterdam, where the Speedwell was moored.

6. The text Bradford is referring to is Heb. 11:13, 14, 15, 16, “All these died in faith, and received not the promises, but saw them afar off, and believed them, and received them thankfully, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For they that say such things, declare plainly that they seek a countrey. And if they had been mindful of that country, from whence they came out, they had leisure to have returned. But now they desire a better, that is an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed of them to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city.”

7. Winslow expands on this in Hypocrisie Unmasked: “and after prayer performed by our Pastor, where a flood of tears was poured out, they accompanied us to the Ship, but were not able to speak one to another for the abundance of sorrow to part. But we only going aboard (the Ship lying to the Key) and ready to set sail (the wind being fair), we gave them a volley of small shot, and three pieces of Ordinance, and so lifting up our hands to each other, and our hearts for each other to the Lord our God, we departed” (91).

8. Prince inserts a dagger after this date, pointing to his comment on MS p. [37v]: “In Gov. Bradford’s Collection of Letters, this Letter is Dated at SouthHampton.”

9. John Peirce was a member of the Clothworkers Company and one of the adventurers (investors) in the migration of the Leiden congregation. In February 1620, a new patent for the group was issued in his name by the Virginia Company; this was sought when the Virginia Company had changed its policies to allow more autonomy to “particular plantations.” The Peirce Patent replaced the patent previously issued in the name of John Wincop. Peirce was involved in the negotiation of terms between the adventurers and the Leiden group, along with Cushman and Christopher Martin, also noted here. When it was clear that the planters had settled outside the jurisdiction of the Virginia Company of London, in June 1621 the adventurers secured a patent in Peirce’s name (also referred to as the Peirce Patent) from Sir Ferdinando Gorges and the Council for New England, allowing the settlement on Cape Cod. His importance is indicated by the fact that Robert Cushman dedicated Mourt’s Relation to him (i.e., Edward Winslow [and William Bradford], A relation or journall of the beginning and proceedings of the English plantation setled at Plimoth in New England [London: Printed for Iohn Bellamie, 1622]).

10. Robert Cushman.

11. William Mullins was an investor in the enterprise from Dorking, Surrey, who emigrated on the Mayflower with his wife, two children, and a servant. Mullins, his wife, son, and servant died during the first winter. His daughter, Priscilla, survived and within a few years married John Alden.

12. Because of the dispute with the adventurers, the group had to sell supplies, including most of their butter, to pay the port clearance fees.

13. See the preface to Mourt’s Relation, titled “Certain Useful Advertisements Sent in a Letter written by a discrete friend unto the Planters in New England, at their first setting sail from Southhampton, who earnestly desireth the prosperity of that their new Plantation” (n.p.).

14. Probably a reference to 2 Cor. 1:8, “For brethren, we would not have you ignorant of our affliction, which came unto us in Asia, how we were pressed out of measure passing strength, so that we all together doubted, even of life”; and Acts 18:5, “Now when Silas and Timotheus were come from Macedonia, Paul burned in spirit, testifying to the Jews that Jesus was the Christ.”

15. Bridget White, the sister of Carver’s wife, Catherine White Leggatt, was married to John Robinson. Robert C. Anderson, The Pilgrim Migration: Immigrants to Plymouth Colony, 1620-1633 (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2004), 95-96.

16. Archaic for delay, be slow.

17. A comparison of Bradford’s transcription of this letter with the version published as “A Letter of advice to the Planters in New-England” in Mourt’s Relation reveals only very minor differences.

18. Prince drew an asterisk in the left margin beside the beginning of the letter, pointing to his comment on MS p. [38v]: “This Letter is omitted in Governour Bradford’s Collection of Letters.”

19. Insert and caret by Bradford in a different ink.

20. Rom. 12:18, “If it be possible, as much as in you is, have peace with all men.”

21. In his Nevv essayes or obseruations diuine and morall Collected out of the holy Scriptures, ancient and moderne writers, both diuine and humane (London: Giles Thorp and Miles Flesher, 1628), ch. 37, Robinson quoted from the church father John Chrysostom: “If men good, and bad be joined together in a special bond of society, they either quickly part, or usually become alike. Friendship either takes, or makes men alike” (202).

22. Matth. 18:7, “Woe be unto the world because of offences: for it must needs be that offences shall come, but woe be to that man, by whom the offence cometh.” Notably, in citing this text, Robinson adds “or woman.”

23. 1 Cor. 9:15, “But I have used none of these things: neither wrote I these things, that it should be so done unto me: for it were better for me to die, than that any man should make my rejoicing vain.” The marginal note in the Geneva Bible reads, “For now you have no just cause against me, seeing that I preached the Gospel freely unto you.”

24. MS: “speaks,” but Mourt’s Relation, “speake” (sig. B3), is used here. 1 Pet. 4:8, “But above all things have fervent love among you: for love covereth the multitude of sins.”

25. Matth. 7:1, 2, 3, “Judge not, that ye be not judged. For what judgment ye iudge, ye shall be judged, and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why seest thou the mote, that is in thy brother’s eye, and perceivest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”

26. The interlineations on this page of the MS were made by Bradford in a different ink.

27. Possibly referring to Heb. 6:9, “But beloved, we have persuaded ourselves better things of you, and such as accompany salvation, though we thus speak.”

1. A later insertion and caret, possibly not by Bradford.

2. Christopher Jones (c.1570-1622) was the master of the Mayflower.

3. One nautical league is just under 3.5 miles.

4. Judges 7 tells the story of how Gideon, one of the judges of Israel, was directed by God to reduce the strength of his forces before attacking the Midianites.

5. The interlineations on this page of the MS were made by Bradford in a different ink.

6. Prince draws a cue corresponding to the one before his remark on MS p. [42v]: “In Gov. Bradford’s Collection of Letters, this is Edward Southworth.” Edward Southworth was a member of the Leiden congregation and a say-weaver who invested in the enterprise but did not emigrate; he died in 1623, following which his wife Alice emigrated and shortly thereafter married the widower William Bradford. Constant Southworth, the son of Edward and Alice Southworth, did not emigrate until 1628; Southworth was evidently in London at the time since Heneage House was part of a neighborhood of tenements in Aldgate.

7. Not further identified. Past editions read “E. M.,” but the first letter more closely resembles Bradford’s capital “G” than “E.”

8. I.e., swindlers, extorters, or those who take an inordinate portion of proceeds.

9. 1 Kgs. 12 records how when Rehoboam succeeded his father Solomon as king, the people of Israel came to him and asked for relief from taxation and servitude; Rehoboam refused the counsel of the older advisors to speak kindly to the people and lessen their burdens, instead heeding the advice of the young advisors to be even harsher than his father. V. 11 has them instructing Rehoboam to boast, “Now where as my father did burden you with a grievous yoke, I will yet make your yoke heavier: my father hath chastised you with rods, but I will correct you with scourges.” This action led eventually to the division of the kingdom.

10. William Ring was, like Southworth, a say-weaver. He is believed to have remained behind when the Speedwell was abandoned. Mary Ring, likely his wife, came to Plimoth in 1629.

11. See 2 Cor. 5:16, “Wherefore, henceforth know we no man after the flesh, yea though we have knowen Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more”; Heb. 12:2, 3, “Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross, and despised the shame, and is set at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider therefore him that endured such speaking against of sinners, lest ye should be wearied and faint in your minds.”

1. Obsolete form of “shrewdly,” meaning sharply, severely, or harshly.

2. This interlineation is a later addition, possibly by a different hand.

3. A myth has long persisted that the great screw referred to here was part of a printing press that the colonists were bringing to America. Jeremy Bangs has persuasively argued that this was actually a house jack used by carpenters (Strangers and Pilgrims, 608-10).

4. Obsolete form of “staunch,” meaning stopped up, watertight.

5. I.e., to heave to and drift under short sail.

6. John Howland (c.1592-1673) was a servant of John Carver. He was likely from Leiden, though it is not known if he was a member of the congregation at that time; given the offices he held in the new colony, he likely became a member of the church in Plimoth, to which Bradford attests. His brother Henry, who came to Plimoth in 1632, later became a Quaker.

7. Roll or pitch.

8. I.e., fathoms.

9. Obsolete or alternative form of “hauled,” meaning drawn or pulled up.

10. There was a William Button baptized in Austerfield in 1598, but it is not likely he was the individual referred to here, who was “a youth.” More likely he was the William Button baptized in Worksop in 1605.

11. Samuel Fuller (1580-1633) had been born in Redenhall, Norfolk, and may have been a serge weaver before his arrival in the Netherlands, where he seems to have pursued that same vocation. He was not from Scrooby but appears to have joined the congregation and been elected a deacon by 1610, when he was part of a delegation led by Robinson and Brewster that travelled to Amsterdam to intervene in a dispute in that church. He likely acquired some medical knowledge in Leiden, and, on the journey to America, perhaps learned more about medical practices from Giles Heal, the ship surgeon on the Mayflower, enabling him to serve as the colony’s physician. But he would play an even more important role in explaining Plimoth church practices to the first settlers in Massachusetts.

12. This indicates that they did intend to settle in the jurisdiction of the Virginia Company of London, as allowed in their patent.

13. MS: “shoulds,” which is how Bradford spells this word throughout OPP.

14. Captain Bartholomew Gosnold (d. 1607) was a sea captain and explorer. On a voyage in 1602, in the bark Concord, he passed the Azores and sailed along the Maine coast before sailing into Cape Cod Bay. He explored the north shore of Buzzards Bay and attempted to establish a trading post in the region, which had to be abandoned for lack of supplies.

15. John Smith (1580-1631), best known for his role in the Virginia colony, in the 1610s turned his attention to New England, mapping the coast and promoting colonization, particularly in his A description of New England (London: Humfrey Lownes, for Robert Clerke, 1616).

16. Dan. 2:19, “Then was the secret revealed unto Daniel in a vision by night: therefore Daniel praised the God of heaven.”

17. Seneca the Younger, Epistle 53:

You can persuade me into almost anything now, for I was recently persuaded to travel by water. We cast off when the sea was lazily smooth; the sky, to be sure, was heavy with nasty clouds, such as usually break into rain or squalls. . . . But when we were so far out that it made little difference to me whether I returned or kept on, the calm weather, which had enticed me, came to naught. The storm had not yet begun, but the ground-swell was on, and the waves kept steadily coming faster. I began to ask the pilot to put me ashore somewhere; he replied that the coast was rough and a bad place to land, and that in a storm he feared a lee shore more than anything else. But I was suffering too grievously to think of the danger, since a sluggish seasickness which brought no relief was racking me, the sort that upsets the liver without clearing it. Therefore I laid down the law to my pilot, forcing him to make for the shore, willy-nilly. . . . I remembered my profession as a veteran devotee of cold water, and, clad as I was in my cloak, let myself down into the sea, just as a cold-water bather should. What do you think my feelings were, scrambling over the rocks, searching out the path, or making one for myself? I understood that sailors have good reason to fear the land. It is hard to believe what I endured when I could not endure myself; you may be sure that the reason why Ulysses was shipwrecked on every possible occasion was not so much because the sea-god was angry with him from his birth; he was simply subject to seasickness. And in the future I also, if I must go anywhere by sea, shall only reach my destination in the twentieth year.

Loeb Classical Library, 75: 354-55 (Harvard University Press, 2018). On the presence of this work in Plimoth Colony, on the consequences of Bradford’s use of this earlier, unrevised translation, and on the interesting history of ownership of the volume, see David Lupher, Greeks, Romans, and Pilgrims, 179-98.

18. Acts 28:2, “And the Barbarians shewed us no little kindness: for they kindled a fire, and received us every one, because of the present shower, and because of the cold.”

19. A reference to Deut. 34, in which Moses, having ascended Mount Pisgah, is shown by Jehovah the promised land of Canaan.

20. Inserted by Bradford in a different ink.

1. The larger and looser script Bradford employs starting at this point indicates a new sitting.

2. This would indicate the journey took 65 days.

3. Present-day Provincetown.

4. The Pamet River, which consisted of a tidal harbor and creek extending most of the way across the Cape.

5. According to Edward Winslow’s account in Mourt’s Relation (4), among these were William Bradford, Stephen Hopkins, and Edward Tilley. Based on the detailed description, Winslow was also one of the party.

6. Miles Standish (d. 1656) was employed as the military leader of the colony. Long believed to have had no prior connection with the Leiden congregation, Jeremy Bangs has demonstrated that Standish was well known to Robinson and other members of the congregation prior to 1620 and was likely a member of the congregation in Leiden and Plimoth (Strangers and Pilgrims, ch. 6). Bangs points out that John Robinson wrote about his character, and that in his will Standish left a legacy for Robinson’s granddaughter. Bangs has also been able to trace Standish’s involvement in the wars in the Low Countries, starting with the siege of Ostende in 1601.

7. The interlineation is by Bradford in a different ink.

8. Variant form of “track,” meaning course, path, or route.

9. The underlining is in slightly different ink, either by Bradford or someone else.

10. The interlineation is by Bradford in a different ink.

11. The pond is near the town of Truro, on Cape Cod.

12. This account should be compared with that of Edward Winslow contained in Mourt’s Relation, which gives more detail on the Native site: “we found a little path to certain heaps of sand, one whereof was covered with old Mats, and had a wooden thing like a mortar whelmed [overturned] on the top of it, and an earthen pot laid in a little hole at the end thereof; we musing what it might be, digged and found a Bow, and, as we thought, Arrows, but they were rotten. We supposed, there were many other things, but because we deemed them graves, we put in the Bow again and made it up as it was, and left the rest untouched, because we thought it would be odious unto them to ransack their Sepulchers.” Going on further, they found another site

where an house had been, and four or five old Planks laid together; also we found a great Kettle, which had been some Ship’s kettle and brought out of Europe; there was also an heap of sand, made like the former, but it was newly done, we might see how they paddled it with their hands which we digged up, and in it we found a little old Basket full of fair Indian Corn, and digged further and found a fine great new Basket full of very fair corn of this year, with some 36 goodly ears of corn, some yellow, and some red, and others mixt with blue, which was a very goodly sight: the Basket was round, and narrow at the top, it held about three or four Bushels, which was as much as two of us could lift up from the ground, and was very handsomely and cunningly made; . . . We were in suspense, what to do with it, and the Kettle, and at length after much consultation, we concluded to take the Kettle, and as much of the Corn as we could carry away with us; and when our Shallop came, if we could find any of the people, and come to parlay with them, we would give them the Kettle again, and satisfy them for their Corn (6-7).

The corn was buried by the Natives for their spring planting.

13. Variant of “creeks.” Cf. Smith, Advertisements for the unexperienced planters of New-England, or any where (London: Iohn Haviland, 1631): “woods, cricks, and swamps” (19).

14. The interlineation is by Bradford in a different ink.

15. Winslow’s account provides more detail on this part of the expedition, including this: “as we wandered we came to a tree, where a young Spritt [sapling] was bowed down over a bow, and some Acorns strewed underneath; Stephen Hopkins said, it had been to catch some Deer, so, as we were looking at it, William Bradford being in the Rear, when he came looked also upon it, and as he went about, it gave a sudden jerk up, and he was immediately caught by the leg. It was a very pretty devise, made with a Rope of their own making, and having a noose as artificially [artfully] made as as any Roper in England can make, and as like ours as can be, which we brought away with us” (8-9).

16. Numb. 13:23, 24, 25, 26, “And they ascended toward the South, and came unto Hebron, where were Ahiman, Sheshai, and Talmai, the sons of Anak. And Hebron was built seven year before Zoan in Egypt. Then they came to the river of Eshcol, and cut down thence a branch with one cluster of grapes, and they bare it upon a bar between two, and brought of the pomegranates and of the figs. That place was called the river Eshcol because of the cluster of grapes, which the children of Israel cut down thence. Then after forty days they turned again from searching of the land.”

17. The interlineation is by Bradford in a different ink.

18. Winslow again offers in Mourt’s Relation far more detail regarding these activities: “we marched to the place where we had the corn formerly, which place we called Corn-hill; and digged and found the rest, of which we were very glad: we also digged in a place little further off, and found a Bottle of oil: we went to another place, which we had seen before, and digged, and found more corn, viz. two or three Baskets full of Indian wheat [corn], and a bag of Beans, with a good many of fair Wheat-ears; whilst some of us were digging up this, some others found another heap of Corn, which they digged up also, so as we had in all about ten Bushels, which will serve us sufficiently for seed. And sure it was God’s good providence that we found this Corn, for else we know not how we should have done, for we knew not how we should find or meet with any of the Indians, except it be to do us a mischief” (10). The day after uncovering this corn, they

found a place like a grave, but it was much bigger and longer than any we had yet seen. It was also covered with boards, so as we mused what it should be, and resolved to dig it up, where we found, first a Mat, and under that a fair Bow, and there another Mat, and under that a board about three quarters long, finely carved and painted, with three tines, or broaches on the top, like a Crown; also between the Mats we found Bowls, Trays, Dishes, and such-like Trinkets; at length we came to a fair new Mat, and under that two Bundles, the one bigger, the other less, we opened the greater and found in it a great quantity of fine and perfect red Powder, and in it the bones and skull of a man. The skull had fine yellow hair still on it, and some of the flesh unconsumed; there was bound up with it a knife, a pack-needle, and two or three old iron things. It was bound up in a Sailer’s canvas Casack, and a pair of cloth breeches; the red Powder was a kind of Embaulment, and yielded a strong, but no offensive smell; It was as fine as any flower. We opened the less bundle likewise, and found of the same Powder in it, and the bones and head of a little child, about the legs, and other parts of it was bound strings, and bracelets of fine white Beads; there was also by it a little Bow, about three quarters long, and some other odd knacks; we brought sundry of the prettiest things away with us, and covered the Corps up again (11).

19. This and the subsequent underlinings in this paragraph are drawn in a slightly darker ink (similar to that used to underline words on MS p. 34), whether by Bradford or by someone else is unascertainable.

20. These can be identified from Mourt’s Relation (15) as Miles Standish, John Carver, John Howland, William Bradford, Edward Winslow, John and Edward Tilley, Richard Warren, Stephen Hopkins and his servant Doty.

21. The seamen were the pilots, John Clarke and Robert Coppin, the master gunner, and three unknown sailors.

22. A deletion and insertion by Bradford in a different ink.

23. Likely a pilot whale.

24. This interlineation by Bradford is in a different ink.

25. An obsolete form of “down.”

26. This interlineation by Bradford is in a different ink.

27. Underlined in a later ink, whether by Bradford is or someone else is unascertainable.

28. A later insertion by Bradford.

29. This interlineation by Bradford is in a different ink.

30. A small bracket in the left margin highlights this statement, but whether it was made by Bradford is unascertainable.

31. Winslow’s account of this in Mourt’s Relation is very similar (18-20).

32. I.e., sailed along the coast.

33. This interlineation by Bradford is in a different ink.

34. This and the other underlining in this sentence were made later.

35. Clark’s Island.

36. This and the remaining underlinings in this chapter are drawn in a different ink.

37. Plimoth harbor.

38. The site of the settlement was the location of the Native village of Patuxet, meaning “At the little falls,” whose population had been all but wiped out by the ravages of disease introduced by European visitors to the coast. As late as 1614 it had been a thriving community.

39. Bradford omits the fact that on returning from this expedition he found that his wife Dorothy had fallen overboard and died. The suggestion, never raised till the mid-nineteenth century, that she committed suicide, was advanced as a possibility by Samuel Eliot Morison in the introduction to his 1952 edition of OPP, but there is no basis for that (Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647 . . . A New Edition: The Complete Text, with Notes and an Introduction, by Samuel E. Morison [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952], xxiv; hereafter “Morison ed.” or “Morison”). For a good discussion of the issues, see Lupher, Greeks, Romans, and Pilgrims, 281-84.

1. This insertion, and the following insertions and deletions on this page of the MS, were made by Bradford in an ink very similar to that of the original composition, probably very soon after.

2. This document is what is referred to as the Mayflower Compact. The names of those who signed are provided in Nathaniel Morton’s New-Englands memoriall: John Alden, John Allerton, John Billington, William Bradford, William Brewster, Richard Britteridge, Peter Brown, John Carver, James Chilton, Richard Clark, Francis Cook, John Crackstone, Edward Doten, Francis Eaton, Thomas English, Moses Fletcher, Edward Fuller, Samuel Fuller, Richard Gardiner, John Goodman, Stephen Hopkins, John Howland, Edward Leister, Edmond Margesson, Christopher Martin, William Mullins, Digory Priest, John Ridgedale, Thomas Rogers, George Soule, Miles Standish, Edward Tilley, John Tilley, Thomas Tinker, John Turner, Richard Warren, William White, Thomas Williams, Edward Winslow, and Gilbert Winslow (15-16).

3. Interlineation by Bradford in a different ink.

4. This and the subsequent deletions and insertions on this page of the MS were made by Bradford in a different ink.

5. The cue in front of this word, and the comment in the margin, are later insertions by Bradford.

6. I.e., boatswain, “bosun” being the common pronunication.

7. The interlineations on this page of the MS are by Bradford in a different ink (with the exception of the change described below, n. 9).

8. A later possessor of the MS changed “goes and gets” to “went and got.”

9. I.e., cheat, defraud.

10. The Wampanoag were still mourning the loss of thousands in the Great Dying that began in 1616 and ravaged their villages through 1619. The rawness of the devastation consuming the early settlement had to have struck fear in the hearts of the Natives observing from a distance. Karen Kupperman (Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America, 34-36) notes that while estimates of total native population at the time of contact with Europeans vary, a mortality rate of ninety percent during the century following is agreed on, brought on by diseases introduced by the colonizers, malnutrition, dislocation and even climactic conditions, including the “Little Ice Age” of the seventeenth century. See Dean Snow and Kim M. Lanphear, “European Contact and Indian Depopulation in the Northeast: The Timing of the First Epidemics,” Ethnohistory 35 (1988): 15-33.

11. A later insertion by Bradford.

12. The trepidation of the Wampanoag most certainly was based on the prior history of the actions of European explorers, including kidnappings and aggression.

13. Samoset was a Wabanaki from the Maine coast who had survived both the devastation of European diseases and attacks by other tribes (the Tarrantines). It was common for the Wabanaki to travel south from the Maine coast to fish and trade with the tribes of southern New England. His presence with the Wampanoags attests to the extensive coastal trade and communications among the tribes of New England. Living on Monhegan Island, Samoset had learned broken English from the various European fisherman and traders who frequented that island. It is likely that at this time Samoset had accompanied an English trader, Captain Thomas Dermer, when the captain sailed to Cape Cod, which Samoset described as a day’s sail from Monhegan Island “with a great wind,” or five days’ journey by land (Mourt’s Relation, 32). With him on that voyage was Tisquantum, also known as Squanto, who was with Dermer in 1619 when the captain visited Monhegan island. Samoset would play a key role in the early history of Plimoth, and inform the colonists of the potential of trade along the Maine coast, but then return to the north (A briefe relation of the discouery and plantation of Nevv England and of sundry accidents therein occurring, from the yeere of our Lord M.DC.VII. to this present M.DC.XXII [London: John Haviland, 1622], 6-7). His only recorded actions thereafter date from 1623, near Casco Bay, when an English explorer and Council of New England member Christopher Levett encountered “Somersett [Samoset], a Sagamore, one that hath been found very faithful to the English, and hath saved the lives of many of our Nation.” On that occasion Samoset visited Levett’s trading post and told the English trader that their sons “should be Brothers and that there should be mouchicke legamatch (that is friendship), betwixt them.” Christopher Levett, A Voyage into New England begun in 1623. and ended in 1624 (London: William Iones, 1624), 9, 16.

14. Squanto, whose Native name was Tisquantum, had been an inhabitant of the Wampanoag village of Patuxet. In 1614, John Smith, accompanied by at least two Natives who had spent time in England, led an expedition of several ships further to explore and map New England. One of the captains serving under him, Thomas Hunt, stopped at Patuxet, where, Smith later reported, he “betrayed twenty seven of these poor innocent souls” aboard his ship (Smith, A description of New England, 47). Hunt, whom Sir Ferdinando Gorges described as “more savage-like” than the Natives he abducted, carried the captives to the Spanish port of Malaga, where he attempted to sell them into slavery. Dominican friars who, going back to the time of Bartolome de las Casas, had advocated for Natives, intervened and prevented the sale. While the fate of most of the captives is unknown, Tisquantum (Squanto) somehow ended up in London, living with a London merchant, John Slany, who served as treasurer of a company which held a patent for exploration of Newfoundland. Tisquantum seized the opportunity to learn English, and was in Newfoundland briefly in 1618, presumably sent by the Newfoundland Company. In 1619 he boarded a ship commanded by Captain Thomas Dermer that was sent by Gorges to Cape Cod, and he was able to return to Patuxet, from which he had been kidnapped five years earlier. What he found was a deserted village with signs that the family and friends he had left were no longer alive. While he is often portrayed as the only survivor of Patuxet references to kinsmen make it clear that some other members of the community had survived the catastrophe that had destroyed their home and had moved on to other villages. He had been taken in by Ousamequin (who would be known to the English by his title, Massasoit) in the Wampanoag village of Pokanoket. Samuel Purchas, Purchas his pilgrimes In fiue bookes (London: W. Stansby for H. Fetherstone, 1625), Bk. 10, pt. 2, 1827-88.

15. According to Winslow in Mourt’s Relation, Samoset spent that night in the home of Stephen Hopkins and left the next day (33).

16. “Massasoit” was a title meaning great sachem of the Wampanoag Pokanoket tribe. At this time that position was held by Ousamequin. The tribe occupied much of what is now southeastern Massachusetts and parts of modern Rhode Island. The Wampanoag were severely affected by the diseases that ravaged the coast prior to 1620, which made them vulnerable to efforts by the neighboring Narragansett to extend their influence to the east and southeast. The Narragansett had raided their neighbors and in one such attack killed the Wampanoag sachem Nanapeshamet, possibly in 1619. In Mourt’s Relation Winslow describes Ousamequin on his first appearance at Plimoth as “a very proper tall young man, of a very modest and seemely countenance,” who “had in his bosom hanging in a string, a great long knife” (38),

17. Squanto’s arrival with the larger party and under the watch of the Massasoit Oousamequin is another indication that he was not fully trusted and perhaps a servant; Kathleen Bragdon describes Squanto as a “lesser messenger” (Native People of Southern New England, 1650-1775 [Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 2009], 20). It is fair to say that Squanto was a victim of circumstance, an accidental agent of suspicion and mistrust. Stolen from the very same village where he was now presented as an emissary, he returned most likely unaware that he was in the company of a suspected foe. He was also without any support from a village or clan, all assumed lost in the great dying that wiped out Patuxet the year before his return. While never formally stated, it should also be considered that Squanto was brought to that initial caucus as he was thought to be the sole survivor of Patuxet and therefore the last person alive who could authorize the Pilgrims to establish their village there.

18. Bradford’s reference dates the writing of this passage to 1644. John Carver was governor when this treaty was negotiated.

19. The terms as reported by Winslow in Mourt’s Relation are as follows: “1. That neither he nor any of his should injure or do hurt to any of our people. 2. And if any of his did hurt to any of ours, he should send the offender, that we might punish him. 3. That if any of our Tools were taken away when our people were at work, he should cause them to be restored, and if ours did any harm to any of his, we would do the like to them. 4. If any did unjustly war against him, we would aie him; If any did war against us, he should aid us. 5. He should send to his neighbour Confederates, to certify them of this, that they might not wrong us, but might be likewise comprised in the conditions of Peace. 6. That when their men came to us, they should leave their Bows and Arrows behind them, as we should do our Pieces when we came to them.” (37). The significant difference is that Bradford’s account, written two decades after Winslow’s, omits the provision that Englishmen entering the Wampanoag villages should leave their weapons behind.

20. Sowams was on the Mount Hope peninsula, near modern Barrington, Rhode Island. This and the subsequent underlinings in this paragraph are in a different ink.

21. This and the subsequent insertions in this paragraph were made later by Bradford.

22. The underlinings on this page of the MS are all drawn in a different ink, whether by Bradford or someone else is uncertain.

23. A reference to A briefe relation of the discovery and plantation of New England, sig. C3. After describing the ambush and wounding of Dermer by “certain new Salvages,” the relation comments: “so ended this worthy Gentleman his days, after he had remained in the discovery of that coast two years, giving us good content in all he undertook; and after he had made the peace between us and the Salvages, that so much abhorred our Nation, for the wrongs done them by others, as you have heard.”

24. A place designated on John Smith’s 1616 map of New England (in A Description of New England), near where the Charles River flowed into Boston harbor.

25. The Pocanocket or Pawkannawkut Indians were part of the Wampanoag group of tribes; they were centered in the area around the mouths of the present-day Taunton and Dighton Rivers that empty into Narragansett Bay.

26. A ship’s small guns.

27. There was a variety of occasions when French and English explorers killed and kidnapped natives during the years to which Dermer generally refers; any one of these, or a combination of them, could have been the cause of Native hostility.

28. This episode centered on the Native Epenow, who was one of five coastal Natives kidnapped by Captain Edward Harlow in 1611, Epenow being from Capawack (Martha’s Vineyard). Carried to London, Epenow became a celebrity in England, commended by Sir Ferdinando Gorges and John Smith among others, and possibly being the inspiration for a character—“a strange Indian”—in Shakespeare’ s Henry VIII (1613). He talked of a gold mine on Capawack, leading to a 1614 expedition financed by Gorges to seek the mine, with Epenow aboard as a guide. When the ship anchored off shore it was surrounded by Natives. Epenow managed to escape his confinement, initiating a clash in which many of the crew were wounded and many Natives wounded or killed. Years later, when Captain Thomas Dermer stopped at Capawack in 1619, Epenow boasted of how he had escaped. In 1620, prior to the departure of the Mayflower, Dermer again visited Capawack, with Tisquantum; some of his men were attacked, and Dermer himself was wounded.

29. This and the subsequent underlinings on this page of the MS are drawn in a later ink, whether by Bradford or someone else is uncertain.

30. MS: “Nawset, & ∫aughtughtett.” Nauset, named after the Indian tribe, was the region around modern-day Eastham on Cape Cod; Satucket, meaning “near the mouth of the stream,” was a Nauset village in the present-day town of Brewster.

31. MS: “pacanawkete.” Pocanocket was land on the Mount Hope peninsula.

32. I.e., the Nausets. Manamoyick or Monomitwas is the region around Pleasant Bay in the present towns of Harwich and Orleans. It was then a harbor entered directly from the sea, but the channel is closed up.

33. Purchas, Purchas his pilgrimes in fiue bookes, vol. 4, bk. 9, p. 1778, which presents a letter from Dermer to Purchas dated 27 Dec. 1619, reading in part: “At Manamock (the Southern part of Cape Cod, now called Sutcliff Inlets) I was unawares taken prisoner, when they sought to kill my men, which I left to man the Pinnace; but missing of their purpose, they demanded a ransom, which had, I was as far from liberty as before: yet it pleased God at last, after a strange manner to deliver me, with three of them into my hands, and a little after the chief Sacheum himself; who seeing me weigh anchor, would have leaped overboard, but intercepted, craved pardon, and sent for the Hatchets given for ransom, excusing himself by laying the fault on his neighbours; and to be friends sent for a Canoe’s lading of Corn, which received we set him free.” The volumes of Purchas are listed in the inventory of Thomas Willett’s estate from 1674 (Bangs, Plymouth Colony’s Private Libraries, 302).

34. Insertion by Bradford in a different ink.

35. Martha’s Vineyard.

36. A small room or compartment.

37. This and the subsequent underlinings on this page of the MS are drawn in a different ink, whether by Bradford or someone else is uncertain.

38. An account of the treatment of the Frenchmen was included in “A Declaration of the affairs of the English people that first inhabited New England,” presented to the General Court by Phineas Pratt in 1662. Pratt was a survivor of the Wessagusset settlement established by Thomas Weston in 1622, which Bradford discusses later (below, p. 226). Pratt’s account was published in the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 4th series, Vol. 4 (1858), 472-76.

39. The Mayflower.

40. Another term for “powwows,” or spiritual leaders.

41. Both “manner” and “them” following in this sentence are later interlineations by Bradford.

42. The spacing of the handwriting tightens up, indicating a new sitting.

43. Interlineation by Bradford in a different ink.

44. The insertion is a later addition, possibly not by Bradford. The reference is to Lam. 3:27, “It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth.”

45. This is a reference to Mourt’s Relation, which contained Winslow’s more detailed narrative of the events of the early months.

46. In the “old style” calendar, the new year began on March 25.

1. This and the following interlineations on this page of the MS were made by Bradford in a different ink.

2. The underlinings on this page of the MS are drawn in a different ink, whether by Bradford or by someone else is unascertainable.

3. Isaac Allerton (c. 1586-1659) was a member of the Leiden congregation and sailed on the Mayflower. His wife died in Plimoth during the colony’s first year. He later married Fear Brewster, a daughter of William Brewster. He travelled back and forth to England in the 1620s and 1630s on personal and colony business. After Bradford and eleven others had bought out the original stockholders’ responsibility for the colony’s troubled finances, Allerton was selected to conduct the colony’s business abroad; he was perceived to have run the colony into debt, in part by mixing his personal finances with the colony’s. He subsequently moved to Marblehead, then to Dutch New Amsterdam, and finally to New Haven, where he died.

4. This was the marriage of Edward Winslow to Susannah White, whose husband had died in February 1621. Her daughter was Peregrine White. Winslow’s first wife, Elizabeth Barker, had died in March 1621.

5. Ruth’s marriage to Boaz, according to leviratic principles, is described in this chapter. The Plimoth colonists followed the practice of civil marriage with which they had become familiar in the Netherlands. This was in contrast to the English law requiring marriage by a clergyman and reflecting the colonists’ belief that the marriage ceremony was not necessarily religious; this also was a practical response to the fact that for most of the colony’s early years there was no ordained clergyman to officiate. For more on this see Bangs, Strangers and Pilgrims, 638-40.

6. The Staten-Generaal of The Netherlands.

7. Jean Francois Le Petit et al., A generall historie of the Netherlands (London: A. Islip and G. Eld, 1608), lib. 13, p. 1029: “The Catholics made no great question about their baptizings and burials, and touching marriages, it was decreed by a public proclamation, that all such as were not of the reformed religion, (after lawful and open publication) coming before the Magistrates in the town-houses, were orderly given in marriage one unto an other.” Note that while in MS Bradford places quotes around the entire passage, he is actually excerpting, representing as though civil marriage was not a possibility “for all such as were not of the reformed religion” (which would exclude the Separatists, being reformed) but for “those of any religion.”

8. Note Bradford’s dating of his writing of this annal, more than a quarter of a century having passed. A slight tightening in the handwriting after this point indicates a new sitting.

9. This interlineation by Bradford is in a later ink.

10. Edward Winslow (1595-1655) was one of the key figures in the history of the colony, whose accounts––Mourt’s Relation and Hypocrisie Unmasked—have been previously cited. He would also write Good nevves from New-England: or A true relation of things very remarkable at the plantation of Plimoth in Nevv-England Shewing the wondrous providence and goodnes of God, in their preservation and continuance, being delivered from many apparant deaths and dangers (London: I. Dawson and Eliot’s Court Press, 1624); and New-Englands salamander, discovered by an irreligious and scornefull pamphlet, called New-Englands Jonas cast up at London, &c. (London: Ric. Cotes, for John Bellamy, 1647). Born in Droitwich, Worcestershire, and educated at the King’s School in Worcester, where he learned Latin and Greek, Winslow did not go on to university but in 1613 was apprenticed to a member of the Stationers Company in London, learning the printer’s trade. He emigrated to Leiden in 1617, perhaps recruited by Thomas Brewer to work on the Pilgrim Press. He joined the Robinson congregation and sailed on the Mayflower. Over the years he would serve as the colony’s Assistant numerous times and Governor from 1633-1636. In the 1640s he represented not only Plimoth but Massachusetts before the English government, and in the 1650s served in various posts in England’s puritan Protectorate government. Oliver Cromwell named him one of the three civil commissioners in the 1655 expedition to capture Hispaniola, but he fell ill and died on the expedition.

11. Stephen Hopkins (c.1579-1644) was a tanner and merchant who was the minister’s clerk in 1609 on the Sea Venture on a journey to Virginia, which was interrupted when the ship encountered a hurricane and was wrecked on the coast of Bermuda. His reading of the scriptures persuaded him that neither the captain of the Venture, Sir George Somers, nor Sir Thomas Gates (who was to assume the governorship of Virginia on arrival there) had any legitimate authority over the shipwrecked men. A resultant mutiny led to Hopkins being tried, convicted and sentenced to death, though the sentence was not carried out. He joined the Mayflower from London and was one of the signers of the Mayflower Compact. Though a freeman in Plimoth and included as an assistant, he ran afoul of the authorities on more than one occasion.

12. Winslow gives a more detailed account of this embassy in “A Journey to Pokanoket,” which was published as part of Mourt’s Relation, 40-48.

13. I.e., “not as much corn.”

14. This and the subsequent underlinings on this page are drawn in a later ink, whether by Bradford or someone else is uncertain.

15. The Narragansetts lived to the west of the Wampanoags and had been relatively unaffected by the great mortality, leading them to seek an advantage over the Wampanoags.

16. This was the son of John Billington (c.1579-1630), who had sailed on the Mayflower with his wife and two sons. The father would be executed by hanging in 1630 for killing John Newcomen. The younger John Billington was born around 1604 and would have been a teenager when he went missing. The story of how he went missing, was found by the Nausets, and returned is told in “A Voyage Made by Ten of our Men to the Kingdom of Nauset, to Seek a Boy that had Lost Himself in the Woods,” published in Mourt’s Relation, 49-52. After Massasoit revealed his location the colonists were able to recover him, but in doing so they encountered “an old woman, whom we judged to be no less than a hundred years old . . . [who] could not behold us without breaking forth into great passion, weeping and crying excessively. We demanding the reason of it, they told us, she had three sons who, when Master Hunt was in these parts went aboard his Ship to trade with him, and he carried them Captives into Spain (for Tisquantum at that time was carried away also) by which means she was deprived of her children in her old age. We told them we were sorry that any English man should give them that offence, that Hunt was a bad man, and that all the English that heard of it condemned him for the same” (50). The account also identifies the Nauset as the natives whose corn the English had stolen, and those who had attacked the English at First Encounter Beach. After negotiations in which the colonists promised restitution, Billington was restored.

17. Manomet was a seaside village of the Wampanoag to the south of Plimoth.

18. Hobomock was a Wampanoag who came to live with the colonists along with his wife. Edward Winslow referred to him as a “Pinse [pniese], that is, one of his [Massasoit’s] chiefest champions or men of valour” (Winslow, Good Newes from New-England: or A true relation of things very remarkable at the plantation of Plimoth in Nevv-England [London, I. Dawson for William Bladen and Iohn Bellamie, 1624], 7).

19. Corbitant was sachem of a Wampanoag band at Mattapoiset who had disapproved of the treaty with the English.

20. MS: “Namassakett.”

21. I.e., Miles Standish.

22. Underlined in a different ink, whether by Bradford or some else is uncertain.

23. Martha’s Vineyard.

24. The Tarrantines were Mi’kmaq and Eastern Etchemins residing eastward from Casco Bay to parts of New Brunswick. Equipped with French firearms, they asserted their influence over the Abenaki in Maine, captured the fur trade with the French for themselves, and also threatened the Natives to the south.

25. A treaty was made with nine Native chiefs on this expedition. Nathaniel Morton gave the opening of the text as follows: “Know all men by these Presents, That we whose Names are under-written do acknowledge our selves to be the Loyal Subjects of King James, King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith &c. In Witness whereof, and as a Testimonial of the same, we have Subscribed our Names or Marks . . .” (New Englands memoriall, 29). The accuracy of the text, the actual date, and names of the chieftains have been questioned. Jeremy Bangs reviews this in Indian Deeds: Land Transactions in Plymouth Colony, 1620-1691 (Leiden: Leiden American Pilgrim Museum, 2002), 9-14.

26. Bradford’s later deletion and interlineation; note the switch from second-person plural.

27. Deut. 32:8, “When the most high God divided to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of Adam, he appointed the borders of the people according to the number of the children of Israel.”

28. See Psa. 121:8, “The Lord shall preserve thy going out, and thy coming in from hence forth and for ever.”

29. MS: “a meal.”

30. Interlineation by Bradford in a different ink.

31. This references a letter from Winslow in December 1621 contained in Mourt’s Relation. In it is the following description that is the basis for the claim that this was the “First Thanksgiving”: “one harvest being gotten in, our Governour sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoyce together, after we had gathered the fruit of our labours. They four in one day killed as much fowl, as with a little help beside, served the Company almost a week, at which time amongst other Recreations, we exercised our Arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest King Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted; and they went out and killed five Deer, which they brought to the Plantation and bestowed on our Governour, and upon the Captaine, and others. And although it be not always so plentiful, as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want, that we often wish you partakers of our plenty” (61).

32. The Fortune. In addition to Cushman the passengers included Jonathan Brewster, Thomas Prence, John Adams, and Philip Delano. The origin of Adams is unknown. Brewster and Prence were members of the Leiden church. Delano was from Leiden; he was of French ancestry and had been admitted to the congregation based on his membership in the French Reformed Church.

33. Interlineations in this paragraph are by Bradford in a different ink.

34. Birchin Lane was a street in London where one could obtain cheap, ready-made suits.

35. MS: “aduentures,” a rendering of “adventurers” (meaning the London investors) that Bradford often uses throughout OPP.

36. This was the second Peirce Patent, obtained June 1, 1622, from the Council for New England to take the place of the Peirce Patent from the Viriginia Company, which had no validity where they had actually settled.

37. Interlineation by Bradford in different ink.

38. On December 9, 1621, prior to his departure, Cushman preached a sermon to the congregation, by way of prophesying, that was published in England as A Sermon Preached at Plimoth in New-England December 9, 1621. In an Assembly of his Majesty’s faithful Subjects there inhabiting. Wherein is Showed the Danger of Self-Love, and the Sweetness of True Friendship. Together with a Preface Showing the State of the Country, and Condition of the Savages. Rom. 12. 10. “Be affectioned to love one another with brotherly love.” Written in the year 1621 (London: John Dawson for John Bellamie, 1622). In it, Cushman expressed his fear that the hardships the Plimoth settlers faced in their first year had tempted many to focus on their personal welfare rather than the common good. He warned of “that bird of self-love which was hatched at home,” saying that “if it be not looked to, will eat out the life of all grace and goodness: and though men have escaped the danger of the sea, and that cruel mortality, which swept away so many of our loving friends and brethren, yet except they purge out this self-love, a worse mischief is prepared for them” (11-12). In words that would be echoed by John Winthrop in his 1630 “Christian Charity” sermon, Cushman exhorted the Plimoth colonists to “labour to be jointed together and knit by flesh and sinews; away with envy at the good of others, and rejoice in his good, and sorrow for his evil, let his joy be thy joy, and his sorrow thy sorrow: let his sickness be thy sickness: his hunger thy hunger: his poverty thy poverty: And if you profess friendship, be friends in adversities; for then a friend is known, and tried, and not before” (18). On the publishing histories of both the Arbella sermon and OPP, see Michael Ditmore, “What Do We Know about the New England Puritans, and When Did We Know It? Twenty-First Century Reconsiderations of William Bradford and John Winthrop,” in American Literature and The New Puritan Studies, ed. Bryce Traister (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2017), 191-205; and on the interpretation of Winthrop’s text, see Daniel T. Rogers, As a City on Hill: The Story of America’s Most Famous Lay Sermon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).

39. Interlineation by Bradford in different ink.

40. Interlineation by Bradford in different ink.

41. The interlineations in this page were all made by Bradford in a different ink.

42. Winslow, Good Newes from New-England, states that it was Tisquantum who informed Bradford that “to send the rattle Snake’s skin in that manner, imported enmity, and that it was no better than a challenge” (3). In her introduction to an edition of Good Newes, Kelly Wisecup has observed, “It is possible that Tisqauntum misinterpreted the meaning of the arrows, whether purposely or not” (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, [2014], 39, n. 114).

43. I.e., the colonists.

44. Pales were the vertical boards that made up a fence or palisadoe.

45. I.e., Miles Standish’s.

46. Insertions on this page of the MS were made by Bradford in a different ink.

47. Puritans in general, including the Scrooby-Leiden congregation that settled Plimoth, found no justification in the Scriptures for celebrating Christmas and disapproved of the revelry, including excessive drinking, associated with the holiday celebrations. As for sports, they did not object to recreational activities in their proper place, but objected to engaging in such activities in times, such as the Sabbath, that were to be devoted to religious worship.

1. While the English recognized the value of Tisquantum, they also acknowledged that he was suspected by Ousemaquin and Ousemaquin’s agent Hobomock of seeking his own advantage, even if it differed from the objectives of the sachem; Bradford elaborates on this below.

2. This and the following interlineations in this paragraph were made by Bradford in a different ink.

3. Bradford’s deletion and interlineation in a different ink.

4. Edward Winslow elaborated on the concerns about Tisquantum in Good Newes from New-England: “Thus by degrees we began to discover Tisquantum, whose ends were only to make himself great in the eyes of his Country-men, by means of his nearness and favour with us, not caring who fell so he stood. In the general, his course was to persuade them he could lead us to peace or war at his pleasure, and would oft threaten the Indians, sending them word in a private manner, we were intended shortly to kill them, that thereby he might get gifts to himself to work their peace, insomuch as they had him in greater esteem than many of their Sachims . . .” (8). Massasoit came to Plimoth,

being much offended and enraged against Tisquantum, whom the Governour pacified as much as he could for the present. But not long after his departure, he sent a messenger to the Governour, entreating him to give way to the death of Tisquantum, who had so much abused him. But the Governour answered; Although he had deserved to die both in respect of him and us; yet for our sakes he desired he would spare him, and the rather because without him he knew not well how to understand himself, or any other the Indians. With this answer the messenger returned, but came again not long after, accompanied with diverse others, demanding him from Massasoit their Master, as being one of his subjects, whom by our first Articles of peace we could not retain: yet because he would not willingly do it without the Governour’s approbation, offered him many Beavers’ skins for his consent thereto, saying, that according to their manner, their Sachem had sent his own knife, and them therewith, to cut off his head and hands, and bring them to him. To which the Governour answered; It was not the manner of the English to sell men’s lives at a price, but when they had deserved justly to die, to give them their reward, and therefore refused their Beavers as a gift: but sent for Tisquantum, who though he knew their intent, yet offered not to fly, but came and accused Hobomock as the author and worker of his overthrow; yeilding himself to the Governour to be sent or not according as he thought meet. But at the instant, when our Governour was ready to deliver him into the hands of his Executioners, a Boat was seen at Sea to cross before our Town, and fall behind a head-land not far off: whereupon, having heard many rumors of the French, and not knowing whether there were any combination between the Savages and them, the Governour told the Indians, he would first know what Boat that was ‘ere he would deliver him into their custody. But being mad with rage, and impatient at delay, they departed in great heat (9-10).

In the event, Tisquantum remained with the English till his death.

5. That is, an ambition to equal or excel another person.

6. The underlinings on this page of the MS were made, most likely by Bradford, in an ink that slightly varies from that of the original text.

7. The Sparrow.

8. MS: “Damarins-Cove,” which is how Bradford generally spelled this name, though sometimes with slight variation. Damariscove Island is off the coast of present-day Boothbay, Maine, in what was prime fishing grounds.

9. Deletion and interlineation by Bradford in a different ink.

10. John Beauchamp was a member of the Ancient Church in Amsterdam and one of the most supportive adventurers.

11. On this and later occasions groups of men were sent over “on their particular,” whom the colonists were expected to feed, but who did not take part in common labors, and whose own fur trading drew profits from the efforts of the colonists.

12. The underlinings on this page of the MS were made, most likely by Bradford, in an ink that slightly varies from that of the original text.

13. Jas. 2:16, “And one of you say unto them, Depart in peace: warm your selves, and fill your bellies, notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body, what helpeth it?”

14. This letter was sent before the second Peirce Patent was secured from the Council for New England.

15. Wordy skirmishers or quarrelers; a pun upon the formerly mentioned adventurer’s name.

16. I.e., 1622, New Style.

17. The underlining of “in the Lord his God” appears to be in a different ink than the underlinings in the previous four lines, which were likely drawn by Bradford.

18. A slight change in the handwriting suggests a new sitting.

19. This and the following underlinings on this page of the MS are in a different ink.

20. I.e., 1622, New Style.

21. MS: “they.”

22. The Fortune.

23. The Sparrow.

24. This and the following underlinings on this page of the MS are in a different ink.

25. The Charity, accompanied by the Swan. These efforts were done in violation of the authority of the Council for New England.

26. On its return voyage the Fortune sailed too near the French coast and was captured, all of its cargo being seized.

27. The reluctance to send over more of the congregation particularly applied to John Robinson.

28. William Greene was one of the more religious of the adventurers and opposed to those who sought to prevent further emigration from the remaining members of the Leiden congregation.

29. Andrew Weston, sailing in the Charity. On his return voyage to England he kidnapped an Indian boy from the Massachusetts tribe.

30. A mistake for 1622.

31. The underlinings on this page of the MS are in a different ink.

32. This and the following underlinings on this page of the MS were made later.

33. Thomas Weston.

34. This was the Swan, which accompanied the Charity.

35. Bradford numbered both this and the following page in the MS as p. 78.

36. Insertion by Bradford in a different ink.

37. A vertical serpentine line in the left margin, to all appearances not by Bradford, highlights the first several lines of the letter.

38. This and the following underlinings on this page were made later, most likely by Bradford.

39. Likely John Reynolds, who had been master of the Speedwell.

40. Bradford numbered both this and the previous page as p. 78.

41. William Trevore was a seaman who had come in the Mayflower, under an agreement to remain in New England for one year.

42. Capawack is the native name for Martha’s Vineyard. The lands of the Mohegan tribe extended from the Connecticut River east to the territory of the Narragansetts.

43. A later insertion by Bradford.

44. A reference to Acts 3:19, “Amend your lives therefore, and turn, that your sins may be put away, when the time of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord.”

45. Echoing the King James Version of 2 Cor. 12:9, “for my strength is made perfect in weakness,” as opposed to the Geneva translation, which reads, “for my power is made perfite through weakenes.”

46. This later insertion may not have been by Bradford.

47. Phineas Pratt, who submitted a “A declaration of the affairs of the English people that first inhabited New England” to the Massachusetts General Court in 1662, described himself as the last remaining one of that group of sixty men.

48. This and the other underlinings on this page of the MS were in all likelihood made later, probably by Bradford.

49. There they established a settlement called Wessagusset, near the present town of Weymouth.

50. The fishing grounds off the coast of Maine were considered “eastward,” as in “Downeast.”

51. Speaking of the war in the spring of 1622 in Virginia, in which 347 settlers were killed.

52. John Huddleston, master of the Bona Nova, was a mariner who frequently sailed to Virginia. At this time he was on a fishing voyage to Maine.

53. In the MS, Bradford skipped the pagination of pp. 80-89, but the text continues uninterrupted. MS p. [79v] contains a deleted passage that Bradford instructs “to be placed in page 103.”

54. This and the subsequent interlineations on this page of the MS were made by Bradford in a different ink.

55. In Good Newes from New-England (13), Winslow indicates that the fort was begun in June 1622 after his return from Monhegan Island.

56. Thomas Jones, commander of the Discovery, was in the employ of the Virginia Company.

57. This and the following underlining on this page of the MS are in a different ink.

58. John Pory (1572-1633) was a graduate of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and an assistant to Richard Hakluyt. In 1618 he was appointed secretary to the Virginia colony. He was on his return when he stopped at Plimoth.

59. The full text of this letter has been published in Three Visitors to Early Plymouth, ed. Syndey V. James (Plimoth Plantation, 1963).

60. This includes, along with whatever works by Robinson were provided, Henry Ainsworth, Annotations Upon the Five Books of Moses, And The Book of the Psalmes (Amsterdam: Giles Thorp, 1619). For Pilgrim ownership of this work, see Bangs, Plymouth Colony’s Private Libraries, 183, 189, 190, 257, 285, 288, 320.

61. This and the following underlinings on this page of the MS are drawn in a different ink, most likely by Bradford.

62. The Swan.

63. Interlineation by Bradford in a different ink.

64. Quite likely a later underlining by Bradford.

65. MS: “hh.”

1. A tightening of the lines and a slight darkening of the ink indicate a new sitting.

2. The inhabitants of Weston’s settlement at Wessaguset.

3. A portion, equaling approximately one half.

4. This deletion and interlineation, and subsequent interlineations on this page of the MS, were made by Bradford in a different ink.

5. A bracket in the left margin, most likely not by Bradford, highlights the following portion of the sentence.

6. Edward Winslow undertook to visit the Native sachem accompanied by a John Hampden and Hobomock. Ousemequin was near death when they reached him, but Winslow was able to nurse him back to health. He described the episode in Good Newes from New-England, 26-27.

7. This was Phineas Pratt.

8. Edward Winslow describes the expedition in greater detail in Good Newes from New-England, 34-45. This includes the attack on the Natives, which Bradford omits. Standish first gathered as many of the Native leaders as he could in a room, where he “gave the word to his men, and the door being fast shut began himself with Pecksuot, and snatching his own knife from his neck though with much struggling killed him therewith, the point whereof he had made as sharp as a needle, and ground the back also to an edge: Wituwamat and the other man, the rest killed, and took the youth, whom the Cap[tain] caused to be hanged.” The English then went on to kill other Natives. John Robinson’s harsh judgement on this pre-emptive strike is contained in a letter from the pastor which is printed below.

9. This deletion and interlineation, and the subsequent interlineations on this page, were made later by Bradford.

10. 1 Cor. 10:12, “Wherefore, let him that thinketh he standeth, take heed lest he fall.”

11. A bracket in the left margin, probably not by Bradford, highlights the beginning of this sentence.

12. The settlement then called Strawberry Bank.

13. A bracket in the left margin, probably not by Bradford, highlights the beginning of this sentence.

14. This and the following interlineations on this page of the MS were made later by Bradford. Bradford’s reference to Weston in the present tense indicates that this passage was written before Weston’s death, which was most likely in 1648.

15. A vertical serpentine line in the left margin, probably not by Bradford, highlights the remainder of this and the entirety of the following sentence.

16. This would have been in April, when the colonists were preparing to plant corn.

17. This was the 1623 land division, which constituted a veritable census of the colony at that time. This record was analyzed in detail by Robert S. Wakefield, “The 1623 Plymouth Land Division,” Mayflower Quarterly 40 (1974):713, 55-61. (Thanks to Robert C. Anderson for providing this reference.)

18. A further vertical serpentine line in the left margin, probably not by Bradford, highlights the first and most of the second sentence in this paragraph.

19. Bradford is drawing on the judgement of Plato found in Richard Knolles’ translation of Jean Bodin’s The Sixe Bookes of a Common-weale (London: Adam Islip for G. Bishop, 1606), a copy of which was in the inventory of Bradford’s books at his death (Bangs, Plymouth Colony’s Private Libraries, 221). In Bk. 1, ch. II, “Of a Family, and what difference there is betweene a Family and a Commonweal,” Bodin, discussing the feasibility of holding things in common, writes: “But howsoever lands may be divided, it cannot possibly be, that all things should be common amongst citizens; which unto Plato seemed so notable a thing, and so much to be wished for, as that in his Commonweal he would have all men’s wives and children common also: for so he deemed it would come to pass that these two words, Mine and Thine, should never more be heard amongst his citizens, being in his opinion the cause of all the discord and evils in a Commonweal. But he understood not that by making all things thus common, a Commonweal must needs perish: for nothing can be public, where nothing is private: neither can it be imagined there to be any thing had in common, if there be nothing to be kept in particular; no more than if all the citizens were kings, they should at all have no king; neither any harmony, if the diversity and dissimilitude of voices cunningly mixed together, which maketh the sweet harmony, were all brought unto one and the same tune. Albeit that such a Commonweal should be also against the law of God and nature . . .” (11).

20. This and the following interlineations on this page of the MS were written by Bradford in a different ink.

21. MS: “bitt.” Variant reading: “bite.”

22. I.e., Jesus, in the Lord’s Prayer: “Give us this day our daily bread . . .”

23. Peter Martyr d’Anghiera (1457-1526), Italian historian, De Nouo Orbe, or The Historie of the West Indies, Contayning the actes and aduentures of the Spanyardes, which haue conquerred and peopled those Countries, transl. Richard Eden (London: Thomas Dawson for Thomas Adams, 1612), who divided his work into “Decades,” or ten-year periods. The passage Bradford cites is found on fol. 207v.-208r.

24. d’Anghiera, De Nouo Orbe, transl. Eden. The famine that befell the soldiers following the conquistador Diego de Nicuesa (d. 1511) to Veragua (Panama) is described on fol. 93v.-94r. The passage quoted by Bradford, on 94r., reads: “Considering therefore, after these storms, with what ease other men shall overrun and inhabit these lands, in respect to the calamities that these men have suffered, they shall seem to go to bride feasts, where all things are ready prepared against their coming.”

25. The Paragon made two false starts and on the third one was wrecked.

26. This and the subsequent deletions and interlineations on this page were made later by Bradford.

27. The Charity.

28. An obsolete form of “freight,” or lading of a ship.

29. This and the following underlining are in a different ink.

30. Following complaints from Plimoth about Peirce’s plans and the fact that the settlers there had not been consulted, the Council for New England revoked that patent and reinstated the Peirce Patent of 1621.

31. I.e., harshly.

32. Involved or interested in a cause, so as to be calculating or devising.

33. This deletion and interlineation by Bradford are in a different ink than the previous emendations on this page.

34. This and the other underlinings on this page of the MS are in a different ink, quite likely by Bradford.

35. Francis West (1586-1634) had previously been involved in the settlement of Virginia. His elder brother, Thomas West, third baron de la Warr, was appointed governor of that colony in 1609. In November 1622 Sir Ferdinando Gorges appointed Francis West admiral of New England and a member of the council there, but in a year he returned to Virginia. 

36. The Little James.

37. Bradford is here referring to what would be a recurring problem for the colony. The English investors (the Adventurers) would send over colonists who were “particulars,” meaning that they were not financed by the investors and thus were free from the economic obligations to which the original settlers had agreed. They could settle where they wanted within the jurisdiction and seek their fortunes however they would, though they would be subject to the government of the colony. Most of these men did not share in the religious outlook of the original settlers. See Ruth A. McIntyre, Debts Hopeful and Desperate (Plimoth Plantation, 1963), 30.

38. Bradford does not include a lengthy letter that he sent in response to the investors. That letter was discovered among the manuscripts of the High Court of Admiralty in the English Public Records Office and was printed in R. G. Marsden, ed., “A Letter of William Bradford and Isaac Allerton, 1623,” American Historical Review VIII (1903), 294-301.

39. The old friends to whom Cushman refers were members of the Leiden congregation, some of whom still wished to join the colony. After the arrival of the Anne in 1623, no further members of the Leiden congregation arrived in Plimoth until the last batch came in late 1629 and early 1630, as an adjunct to the Winthrop Fleet. See Robert C. Anderson, The Winthrop Fleet: Massachusetts Bay Company Immigrants to New England, 1629-1630 (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2012), 6-7.

40. The Treasurer was James Sherley.

41. Morally bad, inferior.

42. The “general” here refers to the body of the investors.

43. In his response to this Bradford wrote that those in the colony “had much desired” the arrival of their “friends in Holland . . . and have long expected the same.” In implicit criticism of some of the particulars sent over, he went on to write that “if we had had them [i.e., friends in Holland] in stead of some others we are persuaded things would have gone better than they are with us, for honest men will ever do their best endeavor, whilst others (though they be more able of body) will scarce by any means be brought to” (“Letter of William Bradford and Isaac Allerton, 1623,” 300).

44. This word is part of a deletion in the MS.

45. In the “Letter of William Bradford and Isaac Allerton, 1623,” Bradford wrote to the investors that the colonists had discussed making salt with “one of the north country” who was familiar with the process. It had been determined that the colony’s blacksmith could make salt pans, but as for using them, “if they go about it who have no skill they will quickly burn the pans and do no good” (298). In the same letter Bradford asked the investors to acquire an additional patent from the Council for New England for Cape Anne, “which is thought to be a good fishing place” (296). He also indicated that “it would be a principal stay and a comfortable help to the colony if they had some cattle. . . . First, it would much encourage them, and be in time a greater ease both for tillage of ground, and carriage of burden. 2ly, it will make victuals both more plentiful, and comfortable. 3ly, it might be a good benefit after some increase that they might be able to spare some to others” who might emigrate. He indicated also that goats were very useful, “and very fit for this place, for they will here thrive very well, are a hardy creature, and live at no charge, either winter or summer; their increase is great and milk very good” and “are much more easily transported . . . than other cattle” (298).

46. This interlineation by Bradford appears to be in a different ink.

47. I Cor. 1:27, “But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and God hath chosen the weak things of the world, to confound the mighty things.”

48. This sentence is highlighted with a vertical line in the left margin.

49. Bradford began underlining at “good measure,” at the beginning of a line.

50. This and the following interlineations on this page of the MS were made by Bradford in a different ink.

51. Bradford’s paraphrase of the scripture is treated as a quote.

52. “His mercy endureth forever” is a common biblical phrase, which occurs first in I Chron. 16:34 but appears most often in the Psalms. This sentence is highlighted by a vertical line in the left margin.

53. Variant: “bite.”

54. The present and past tenses of this word are spelled the same, though pronounced differently.

55. This verso-side addition is written in a lighter brown ink than the surrounding pages.

56. In the “Letter of William Bradford and Isaac Allerton, 1623,” the governor identified Winslow as “one of our honest friends” who could provide the investors “better and more large information of the state of all things than we can possibly do by our letters; unto who we refer you in all particulars; and also we have given him instructions to treat with you of all such things as concern our public good and mutual concord, expecting his return by the first fishing ships” (296).

57. In the “Letter of William Bradford and Isaac Allerton, 1623,” Bradford wrote, “Touching those which came to us in their particular, we have received them in as kindly a manner as we could, according to our ability, and offered them as favorable terms as we could touching their footing with us. Yet they are sundry of them discouraged, I know not whether by the country (of which they have no trial) or rather for want of those varieties which England affords, from which they are not yet weaned, and being so delightful to nature cannot easily be forgotten without a former grounded resolution. But as they were welcome when they came, so shall be they when they go if they think it not for their good, though we are most glad of honest men’s company, and loath to part from the same” (301).

58. This and the subsequent interlineations on this page of the MS were written by Bradford in a different ink.

59. MS: “Commone,” later changed by Bradford to “Commune.”

60. This was of concern to the colonists because of their struggles at the time in the fur trade, which was anticipated as being a source of profit that would enable them to pay off their debts. In the “Letter of William Bradford and Isaac Allerton, 1623,” the governor raised a concern about that trade, noting that “the Dutch on one side [New Netherlands] and the French on the other side [New France], and the fishermen and other plantations between both have, and do furnish the savages, not with toys and trifles, but with good and substantial commodities as kettles, hatchets, and clothes of all sort” with which the investors had not supplied the colonists for their own trade. He added that the French even provided the Natives with coastal vessels of their own and guns and shot (295).

61. In December 1622 Robert Gorges, the second son of Sir Ferdinando, had acquired a patent from the New England Council for a tract of land encompassing the north shore of Massachusetts Bay, extending thirty miles inland. Wessagusset, the settlement established by Thomas Weston and since abandoned, was outside of this patent, though given the imprecise knowledge of the region’s geography he may have believed it was included.

62. Bradford’s handwriting becomes tighter at this point, indicating a new sitting.

63. See the earlier note on West, above, in the annal for 1623 (p. 240, n. 35).

64. Christopher Levett had purchased a share in the Council for New England and had been granted 6,000 acres of land. He explored sites for a settlement in what is now Maine but returned to England in 1624, not having accomplished anything. He wrote A Voyage into New England Begun in 1623 and ended in 1624 (London: William Jones, 1624). Levett later gained permission from the king to raise money for his adventures by solicitation in English parishes, but this too came to nought. He was in New England in 1632, when he met John Winthrop.

65. The 1620 charter given by King James to the Council for New England conferred broad governing powers to that body to pass laws and ordinances and to judge all of the king’s subjects in New England. These powers were to be exercised by Robert Gorges.

66. The Swan.

67. Bradford mistakenly numbered this as p. 145; a later possessor of the MS overwrote “4” with “0” and also inserted “105” beside the original number.

68. The charges against Weston are laid out in Gorges’ Brief Narration (1658), printed as part of Sir Ferdinando Gorges and his Province of Maine, including the Brief Relation, the Brief Narration, His Defence, the Charter Granted to Him, and His Letters, Vol. II, Publications of the Prince Society (3 vols., Boston: Prince Society, 1890). The charges were “That the mischief already sustained by those disorderly persons, are inhumane and intolerable; for first in their manners and behavior they are worse than the very Savages, impudently and openly lying with their Women, teaching their men to drink drunk, to swear and blaspheme the name of God, . . . besides, they cozen and abuse the Savages in trading and trafficking, selling them salt covered with butter instead of so much butter . . . to bring the planters and all our Nation into contempt and disgrace . . . [and] that they sell unto the Savages muskets, fowling pieces, powder, shot, swords, arrowheads, and other arms” (41-42).

69. This and the subsequent interlineation on this page by Bradford appear to be in a different ink.

70. Archaic, meaning a secret, hidden, or veiled offense.

71. I.e., the Governor-General of New England, Robert Gorges.

72. The date was Nov. 5, 1623. This was neither the first nor last such fire, and in January 1629 the Colony Court ordered that “henceforth no dwelling was to be covered with any kind of thatch, as straw, reed, etc., but with either board, or pale, and the like” (Records of the Colony of New Plymouth, Vol. XI, Laws, 1623-1682 [Boston: W. White, 1855-1861], 4).

73. Bradford originally numbered the page “146,” and a later hand inserted “106.”

74. The remainder of the sentence is highlighted by a vertical line in the left margin.

75. An ell is an obsolete measure of length, the English ell being 45 inches.

76. Bradford could have meant “wall,” but a wale is a horizontal member that forms the rim, or, in this case, the bottom of a structure, such as a basket or a house.

77. This interlineation by Bradford appears to be in a different ink.

78. A later addition, probably not by Bradford.

79. It is uncertain whether Bradford or a later possessor of the MS drew this manicule, though it does resemble the ones on MS pp. 29 and 33, which were drawn by Prince.

80. The underlining appears to be in a different ink.

81. Probably a later addition by Bradford.

82. It is uncertain whether Bradford or a later possessor of the MS drew this manicule, though it does resemble the ones on MS pp. 29 and 33, which were drawn by Prince.

83. Possibly a later underlining, whether made by Bradford or someone else is uncertain.

84. This sentence was inserted later by Bradford.

85. This was probably the William Morrell who graduated from Magdalene College, Cambridge, in 1619 and was ordained in the Peterborough diocese in that same year. He bore a commission to exercise superintendence over the churches that were, or might be, established in New England, presumably including Plymouth. After Gorges’s departure, Morrell remained a year at Plimoth to learn something of the country, but neither exercised nor mentioned his commission. He spent his time investigating the local flora and fauna and the rituals of the Natives. Morrell recorded the results of his observations in Latin hexameters, which he translated into English and published under the title of New-England, or, A briefe enarration of the eyre, earth, water, fish, and fowles of that country, with a description of the natures, orders, habits and religion of the natives; in Latine and English verse (London: John Dawson, 1625).

86. In November 1622 David Thomson, who had served both the Council of New England and Sir Ferdinando Gorges personally, obtained a grant of 6,000 acres in New England. He settled at the mouth of the Piscataqua River. Also in 1622 Abraham Jenness obtained the right to Monhegan Island from the Council.

87. The Little James. The ship had a commission to act as a privateer and capture ships on its voyage, but on its arrival at Plimoth was sent on a fishing voyage, to which the crew objected. According to Bradford, the crew stated that “they would obey no command, . . . alleging that they were cozened and deceived, and should sail and work for nothing, the which they would be hanged rather than they would do, as also that they would not fish or do any such thing.” They claimed that the ship had been “fitted out for a taker, [and they] were told that they might take any ship whatsoever that was not too strong for them” (“Letter of William Bradford and Isaac Allertion, 1623,” 296). Bradford agreed to the crew being paid wages. This letter of Bradford ended up in the records of the Admiralty Court because on the ship’s return to England in 1624 some of the crew sued before that court for their wages. See Caleb H. Johnson and Simon Neal, “Documents in the High Court of Admiralty Case of Stevens and Fell vs. The Little James,” Mayflower Descendant 60 (2011): 77-95, 192-96.

1. Annual elections were the custom in English local government. An interesting aspect of the colony’s elections is provided in the “Letter of William Bradford and Isaac Allerton, 1623.” Evidently the investors had heard rumors that women and children were allowed to vote in the colony. Bradford wrote: “Touching our government you are mistaken if you think we admit women and children to have to do in the same, for they are excluded, as both nature and reason teacheth they should be. Neither do we admit any but such are above the age of 21 years, and they also but only in some weighty matters, when we think good” (299).

2. The interlineation appears to be in a different ink.

3. I.e., the purpose.

4. There were no provisions for the forms of governance in the patents granted to the colony, nor agreed to in the Mayflower Compact, so the colonists were free to shape their government institutions as they believed dictated by their needs.

5. The interlineation is by Bradford in a different ink.

6. The storm occurred on April 10, 1624.

7. This and the following insertions on this page of the MS were written by Bradford in a different ink.

8. See above, p. 247, n.57.

9. The deletion and interlineation are by Bradford in a different ink.

10. This was likely the Charity, which arrived in March 1624, though entries in the Colony Records in 1627 indicate that the cattle arrived on the Anne (Records of the Colony of New Plymouth, Vol. XII, Deeds, Etc., 1620-1651 [Boston: William White, 1861], 9-13). In the “Letter of William Bradford and Isaac Allerton, 1623,” Bradford had expressed hopes for fishing as a means of sustaining the colony; perhaps the troubles with the Little James had altered his views.

11. This interlineation by Bradford appears to be written in a later ink.

12. Archaic for being visited with regrets, or second thoughts.

13. I.e., loaded with cargo.

14. Bilbao, Spain. Spain was a major market for the sale of fish since it remained a Catholic country in which the prohibition on eating meat on certain holy days and during the season of Lent meant that for as many as 120 days a year those who could afford it ate fish. For the importance of the fishing trade and the Spanish market at this time, see Mark Peterson, The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630-1865 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2019), 39-41.

15. Agent or representative.

16. A ketch is a two-masted sailing craft whose mainmast is taller than the mizzen or aft-mast; a lighter is a flat-bottomed barge used to transfer goods and passengers to and from moored ships; and a shallop was a small, usually one-masted boat with a shallow draft that could be propelled by oars for navigating coastlines.

17. This was evidently Roger Conant, whose skills Bradford would soon denigrate.

18. This was John Lyford, whose stay in Plimoth would prove very contentious. He was not known as a separatist, which might account for the reluctance shown by Winslow and Cushman. Cushman perhaps reveals his estimation of him by naming him last after the carpenter and the saltman.

19. This interlineation is in a different ink, and possibly by someone other than Bradford.

20. See above, p. 253.

21. It is likely that some of the colonists objected to the fact that the practices set forth in the Book of Common Prayer were not observed.

22. The members of the Scrooby-Leiden-Plimoth congregation believed that only an ordained clergyman could administer the two sacraments. An inquiry had been sent to John Robinson as to whether Elder William Brewster could administer the sacrament. Robinson replied in December 1623 rejecting that expedient.

23. The prime educational agency of puritan families was the home, and the large number of books, including catechisms, that are revealed in the estate inventories of the first settlers attest to the fact that Bradford’s report was likely correct. There is also evidence that the wife of Deacon Samuel Fuller conducted what was likely a dame school in the colony where she would have taught reading and writing to those whose parents were unable to do so. Bradford’s hope for something more advanced would not be realized for a long time.

24. The early settlers of New England generally praised the quality of the water they found. In his 1634 review of New England William Wood wrote that the “sweet waters” of New England were “far different from the waters of England, being not so sharp . . . It is thought there can be no better water in the world . . . Those that drink it be as healthful, fresh, and lusty as those that drink beer.” Wood, New England’s Prospect, ed. Alden T. Vaughan (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1977), 37.

25. In fact, the Dutch would become Plimoth’s principal competition in the fur trade.

26. Robinson is referring to an incident which Bradford passes over lightly in his history (see above, p. 232). Weston’s settlers at Wessagusett had alienated the local Massachusetts tribe, stealing from the Natives when their own food supplies ran out. Ousamequin, the Wampanoag Massasoit, had warned the Plimoth colonists that Wituwamat, sachem of the Massachusetts, planned to wipe out the settlement and then do the same with Plimoth. Miles Standish led a small expedition to deal with the threat. He lured Wituwamat and some of his principal supporters into a small room where Standish and his men killed them. Wituwamat’s head was cut off and brought back to mount atop the walls of Plimoth. This was a common way to warn possible enemies of treason or treachery (following the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, Oliver Cromwell’s body was dug up and his head placed over the London city wall). As was often the case with matters relating to Natives, Edward Winslow gives a far more detailed account of the story in Good Newes from New-England, 34-45.

27. Robinson is writing of Miles Standish, whom he knew well in the Netherlands, and referencing Col. 3:12, “Now therefore as the elect of God holy and beloved, put on tender mercy, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, long suffering.”

28. An obsolete variant of “interested,” retained here because Bradford uses it fairly consistently throughout OPP. Cf. A briefe relation of the discouery and plantation of Nevv England (London: John Haviland, 1622): “formerly interessed in it” (sig. Bv.).

29. Variant: “principles.”

30. William Brewster’s wife was Mary; her maiden name is not known. Jonathan Brewster came on the Fortune in 1621, and Patience and Fear Brewster on the Anne in 1623. 

31. Robinson identified three factions among the investors: five or six supportive of Robinson and his congregants in the colony; five or six opposed to the separatist cast of the colony; and the remainder neutral but leaning towards the opponents. This meant that the investors would do nothing to send Robinson over.

32. A restraining hold, as in wrestling.

33. A restive horse of an inferior breed.

34. This interlineation by Bradford is probably a later addition.

35. The adventurers were stipulating that none of their invested money or profits could be used to send Robinson or other members of the Leiden congregation to Plimoth. After John Robinson’s death, Thomas Blossom, a member of the Leiden congregation, in a letter to Bradford and Brewster of Dec. 15, 1625, wrote that “many letters and much speech hath been about his [Robinson’s] coming to you, but never any solid course propounded for his going” (Letter Book, 18).

36. Rom. 12:6-8, “Seeing then that we have gifts that are diverse, according to the grace that is given unto vs, whether we have prophecy, let us prophecy according to the proportion of faith: or an office, let us wait on the office: or he that teacheth, on teaching: or he that exhorteth, on exhortation: he that distributeth, let him do it with simplicity: he that ruleth, with diligence: he that sheweth mercy, with cheerfulness.” 1 Tim. 5:17, “The Elders that rule well, are worthy of double honor, specially they which labour in the word and doctrine.”

37. Literally, regarding gladiators of old, “Hatch a strategy in the arena,” but colloquially, “Think on your feet.” David Lupher points out (Greeks, Romans, and Pilgrims, 305-6) that this is from Seneca, Epistlulae ad Lucilium 22:1.

38. Seneca, Moral Epistles, 123, on the Conflict between Pleasure and Virtue, para. 3 (“A well-behaved stomach which is tolerant of insult makes a major contribution to freedom”). On Bradford’s citation of this passage, see Lupher, Greeks, Romans, and Pilgrims, 197-98.

39. Two quarts.

40. Pliny, bk. 18, ch. 3 (Bradford changed “2” to “3”), i.e., Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, ch. 3, “The Jugerum of Land”: “That portion of land used to be known as a ‘jugerum,’ which was capable of being ploughed by a single ‘jugum,’ or yoke of oxen, in one day; an ‘actus’ being as much as the oxen could plough at a single spell, fairly estimated, without stopping. This last was one hundred and twenty feet in length; and two in length made a jugerum. The most considerable recompense that could be bestowed upon generals and valiant citizens, was the utmost extent of land around which a person could trace a furrow with the plough in a single day.” See Lupher, Greeks, Romans, and Pilgrims, 236-37.

41. The first mill was not established until 1633.

42. This interlineation by Bradford is in a different ink.

43. Archaic variant of “guzzle.”

44. MS damage; Deane (169) reads “in.”

45. The effort in 1624 by the agents of the Dorchester Adventurers failed. A party of farmers was sent to settle along the coast of Cape Anne, near Gloucester, in order to provide the support that would be needed for the fishing trade. During the summer of 1624 a house was built, along with salt works and fishing stages. As for fishing itself, in his Planter’s Plea, Or The grounds of plantations examined (London: William Jones, 1630), John White concluded (72-74) that the vessel sent for that purpose had arrived at the fishing grounds a month to six weeks later than others fishing along that coast. The captain left some men behind on Cape Anne and sailed into Massachusetts Bay, where he caught some fish, but on proceeding to Spain he was again behind the other fishermen, finding the market depressed. The result was a considerable loss for the Dorchester Adventurers. Bradford notes that the Plimoth settlers who had gone to Cape Anne to help erect fishing stages had stayed to trade for furs with some success.

46. This interlineation and deletion are in a different ink, and probably not by Bradford.

47. It is likely that this was Roger Conant, who had been a member of the Salters Company in England. Bradford’s hostility may have been shaped by the fact that Conant appears to have been a member of the dissident faction that supported John Lyford in the events that follow in the text. See Anderson, Pilgrim Migration, 134-43.

48. At this point, several words are deleted so heavily (whether by Bradford or by another is unascertainable) as to be indecipherable.

49. Most likely a later interlineation, and probably not by Bradford.

50. He may have been the John Lyford who received degrees in 1597 and 1602 from Magdalen College, Oxford. This would fit with an identification of his being curate at Treddington, Worcestershire, as of 1603 and minister of the chapel at Shipston-upon-Stour, Warwickshire, in 1609. Prior to his coming to Plimoth he had served in the ministry at the parish of Levalleglish in county Armagh, Ireland. The first two of these posts would have required him to conform to the Church of England; the Irish post would have required conformity to the Church of Ireland, which was identical to most matters of practice in the English church. Thomas Morton, in New English Canaan (London: Printed for Charles Greene, 1637), wrote that Lyford was “at the Merchant’s charge sent to Plimoth plantation to be their Pastor” (118). This would have been another stratagem to resist sending John Robinson to the colony. It is not known what, if anything, Cushman knew of Lyford’s background, but he would have known that it would be up to the congregation in Plimoth to decide whether or not to call him to be pastor. See John E. D’Anieri, “Notes on John Lyford of Plymouth Colony and Virginia, His Child Ann, and His Widow’s Second Husband,” The American Genealogist 83 (2009):174-78, and D’Anieri, “When Was John Lyford Born?” The American Genealogist 84 (2010):176.

51. A short vertical serpentine line in the left margin, probably not by Bradford, highlights the following portion of the sentence.

52. John Oldham had come to the colony in 1623 on the Anne along with ten associates “on their particular.” He was more interested in trade than agriculture and proved fractious from the start. He would continue to play a role in New England affairs for over a decade.

53. This interlineation by Bradford is in a different ink.

54. A league at sea is 3.5 nautical miles, or about 5.5 kilometres.

55. The insertion by Bradford appears to be in a different ink.

56. The identity of the Rev. John Pemberton has not been established.

57. I.e., margin.

58. The underlinings on this line are drawn in a different ink, whether by Bradford or someone else is uncertain.

59. I.e., running smoothly, going as planned.

60. Variant of “romp,” implying wanton, riotous; of old, said of a beast, such as a lion, rearing up on its hind legs, but also used to describe an ill-behaved woman.

61. Thomas Morton, in his New English Canaan, an attack on the separatist colony, wrote that Oldham was ordered “to come to their needless watch house in person, and for refusing [they] gave him a cracked Crown . . . and make the blood run down about his ears” (119).

62. Morton, seeking to undermine the Plimoth church, wrote in New English Canaan that Lyford and his supporters used The Book of Common Prayer in their meetings (50). There is no direct evidence of this, but Bradford’s previous comment that they planned to have the sacraments would suggest that this was the case.

63. Bradford numbered this and the following page as 121.

64. The ink changes at this point from a dark to a medium brown, indicating the start of a new sitting.

65. I.e., acquire a repugnance for them.

66. Replying to a similar charge made at a later date, Edward Winslow named Godbert Godbertson and Moses Symonson of the Dutch Reformed Church, along with members of the Walloon congregation, as having been welcomed into the Leiden congregation, and wrote that the Leiden congregation “made no Schisme or separation from the Reformed Churches, but held communion with them occasionally: For we ever placed a large difference between those that grounded their practise upon the Word of God (tho differing from us in the exposition or understanding of it) and those that hated such Reformers and Reformation, and went on in Antichristian opposition to it, and persecution of it, as the late Lord Bishops did.” He continued, “For the truth is, the Dutch and French churches either of them being a people distinct from the world, and gathered into an holy communion, and not Nationall Churches . . . the difference is so small (if moderately pondered, between them and us) as we dare not for the world deny communion with them” (Hypocrisie Unmasked, 94-95, 96).

67. 2 Sam. 12:7, “Then Nathan said to David, Thou art the man. Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, I anointed thee King over Israel, and delivered thee out of the hand of Saul.”

68. I.e., the planters who were not part of the common stock, or the “general.”

69. Underlined in a different ink, whether by Bradford or by someone else is uncertain.

70. This too paralleled complaints reported in the Dec. 18, 1624, letter of some of the adventurers: it was said that the colonists were “negligent, careless, wasteful, unthrifty, and suffer all general goods and affairs to go at sixes and sevens and spend your time in idleness and talking and conferring” (Letter Book, 4).

71. This was a proposal that the “Captain” come over not as a particular, but on the general charge, as had those who had originally come over, which would have given him the status of a freeman and made him eligible to be chosen to command the colony’s militia. In his edition of OPP, Morison speculated that the “Captain” alluded to here was John Smith (156n).

72. A small “x” is drawn in the left margin, probably not by Bradford, beside the line on which this part of the sentence is written.

73. “Woe to us.”

74. Probably John Billington. In a letter to Robert Cushman on June 9, 1625, Bradford described Billington as “a knave, and so he will live and die” (Letter Book, 13).

75. This and the interlineations in the next several lines all appear to be later additions by Bradford.

76. A different perspective was offered by the colony’s critic Thomas Morton in New English Canaan: “But the Brethren, before they would allow of it, would have him first renounce his calling, to the office of the Ministry, received in England, as heretical and Papistical (so he confessed) and then to receive a new calling from them, after their fantastical invention, which he refused, alleging and maintaining, that his calling as it stood was lawful, and that he would not renounce it,” and with John Oldham “both together did maintain the Church of England, to be a true church, although in some particulars (they said) defective” (118-19).

77. Mark 9:50, “Salt is good: but if the salt be unsavoury, wherewith shall it be seasoned? Have salt in your selves, and have peace, one with another.” In the left margin beside the line ending with this reference appears a small “x,” probably not by Bradford.

78. Bradford draws quotation marks in the left margin beside each line for the remainder of the paragraph, indicating that he is drawing from Lyford’s own statement, though he recasts that statement into the second person.

79. Lyford is referring here, due to the absence of an ordained minister at Plimoth, to a subsequent lack of the observance of the sacrament of communion, which was considered a “means of salvation.”

80. To deal heavy blows.

81. See Gen. 29, where is told the story of how Laban tricked Jacob into marrying his older daughter rather than the younger one, as he had promised.

82. Pro. 20:25 reads in full, “It is a destruction for a man to devour that which is sanctified, and after the vows to inquire.”

83. This was the Little James (see above, pp. 253–54, n. 87).

1. Obsolete form of “breech.”

2. This interlineation is written by Bradford in a slightly darker ink.

3. MS: “Pequent,” which is how Bradford consistently spells this word.

4. After his first expulsion from Plimoth, Oldham may have settled for a time at Nantasket, present-day Hull, where he was joined by John Lyford. There are conflicting accounts of Oldham’s activities in the time following his second expulsion from Plimoth. Bradford suggests that he attempted a voyage to Virginia. By 1628 he had been restored to good favor sufficiently so as to be entrusted with escorting Thomas Morton, who had been accused by Plimoth authorities of various misconduct, back to England. Returning to New England, Oldham became a resident of Watertown, Massachusetts. In the 1630s he was engaged in trade with the Narragansett tribe and may have moved the base of his operations to Hartford. It was on a coastal trading voyage that he was killed by Natives near Block Island; his mutilated body was discovered on his ship by another English trader. This incident was but one of the many episodes that led up to the Pequot War of 1637. For an overview of these incidents in Oldham’s life, see Robert Charles Anderson, The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England, 1620-1633 (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1995), vol. 1.

5. This interlineation is written by Bradford in a darker ink.

6. Before this word someone drew a right-angled bracket, presumably to highlight the sentence.

7. A later “X,” presumably not written by Bradford, appears in the left margin beside this sentence.

8. Archaic for “soon afterwards.”

9. This was in all likelihood John (or Century) White (1590-1645), a politician and attorney who was associated with a number of puritan colonizing ventures and had interests in the Virginia Company, the Dorchester Company, and the Massachusetts Bay Company.

10. I.e., Thomas Hooker (1586?-1647), former curate of Esher, Surrey, was in late 1624 living in London, and later became a lecturer at Chelmsford, Essex. After being silenced by Archbishop Laud, he migrated first to Holland and then to America, settled as the first minister of Newtown (later Cambridge), Mass., in 1633, and then as the first minister of Hartford, Conn., in 1636.

11. During this period puritans, who were under growing pressure from the church and civil authorities in England, found Ireland a potential refuge. The Protestant Church in Ireland had incorporated a more Calvinist position into its creeds, and the need for qualified ministers made the authorities there less concerned about clerical noncomformity.

12. Levalleglish, a parish of Loughgall, County Armagh, Ireland.

13. The handwriting becomes smaller, suggesting a new sitting.

14. A bracket in the left margin, probably not by Bradford, highlights this part of the sentence.

15. Two hash marks, probably not drawn by Bradford, appear in the left margin beside this sentence.

16. MS: “Natasco.”

17. MS: “Namkeke.”

18. Roger Conant, who had been sent to Plimoth as a salter, also settled on Nantasket with Oldham and Lyford. When Conant took over the Dorchester Adventurers’ outpost at Cape Anne, Lyford may have followed him since, according to Thomas Morton, Lyford preached both at Nantasket and Cape Anne. Lyford then moved to Virginia where he ministered to the Church of England parish at Martin’s Hundred, where he soon died. His wife retuned to New England where she married Edmund Hobart of Hingham.

19. Bradford wrote to the Council for New England on June 28, 1625, that the colonists were “now left, and forsaken of our adventurers, who will neither supply us with necessaries for our subsistence, nor suffer others that would be willing; neither can we be at liberty to deal with others, or provide for ourselves, but they keep us tied to them, and yet they will be loose from us; they have not only cast us off, but entered into a particular course of trading, and have by violence, and force, taken at their pleasure, our possession at Cape Ann.” This would indicate that the investors or adventurers who had abandoned the Plimoth colony had nevertheless claimed a right to Cape Anne under the Sheffield Patent. Bradford asked that the Council free the colonists from those adventurers. Miles Standish carried this letter to England but, Bradford noted in his Letter Book, “by reason of the great plague which raged this year in London, of which so many thousands died weekly, Captain Standish could do nothing either with the Council of New England, or any other hereabout, for there was no Courts kept” (Letter Book, 14-15).

20. The Charity.

21. In his General History of New England (Cambridge: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1815), William Hubbard wrote that “In one of the fishing voyages about the year 1625, under the charge and command of one Mr. Hewes, employed by some of the West Country merchants [presumably the Dorchester Adventurers], there arose a sharp contest between the said Hewes and the people of New Plymouth, about a fishing stage, built the year before, about Cape Anne by Plymouth men, but was now, in the absence of the builders, made use of by Mr. Hewes his company, which the other, under the conduct of Capt. Standish, very eagerly and peremptorily demanded . . . . The dispute grew to be very hot, and high words passed between them, which might have ended in blows, if not in blood and slaughter, had not the prudence and consideration of Mr. Roger Conant, at that time there present . . . timely prevented” (110-11). Complicating our efforts to understand these events and the relationship between the Plimoth colony and the Dorchester Adventurers is that Hubbard, our principal source, learned his information directly from Roger Conant. As for the settlements on Cape Anne, the efforts of the Dorchester Adventurers were unsuccessful and Plimoth’s leaders soon realized that it was profits from the fur trade, not fish, that offered them the opportunity to pay off their debts.

22. On June 9, 1625, Bradford wrote to Robert Cushman, informing him of Miles Standish’s mission to the Council of New England: “Our people will never agree, any way again to unite with the Company [the merchant adventurers]; who have cast them off with such reproach and contempt; and also returned their bills, and all debts upon their heads. But as for those our loving friends, who have, and still do, stick to us, and are deeply engaged for us, and are most careful of our goods, for our part we will ever be ready to do any thing, that shall be thought equal and mete” (Letter Book, 12-13).

23. Meaning the ecclesiastical polity of the French Protestant, or Huguenot, churches.

24. MS: “receiue=.”

25. This interlineation by Bradford is written in a later, darker ink.

26. An Harmony of the Confessions of the Faith of the Christian and Reformed Churches, which purelie professe the holy doctrine of the Gospell in all the chiefe kingdomes, nations, and prouinces of Europe (London: Thomas Thomas, 1586).

27. Referring to Gal. 2:4, “For all the false brethren that crept in: who came in privily to spy out our liberty, which we have in Christ Jesus, that they might bring us into bondage.”

28. I Cor. 11:1, “Be ye followers of me, even as I am of Christ.”

29. A bracket, probably not by Bradford, appears in the left margin opposite this part of the sentence.

30. This is in keeping with the views of John Robinson, who in his parting message to the colonists told them that “the Lord hath more truth and light yet to break forth out of his holy Word.”

31. This interlineation, apparently by Bradford, is written in a darker ink.

32. Bradford’s later interlineation.

33. In his Letter Book Bradford introduces this piece of correspondence after stating, “Now follows the first letters we received after the breach” (3). The full letter, which Bradford abbreviates in his history here, is in the Letter Book, 3-10; significant omissions are indicated in the following notes.

34. Bradford’s later interlineation.

35. The original continues: “condemning all other churches, and persons but yourselves and those in your way, and you are contentious, cruel, and hard hearted, among your neighbors and towards such as in all points both civil and religious jump not with you” (Letter Book, 4).

36. Psa. 37:6, “And he shall bring forth thy righteousness as the light, and thy judgement as the noon day.” Ezek. 7:18. “They shall also gird them selves with sackcloth, and fear shall cover them, and shame shall be upon all faces, and baldness upon their heads.”

37. In this history, Bradford omits the last part of the letter, which includes this advice:

And first, seeing our generality here is dissolved, let yours be the more firm; and do not you like carnal people (which run into inconveniences and evils by examples) but rather be warned by your harms, to cleave faster together hereafter; take heed of long and sharp disputes and oppositions, . . . let not hatred or heart-burning be harboured in the breast of any of you one moment, but forgive and forget all former failings and abuses, and renew your love and friendship together daily. . . .

And although we here which are hedged about with so many favours and helps in worldly things and comforts; forget friendship and love and fall out often times for trifles; yet you must not do so, but must in all things turn a new leaf and be of another spirit. . . . We have a trade and custom of tale bearing, whispering, and changing of old friends for new, and these things with us are incurable. But you which do as it were begin a new world and lay the foundation of sound piety and humanity for others to follow, must suffer no such weeds in your garden, but nip them in the head, and cast them out forever . . . .

And if any amongst you, for all that, have still a withdrawing heart, and will be all to himself, and nothing to his neighbour, let him think of these things. 1st, The providence of God in bringing you there together. 2d, His marvellous preserving you from so many dangers . . . (Letter Book, 5-6).

The letter continued, urging the colonists at great length to remember their financial obligations: “albeit, the company here as a company hath lost you; you know when Saul left David, yea, and pursued him, yet David did not abuse his allegiance and loyalty to him, no more should you” (7). This message is picked up by Bradford as continues in OPP.

38. The original continues: “All which debts, besides adventures, have been made about general commodities and implements, and for which divers of us, stand more or less engaged” (Letter Book, 7).

39. The original continues:

And we dare say of you, that you will do the best you can to free us, and unburden us, that for your sakes, and help, are so much hazarded in our estates, and names. 5thly, If there be any that will withdraw himself from the general, as he must not have, nor use any of the general’s goods, so it is but reason that he give sufficient security for payment of so much of the debts as his part cometh to; which how much it will come to, upon a person, or family is quickly counted; and since we require but men’s faithful endeavours, and cannot obtain them, let none think much if we require other security than fair words and promises, of such men as make no more conscience of their words and ways.

If any amongst you shall object against us, either our long delays in our supplies heretofore, or our too much jollity in spending sometimes at our meetings more than perhaps needed; that will prove but trifling, for we could also find fault with the idleness and sloth of many amongst you, which have made all the rest go foreward slowly, as also we could find fault with your liberality, and largeness also, when it might have been otherwise; but all such matters must still be left to the discretion and conscience of either side, knowing that where many have a hand in such business, there will not want some, that are too timerous and slack; as also that in matters of note, something must be done for form and credit. And for ourselves we think there hath hardly in our days; been a business, of this note, and fame, carried by Londoners, with twice the expense in by-matters that this hath been; and therefore let each man rather seek to mend himself, than hastily to cast in objections against others.

In a word, since it thus still falleth out, that all things between us, are as you see, . . . (Letter Book, 7-8).

40. Omitted by Bradford: “To conclude, . . . we advise you, as your friends to these particulars. First let all sharpness, reprehensions, and corrections, of opposite persons, be still used sparingly . . . 2d, Make your corporation, as formal as you can, under the name of the Society of Plymouth in New England, allowing some peculiar privileges, to all the members thereof . . . 3d, Let your practises and course in religion in the church, be made complete, and full; let all who fear God amongst you, join themselves thereunto without delay; and let all the ordinances of God be used completely in the church without longer waiting upon uncertainties, or keeping the gap open for opposites. 4ly, Let the worship and service of God be strictly kept on the Sabbath, and both together, and asunder let the day be sanctified . . .” (Letter Book, 8-9).

41. Psa. 27:10, blending the Geneva and King James translations. Geneva: “Though my father and mother should forsake me, yet the Lord will gather me up”; King James: “When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up.”

42. Robert Cushman wrote to Bradford that James Sherley, one of the principal adventurers, who was ill, had sent (probably on the Jacob) “an heifer to the plantation, to begin a stock for the poor. There is also a bull and three or four jades” (Letter Book, 10). A jade was a broken down or vicious horse. This is the first indication of a horse sent to Plimoth.

43. See above, p. 201, n. 3. On Allerton’s origins, see Caleb Johnson, Sue Allan and Simon Neal, “The Origin and Parentage of Mayflower Passenger Isaac Allerton in East Bergholt, Suffolk,” New England Historic Genealogical Register 173 (2019):197-205. (Robert C. Anderson kindly provided this reference.)

44. Who, according to Gen. 5:27, lived 969 years.

45. Where the MS has only the intitials of the signators, Bradford’s Letter Book gives the names (10), though the letter itself was written by Robert Cushman, possibly because, as Cushman indicated in a separate letter, Sherley was very ill and likely to die soon.

46. I.e., forty per cent interest.

47. Marginal comment written later by Bradford in a lighter ink.

48. “Ware” here can mean “wares,” or merchandize, but also “warily,” as in cautiously or tentatively. Alternatively, Bradford could simply have mistakenly written “ware” but meant “were,” which follows, neglecting to delete “ware,” so that the phrase would read: “for the other being ventured were neither of the best.”

49. Bradford or someone else drew a bracket before this word.

50. The Little James; see above, p. 285.

51. The White Angel.

52. Bilbao and San Sebastian, both located on the northern coast of Spain near the French border and known as ports where it was possible to sell large quantities of fish.

53. Obsolete for rumor, tiding, report.

54. This interlineation was written by Bradford in a different ink. Probably a reference to Stellwagen Bank, located in the Atlantic Ocean between the northern tip of Cape Cod and the eastern tip of Cape Anne.

55. The Turkish vessel was likely a pirate ship from the north coast of Africa. Salé, a port in French Morocco, was notorious as a pirate hideout.

56. Rom. 11:33, “O the deepness of the riches, both of the wisdom, & knowledge of God! how unsearcheable are his judgements, & his ways past finding out!”

57. Archaic form of “dividend.”

58. The deletions and interlineations in this and the following line are later emendations by Bradford.

59. In a letter to Cushman written June 9, 1625, Bradford wrote that the colonists had “never felt the sweetness of the country till this year” (Letter Book, 13). Cushman would not have received this letter, because he had died and was buried at Benenden, Kent, on May 6, 1625.

1. John Robinson died on March 1, 1625 (NS), and was buried in the Pieterskerk (St. Peter’s Church) in Leiden.

2. From this point until MS p. 156, Bradford writes on both sides of the leaves, numbering consecutively.

3. Maurice, son of William the Silent, died April 23, 1625, and was succeeded by his younger brother, Frederick Henry or Frederik Hendrik (1584-1647). He was active in the war against Spain, for which reason he is referred to here as general.

4. This marginal note was added later by Bradford.

5. Roger White was a member of the Leiden congregation and a greengrocer in that city.

6. Bradford or another person drew a bracket before this word.

7. Monhegan was the island from which Samoset had come. It had played a role in coastal trading for many years. In 1622 Abraham Jenness, a merchant in Plymouth, England, had purchased a share in the Council for New England and under their jurisdiction established a fishing settlement on Monhegan Island. In 1626, Jenness decided to abandon his settlement and sold his rights to Robert Aldworth and Giles Elbridge of Bristol, who established a new settlement under Abraham Shurt. A decision was made to sell off the assets of the Jenness settlement.

8. MS: “Sacadahock.”

9. A province in northern Spain whose capital is Bilbao, mentioned earlier in OPP.

10. Possibly Abraham Shurt, representing the new Bristol ownership of the settlement on Monhegan Island.

11. Bradford was concerned about what he considered illegal and improper trading along the coast. He complained against these trade practices in a letter to the Director and Council of New Netherlands. That and subsequent letters with the Dutch are included in the Letter Book, 29-34. He also wrote to the Council for New England and to Sir Ferdinando Gorges complaining about the Dutch, but also about unlicensed English traders (Letter Book, 35-36).

12. A slight shift in the appearance of the handwriting indicates the beginning of a new sitting.

13. Bradford skipped 142 in his pagination.

1. Here in the MS is a deletion of about one and three-quarters lines in length, the text of which Bradford includes several lines further on, having apparently skipped over some as he copied: “to the said adventurers, and other their fellow adventurers to New-Plimoth aforesaid, accruing or belonging to the Generality of.”

2. These names are all underlined in a different ink. John Pocock was a merchant and one of the original investors supporting the colony; he was a puritan who later invested in the Massachusetts Bay Company, but he was critical of what he viewed as separatist extremism. His brother Joseph was also an early investor in the venture. John Beauchamp was one of the original investors in the Company; he was a merchant involved in the Amsterdam trade. His puritan sympathies are suggested by the fact that he was made a justice of the peace during the rule of Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s. Robert Keayne was a London merchant and avid puritan who was an habitual sermon gadder; he later invested in the Massachusetts Bay Company and himself emigrated to Massachusetts, where he became a prominent and controversial merchant. Little is known of Edward Base or Bass, other than that he was one of the early investors. James Sherley was a London goldsmith and had been involved in trade with the Netherlands and connected through that effort with Edward Pickering; he also owned a number of ships that were involved in the New England trade. Sherley was a puritan, though favoring Presbyterian polity; he was an elder in a Presbyterian classis formed in Surrey in the 1640s and in 1652 was appointed by Parliament to be one of the members of a committee seeking to supply qualified clergy and schoolmasters in that English county. He had been an early investor in the colony, who at this time was serving as Treasurer of the Adventurers. When he was thought to be in danger of dying in 1624, he was referred to as the glue of the company and one of its most generous supporters.

3. The Royal Exchange was the center of commerce in London and the typical place for payments such as this to be made.

4. This passage is underlined in the same ink as the list of names above.

5. The agreement with the adventurers transferred ownership of the colony to Plimoth, by which the colony became a virtual corporation. In reflecting on this, Bradford wrote in his Letter Book that “this was a great mercy of God unto us, and a great means of our peace and better subsistence, and wholly dashed all the plots and devises of our enemies, both there and here, who daily expected our ruin, dispersion, and utter subversion by the same” (27). It was decided to include as “purchasers” all men (heads of household or single men not indentured servants) in the colony, regardless of their previous status. Single men were given a single share and heads of household also received a share for each member of their family. In the division of assets in 1627 each received twenty acres of tillable land, and the livestock was divided among twelve groups of six, with each group receiving use of one cow and two goats. Bradford spells out some of the details and the reasons for these decisions in his text.

6. The immediate responsibility for paying off the London investors was given to a group of eight “undertakers,” John Alden, Isaac Allerton, William Bradford, William Brewster, John Howland, Thomas Prence, Miles Standish, and Edward Winslow. In return for taking up this charge they were subsequently granted monopoly on managing the colony’s fur trade for six years, that being the principal means of raising the funds to pay off the investors. Three of the original London investors, James Sherley, John Beauchamp, and Richard Andrews subsequently joined the undertakers, with Sherley and Beauchamp being designated as factors to handle the furs shipped to England by the colony.

7. The deed is no longer extant.

8. A line in the left margin, possibly not by Bradford, highlights this sentence.

9. As in “abut.”

10. A double hash mark, possibly not by Bradford, appears in the left margin beside this portion of the sentence.

11. A single hash mark in the left margin, possibly not by Bradford, highlights the beginning of this sentence.

12. Further details on the division of land is to be found in the Records of the Colony of New Plymouth, Those assigned the task of laying out the land were William Bradford, Edward Winslow, John Howland, Francis Cooke, Joshua Pratt and Edward Bangs.

13. The Sparrowhawk.

14. A loose fiber, made from untwisted rope, used to caulk between the planks of wooden ships.

15. MS: “ther.”

16. Later deletion and insertion, possibly not by Bradford.

17. MS: “Naumskachett.”

18. Nothing is known of Mr. Fells. Capt. John Sibsey later became a burgess and councilor of Virginia Colony.

19. A short horizontal dash in the left margin, probably not by Bradford, seems to highlight this sentence.

20. A double hash mark, probably not by Bradford, appears in the left margin beside this portion of the sentence.

21. A durable woolen fabric.

22. Manomet was a Wampanoag village on a river of the same name that flows into Buzzard’s Bay. It is in the present town of Bourne.

23. Allerton sailed in May on the Marmaduke.

24. MS: “pascataway.”

25. Sebastiaen Jansen Krol, who was Governour of New Netherlands until 1633.

26. In his Letter Book, Bradford wrote: “This year we had letters sent us from the Dutch plantation, of whom we had heard much by the natives, but never could hear from them nor meet with them before themselves thus writ to us, and after sought us out” (29).

27. MS: “Salichitt.”

28. “Noble, praiseworthy, wise, judicious lords, the Governor and Council residing in New Plimoth, our very good friends. The Director and Council of New Netherlands wishes you, noble, praiseworthy, and wise, judicious happiness [and] salvation. In Christ Jesus our Lord, with good prosperity and health, in body and soul, Amen.” (Thanks to Kornelia Neele, Research Fellow at the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa, for checking and translating the Dutch.)

29. I.e., the next page.

30. Bradford omits the following passage, which appears here in the Letter Book: “But you may please to understand that we are but one particular colony or plantation in this land, there being divers others besides, unto whom it has pleased those Honourable Lords of his Majesty’s Council for New England, to give the like commission, and ample privileges to them (as to us) for their better profit and subsistence; namely to expulse, or make prize of any, either strangers or other English which shall attempt, either to trade, or plant within their limits (without their special licence and commission) which extends to forty degrees: Yet for our parts, we shall not go about to molest or trouble you in any thing, but continue all good neighbourhood and correspondence as far as we may; only we desire that you would forbear to trade with the natives in this bay, and river of Naragansett and Sowames, which is (as it were) at our doors: The which if you do, we think also no other English will go about any way to trouble or hinder you; which otherwise are resolved to solicit his Majesty for redress, if otherwise they cannot help themselves” (30). The next sentence begins “May it please you further to understand, that for this year . . .”

31. Additional letters are contained in the Letter Book, 31-35. In commenting on those letters and correspondence about the Dutch with the Council for New England and Sir Ferdinando Gorges (35-36), Bradford alludes to conflict between the Dutch and English as to whose title to the region was superior.

32. What the undertakers kept secret was the plan to bring over more members of the Leiden congregation, which was not likely to be approved by settlers who had no ties to that church.

33. The hand becomes smaller, and the ink is a lighter brown, indicating a new sitting.

34. The text in the Letter Book reads: “and such others as they shall take unto them” in place of “&c.” (39).

35. Animal skins.

36. MS: “Wampampeak.” Wampumpeag, or wampum, made from colored clam shells, was a means of exchange among Indians and colonists at this time, and was most elaborately used by natives for the construction of belts given as memorials of agreements and treaties.

37. This interlineation by Bradford is in darker ink.

38. In the Letter Book, Bradford listed those who subscribed to the agreement as well as the names of the undertakers: “This agreement was by these subscribed; for some would not subscribe, and some were from home: William Brewster, Stephen Hopkins, Francis Eaton, Jonathan Brewster, Manas[seh] Kempton, Thomas Prince, Anthony Anable, John Shaw, William Bassett, Cudbert Cudbers, John Adams, Phineas Pratt, Stephen Trasie, Edward Doty, Joshua Pratt, Stephen Dean, William Wright, Francis Cook, William Palmer, Exper[ience] Michell, Edward Bangs, Samuel Fuller, Robert Hicks, John Howland, John Billington, Peter Brown, John Fance. The names of the undertakers were these following, for the three before mentioned made choice of three other, and though they knew not their minds before (many of them being absent) yet they did presume they would join with them in the thing, as afterwards they did. William Bradford, Captain Standish, Isaac Allerton, Edward Winslow, William Brewster, John Howland, John Allden, Thomas Prince, And these of London: James Sherley, John Beauchamp, Richard Andrews, Timothy Hatherly” (40).

1. The underlinings here and below may not be by Bradford. In the left margin opposite the line on which this appears is a bracketed marginal reference by Prince (though Ford., 2:32, and subsequent editors, attribute it to Bradford), which reads, “Nov. 6. 1627 / pag. 238,” referring to the folio of the original MS, where, in the annal for 1641, begins the “Articles of Agreement, Made and Concluded upon the 15[th] Day of October, 1641, &c.,” which contains the original date of the deed.

2. The last half of this word is heavily overwritten.

3. John Gibbs, master of the Marmaduke on which Allerton had sailed, and Thomas Goffe, one of the adventurers, later a freeman and deputy governor of Massachusetts Bay.

4. Morison (197n) refers to Sherley’s accounts for 1631 published in the Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 3rd series, 1:201, which record that this sum was received for 220 otter, mink, and musquash skins, and that Sherley was charging thirty percent interest.

5. Bradford transcribed another letter from Sherley on MS p. 155, below.

6. Bradford entered this and the following letter out of chronological order in order to point to future problems.

7. Bradford does not number this page, on which he later inserted the following letter, as indicated by the slightly darker ink in which it is written.

8. This interlineation by Bradford is in a different ink.

9. This interlineation by Bradford is in a different ink.

10. The four, in addition to Sherley, were John Pocock, John Beauchamp, Edward Bass, and Robert Keayne.

11. See Psa. 121:8, “The Lord shall preserve thy going out, and thy coming in from hence forth and for ever”; and Gen. 39:23, “And the keeper of the prison looked unto nothing that was under his hand, seeing that the Lord was with him: for whatoever he did, the Lord made it to prosper.”

12. The Letter Book continues: “and that for Jesus Christ his sake. I acknowledge myself much obliged to you, and others with you, for your good counsel and loving respect to my kinsman; I pray you continue the same still and set it as on my score to requite when occasion is offered. My wife and I most kindly remember our loves unto you and Mrs. Bradford, desiring you to remember us in your prayers, for assuredly, etc.” (28).

13. A reference, in part, to the ongoing conflicts relating to the Thirty Years’ War.

14. Perhaps a reference to the Merry Mount incident, as related in this chapter.

15. The Letter Book continues: “And this I leave to your serious consideration, not questioning, but that you will approve yourselves faithful and honest before God and men” (28).

16. Sherley’s invoice identifies the goods that were sent over, including shoes and leather, Irish stockings and clothes of various types, pitch, tar, rope, twine, knives, scissors, hatchets, hoes, axes, scythes, shovels, saws, files, nails, iron pots, drugs, and spices.

17. This interlineation is in a different ink, and possibly not by Bradford.

18. The patent from the Council for New England for a trading post along the Kennebec, referred to here, has not survived; it was superseded by another one issued in January 1630. In a letter to Bradford in the Letter Book, written in March 1630, Sherley suggested that Sir Ferdinando Gorges was playing a double game by over-granting trading patents (51-55).

19. It is uncertain whether the underlinings in this sentence were made by Bradford or by another hand.

20. The trading post was at a place called Cushenoc, which is now Augusta, Maine.

21. MS: “lining.” Bradford consistently emended “lining cloth” to “linen cloth” throughout the MS of OPP at a later time.

22. Or, Scusset, which was a small river, now subsumed by the Cape Cod Canal, that led to a short portage to the head of the Manomet River, which flowed into Buzzards Bay.

23. In a letter, c. 1628, to Simon Blommaert, an Amsterdam merchant, de Rasieres told of his visit and included an account of the Plimoth settlement:

New Plymouth lies on the slope of a hill stretching east towards the seacoast, with a broad street about a cannon shot of 800 feet long, leading down the hill; with a [street] crossing in the middle, northwards to the rivulet and southward to the land. The houses are constructed of clapboards, with gardens also enclosed behind and at the sides with clapboards, so that their houses and courtyards are arranged in very good order, with a stockade against sudden attack; and at the ends of the streets there are three wooden gates. In the center, on the cross street, stands the Governor’s house, before which is a square stockade upon which four patereros [a short piece of military ordinance] are mounted, so as to enfilade the streets. Upon the hill they have a large square house, with a flat roof, built of thick sawn planks stayed with oak beams, upon the top of which they have six cannon, which shoot iron balls of four and five pounds, and command the surrounding country. The lower part they use for their church, where they preach on Sundays and the usual holidays. They assemble by beat of drum, each with his musket or firelock, in front of the captain’s door; they have their cloaks on, and place themselves in order, three abreast, and are led by a sergeant without beat of drum. Behind comes the Governor, in a long robe, beside him on the right hand comes the preacher with his cloak on, and on the left hand the captain with his side-arms and cloak on, and with a small cane in his hand; and so they march in good order, and each sets his arms down near him. They are constantly on their guard night and day.

Three Visitors to Early Plymouth, ed. Sydney V. James, Jr. (Plymouth: Plimoth Plantation, 1963), 76-77.

24. The Dutch New Netherland Colony. The Plimoth colonists had been getting tobacco from the Virginia fishing fleet that sailed along the New England coast.

25. Fort Orange, now Albany, New York.

26. While Bradford appears to have claimed little prior knowledge of wampum, de Rasieres, in his letter to Blommaert, claimed that the English at the trading post at Manomet were interested in wampum, and he sold what he did to prevent them from seeking out more themselves (Three Visitors, 74).

27. In the left margin besides this part of the sentence is the memo, “Peag” and a serpentine vertical line, most likely not by Bradford.

28. MS damage; the Deane ed. (235) reads “a.”

29. MS: “Wolastone.” Nothing is known of this Captain Wollaston, and no patent survives authorizing him to plant a settlement in New England. There was a Capt. Richard Wollaston who was a pirate, but he reportedly died in 1626, two years before the incidents Bradford relates.

30. This was Thomas Morton, who would feature significantly in the later pages of this history. He had been a lawyer of Clifford’s Inn, London.

31. I.e., he sold the remaining terms of service of these indentured servants to Virginia planters. Such “servants” were typically impoverished (or even convicted criminal) English folk who indentured themselves for a number of years, at the end of which time the servant would ostensibly be provided for; however, such terms were not often kept, and indentured servants could lead miserable lives (which explains, in part, why Morton could appeal so easily to the servants at Mount Wollaston, whose fate they seemed bound to share with their counterparts who had been sold in Virginia, to turn out Wollaston’s agent and become Morton’s partner in the venture). According to Bradford’s list of “those which came over first, in the year 1620,” compiled at the end of OPP, no less than twelve males (men and boys) and one female—approximately one-tenth of the entire company—were servants. On this phenomena in the British colonization of the New World, see John Wareing, Indentured Migration and the Servant Trade from London to America, 1618-1718 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Dan Jordan and Michael Walsh, White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America (Washington Square, N.Y.: New York University Press, 2007), 113, 116; and Kenneth Morgan, Slavery and Servitude in Colonial North America: A Short History (Washington Square, N.Y.: New York University Press, 2001).

32. Nothing is known of Rasdall other than what Bradford writes.

33. Nothing is known of Fitcher.

34. Furnival’s Inn was an Inn of Chancery founded in London during the medieval period where apprentices for legal training were boarded. But Morton wrote of himself as being of Clifford’s Inn, a separate Inn of Chancery.

35. A junket was usually a dish of sweetened or flavored curds of milk, sometimes served with fruit; though here, Bradford probably intended the word to include a selection of such dainties as would be available.

36. A hash mark in the left margin, possibly not drawn by Bradford, highlights this sentence.

37. This interlineation was written by Bradford in a later ink.

38. Morton described how he and his followers “set up a maypole . . . & brewed a barrel of excellent beer, and provided a case of bottles to be spent, with other good cheer for all comers of that day” (Morton, New English Canaan, 132). He wrote and fixed to the maypole a poem in which he portrayed the land as a fertile woman whose virile husband, the Indians, had fulfilled her needs until he perished. The Plimoth puritans were not skilled enough to satisfy her and make her agriculturally fertile, while Morton and his supporters claimed they could be a productive husband to the land. On the day of the revels his followers danced round the maypole singing a song that began, “Drink and be merry, merry, merry, boys / Let all your delights be in hymen’s joys,” and ended, “Lasses in beaver coats come away / Yee shall be welcome to us night and day.” This reading of the poem is one advanced by Joanne van der Woude, “Indians and Antiquity: Subversive Classicism in Early New England Poetry,” New England Quarterly 93 (2017): 418-441; Edith Murphy, “’A Rich Widow Not to Take Up or Lay Down’: Solving the Riddle of Thomas Morton’s ‘Rise, Oedipus’,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 53 (1996): 755-68; and Jack Dempsey, “Reading the Revels: The Riddle of May Day in New England Canaan,” Early American Literature 34 (1999): 283-312. But David Lupher cautions that the identification of the woman as the land and the husband the Natives is not self-evident in a reading of the poem. See his thoughtful exegesis in Lupher, Greeks, Romans, and Pilgrims, ch. 2.

39. The interlineations and deletions on this page of the MS by Bradford are written in a slightly darker ink.

40. John Endecott (1600-1665) was sent to New England in 1628 by the New England Company, an English corporation that soon was re-chartered as the Massachusetts Bay Company. He was to take over the outposts of the Dorchester Adventurers and govern the new colony and settled in Salem. His authority was superseded in 1630 when John Winthrop, recently chosen governor of the company, arrived in Massachusetts, carrying the charter with him and combining the offices of governor of the company and the colony. Endecott (referred to by Morton as “Captain Littleworth”) visited Merry Mount and cut down the maypole in 1629, after the incident related by Bradford in the following pages.

41. Later insert by Bradford in lighter ink.

42. After the god of the Philistines. Judg. 16:23, “Then the princes of the Philistines gathered them together for to offer a great sacrifice unto Dagon their god, and to rejoyce: for they said, Our god hath delivered Samson our enemy into our hands.” However, Samson, though blinded, prayed for strength from God and pulled down Dagon’s temple, killing himself and all inside.

43. The MS is damaged at the edge of the page.

44. In June 1628, Bradford wrote to complain of these matters to Sir Ferdinando Gorges, seeking his help for “redress of our almost desperate state and condition in this place, expecting daily to be overrun and spoiled by the Savages, who are already abundantly furnished with pieces, powder, and shot, swords, rapiers and Jaflings [javelins?]; all which arms and munition is this year plentifully and publickly sold unto them, by our own countrymen; who, under the pretence of fishing, come a-trading amongst them; yea, one of them [presumably Morton] . . . hath for his part sold twenty or twenty-one pieces, and one hundred weight of powder” (Letter Book, 43).

45. The lockplate in a musket, such as was used at the time, was a flat metal piece on which the firing mechanism was mounted; the lockscrew was a long screw running laterally through the stock to hold the lock in place.

46. An English silver coin worth four old pence.

47. The interlineation of “oh” and deletion of “ho” was done later, possibly by Prince.

48. This interlineation is by Bradford in a darker ink.

49. This interlineation is by Bradford in a darker ink.

50. MS: “Laen.” The Deane ed. (240) reads “been.”

51. MS: “Pascataway, Namkeake, Winisimett, Weesagasscusett, Natasco.” Bradford’s Letter Book (43) provides a list of the plantations and of their contributions. Contributing were Roger Conant and the remains of the Cape Ann fishing outpost, then at Naumkeag (later renamed Salem); and planters at Piscataqua, Wessagusett, Thompson’s Island in Boston harbor; Shawmut (Boston), and Cocheco (Dover). Though mentioned in the text, there is no contribution listed for John Oldham’s settlement at Nantasket (Hull), nor for the settlers at Winnisimmet (Chelsea).

52. MS: “them.”

53. Meaning James I, who died in 1625.

54. This interlineation is by Bradford in a darker ink.

55. The letter to the Council for New England was dated June 9, 1628, and is included in Bradford’s Letter Book (41-43). The charges it mentions are those of selling weapons to the Natives to the detriment of the safety of England’s outposts in New England.

56. This was John Oldham, who by this time was reconciled to the Plimoth authorities.

57. I.e., made a fool of.

58. Morton provided his own account of the clash with Plimoth in his New English Canaan, in which he identifies the cause of friction as the fact that he “was a man that endeavoured to advance the dignity of the Church of England; which they (on the contrary part) would labour to vilify; with uncivil terms: envying against the sacred book of common prayer” (138). He denigrated Miles Standish as “Captaine Shrimp” (140). In his account, Morton claimed that when no ship was to be found to take him to England he was placed on the Isle of Shoals “without gun, powder, or shot, or dog, or as much as a knife, to get any thing to feed upon: or any other clothes to shelter him with at winter, than a thin suit which he had on at that time,” remaining there until a fishing vessel carried him to England (144-45).

59. There were numerous English clergy with this surname at the time, but no identification of this particular individual has been found. The surviving account of the Plymouth Company for 1628 shows a charge for his passage.

60. A double hash mark in the left margin, probably not by Bradford, highlights this portion of the sentence.

61. See I Cor. 13:5, “It [love] disdaineth not: it seeketh not her own things: it is not provoked to anger: it thinketh not evil.”

62. The underlinings on this page of the MS are apparently later, the ink most closely matching that which Bradford used to compose the annal for 1629 (after the chapter title and horizontal rules).

63. Possibly meaning the Seal of Plymouth Colony, provided by the adventurers in 1624 (though Morison [xlii] states that this seal was not used before 1630).

64. It is likely that Allerton was trusted further than he might otherwise have been because he had married Fear Brewster, daughter of Elder William Brewster.

1. A tightening of the handwriting and a slight lightening of the ink indicates a new sitting.

2. Two hash marks appear in the left margin beside this sentence, possibly made by Thomas Prince. The ink with which the underlinings on this page of the MS are made bear a strong resemblance to the ink Prince uses for cue marks and his comments.

3. Bradford is referring to the group of ships sent out by the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1629. Massachusetts Bay quickly grew to be the major puritan colony in New England. The scourge to which Bradford referred was likely the intensifying effort to force puritans to conform that followed upon the accession of Charles I to the throne and his appointment of William Laud to be bishop of London in 1628, that diocese having jurisdiction not only over the city of London, but over the county of Essex. In 1633 Laud would be elevated to Archbishop of Canterbury, allowing him to expand his efforts to much of the country.

4. Psa. 118:23, “This was the Lords doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.”

5. Here Thomas Prince drew a dagger, a cue corresponding to his note at the top of p. [163a]: “† 1629, May 25. The first Letter Dated, concerning the former company of Leiden People.”

6. The ink with which the underlinings on this page of the MS are made bear a strong resemblance to the ink Thomas Prince uses for his cue marks and his comments.

7. In commenting on this letter in his Letter Book, Bradford writes that “These persons were in all thirty-five, which came at this time unto us from Leyden, whose charge out of Holland into England and in England till the ship was ready, and then their transportation hither, came to a great deal of money; . . . and after their coming here, it was 16 months before they could reap any harvest, all which time they were kept at our charge, which was not small” (46).

8. The Talbot and Mayflower (a different one than had taken the 1620 voyage) were two of five ships commissioned by the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1629.

9. Richard Andrews has been previously identified as agreeing to become one of the undertakers. Timothy Hatherley, a London merchant, was also one who signed the agreement of November 1626; he had visited the Plimoth colony in 1623 but returned to England in the same year. He returned to New England briefly in each of the years 1631, 1632 and 1633, residing for a time at Boston, but was not a settler there. When he settled permanently in New England in 1634, it was in Scituate, part of the Plimoth colony. For more on Hatherley, see Anderson, Pilgrim Migration, 234-40.

10. Sherley identifies William Collier and a Mr. Thomas as also being partners.

11. This is excerpted from another letter from Sherley to Bradford, dated March 8, 1629/30, and included in the Letter Book, 49-50.

12. A heavily written bracket appears before this sentence. The Ford ed., 2:64n, suggests, probably correctly, that this bracket, a later insert, indicates the division between the two letters as demarcated by Bradford’s marginal comment and by Prince’s comments on the previous page.

13. Incomplete word at the right edge of the page. The Deane ed. (246) has “willing.”

14. Among those who likely came from Leiden at this time was John Robinson’s son Isaac. Robinson’s widow, who remarried, and their other surviving children, remained in Europe. When Samuel Sewall visited Isaac Robinson in 1702, Robinson informed him that “he came not to New-England till the year [1631] in which Mr. [John] Wilson was returning to England after the settlement of Boston” (The Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674-1729, ed. M. Halsey Thomas [2 vols., New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973], 1:463-64). But Robinson was then ninety-two years old, and his memory of events seven decades previous may have been inaccurate, so Bradford’s dating of Robinson’s coming in 1629 may well be correct. (Robert C. Anderson provided this reference about Isaac Robinson.)

15. Following the date Thomas Prince drew a cue mark, corresponding to his note on the bottom of p. [163a]: “‡ 1629/30, March 8. The second Letter dated, concerning the Latter Company of Leiden People.”

16. A vertical line in the left margin highlights the first three sentences in this paragraph.

17. The ink with which the underlinings on this page of the MS are made bear a strong resemblance to the ink Thomas Prince uses for his cue marks and his comments.

18. Here Thomas Prince drew a dagger, corresponding to his note at the top of p. [164a]: “† I.e., in May & August 1629, as by Mr. Sherley’s Letter of May 25, 1629.”

19. A course, narrow, ribbed cloth woven from long wool.

20. Archaic form of ell; a single ell measures about 45 inches.

21. The ink with which the underlinings on this page of the MS are made bear a strong resemblance to the ink Thomas Prince uses for his comments.

22. Though included in this chapter, much of the material relating to the English undertakers’ effort to establish a trading post in Maine is properly dated in 1630.

23. This reference is a later addition, apparently by Bradford.

24. In the MS, quote marks appear in the left margin beside each line of this letter, drawn in a different ink, possibly inserted by Prince.

25. Along with Sir Ferdinando Gorges, Robert Rich, the second Earl of Warwick, was an important member of the Council for New England. As a noted promoter of colonization, he was also a member of the Virginia Company and of the Somers Island Company.

26. This was the so-called Warwick Patent, from the Council of New England, dated Jan. 13, 1630, which became the basis for the Plimoth colony’s boundaries and authority. The patent included and expanded the grant of land on either side of the Kennebec River in Maine, which had been previously obtained.

27. This refers to the charter that had been granted to the Massachusetts Bay Company.

28. Acts 22:28, “And the chief captain answered, With a great sum obtained I this burgesship. Then Paul said, But I was so born.”

29. The Lord Treasurer at the time was Richard, Baron Weston. The Massachusetts Bay charter had freed the colony from paying customs or subsidies on trade for seven years as well as additional freedom from taxes and other impositions, and this is presumably what Allerton sought. It is likely that Allerton would have been expected to pay a bribe to achieve this. The records of the Privy Council do not include any discussion of this matter regarding Plimoth.

30. Here Thomas Prince drew a cue mark consisting of parallel vertical lines, referring to his comment on MS p. [165v]: “By this it seems that M^r Allerton now comes with ^several Leiden People in^ Mr. Peirce, and accordingly Gov. Winthrop says that when He arrived at Salem on June. 12, 1630, we sent a skiff to Mr. Peirce [h]is ship which lay in the Harbour & had been There [blank] Days before, about an Hour after Mr. Allerton came aboard us in a shallop, as He was sailing to Pemaquid [no doubt with Ashley].” See The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630-1649, ed. Richard S. Dunn, James Savage, and Laetitia Yeandle (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1996), 34.

Allerton sailed on the Lyon, captained by William Pierce, arriving in Salem in June 1630. He was accompanied by Edward Ashley, whom Bradford identified as “a profane young man,” whom Allerton (and possibly Sherley) had engaged to run a fur-trading venture along the Kennebec, on land that had been granted to John Beauchamp. After sailing with Ashley to that location, Allerton returned to Plimoth.

31. The ink with which the underlinings on this page of the MS are made bear a strong resemblance to the ink Thomas Prince uses for his comments.

32. MS: “y^e March .19. 1629.” Here Thomas Prince drew a parallel vertical lines as a cue, referring to his comment at the top of MS p. [166v]: “I.e., March 19, 1629/30.” On MS p. [167v], Prince further comments: “By the Date of Mr. Sherley’s & Hatherley’s Letters of March 19, 1629 (i.e., 1629/30) it seems that all this Account of Ashley should be brought into 1630.” An earlier comment of Prince’s on MS p. [165v] reads: “By March 19, 1629, must be meant 1629/30; and so this Letter is Placed a year sooner than it should. But I conclude that Gov. Bradford does it, because according to the Old England way, He carries the year 1629 down to March 24, inclusive of 1629/30.”

33. A later interlineation and deletion, possibly not by Bradford.

34. A later interlineation and deletion, possibly not by Bradford.

35. The underlining appears to be drawn in an ink similar to that which Prince used for his cue marks and comments. This is Thomas Morton, who had been sent back to England in 1628 after having been seized at Merry Mount.

36. The Massachusetts Court of Assistants passed sentence on Morton on Sept. 7, 1630. John Winthrop wrote in his Journal: “Thomas Morton adjudged to be imprisoned till he were sent into England, & his house burnt down, for his many injuries offered to the Indians, & other misdemeanors” (Journal of John Winthrop, 39).

37. The accusation of murder was persistent but imprecise, including whether the offense occurred in England or New England. It is summarized in the annotation to the Ford edition of Bradford’s Of Plimoth Plantation (2:76n): “Thomas Dudley, writing in 1631, says Morton was sent to England ‘for that my Lord Chief Justice [Sir Nicholas Hyde] there so required, that he might punish him capitally for fouler misdemeanors there perpetrated.’ Thomas Wiggin, in 1632, wrote to Sir John Coke, a member of the Privy Council, that on authority of Morton’s ‘wife, son and others,’ Morton had fled to New England ‘upon a foul suspicion of murder.’ . . . Winslow, in his petition of 1635, says Morton was sent to England the second time ‘by my Lord Chief Justice Hyde’s warrant to answer to the murder of a person specified therein.”

38. See Rev. 18:2, “And he cried out mightily with a loud voice, saying, It is fallen, it is fallen, Babylon the great city, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of all foul spirits, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.”

39. MS: “fraight.” Though this word has a relation to “fraught” (which is used by Morison, p. 217), Bradford’s original term, connoting loaded or laden, is retained; he does later use “fraught” and “fraight” in the same sentence (MS p. 172).

40. Morton’s New English Canaan.

41. Here the text returns to the middle of MS p. 167, following the inclusion of Bradford’s later addition on MS p. [166v].

42. MS: “laiden,” perhaps Allerton’s play on “laid out” earlier in the sentence, at first preserved by Bradford but later revised.

43. I.e., Edward Ashley (see below).

44. The ink with which the underlinings on this page of the MS are made bear a strong resemblance to the ink Thomas Prince uses for his comments.

45. See Heb. 6:9, “But beloved, we have persuaded our selves better things of you, and such as accompany salvation, though we thus speak.”

46. This interlineation is in a different ink.

47. The underlinings on this page of the MS are in a different ink, bearing a resemblance to Prince’s comments and cue marks.

48. Perhaps Robert Aldworth and Giles Elbridge, who had purchased the Monhegan fishing post.

49. The interlineations on this line are in a different ink.

50. In the more complete version in the Letter Book is the following passage: “Indeed the Salem partners here, as Mr. [John] Humfries, Mr. [Isaac] Johnson; but chiefly Mr. [Matthew] Cradock and Mr. [John] Winthrop [members of the Massachusetts Bay Company], would fain have joined with him, and, when that could not be, with us, in that business; but we not willing, and they failing they said he would strip them of all trade in those parts; and therefore they so crossed him and us in the taking of the patent, as we could not have it, but to join their name with ours in it, though Knights, and men of good rank and near the King, spake in his behalf; and this I conceive they did only to bring it to pass, that they might join with us” (53-54).

51. The Letter Book version adds: “partake with us in the profits, if it please God to send any” (54).

52. Here Thomas Prince drew a cue corresponding to his comment on MS p. [168v]: “By this it seems as if Mr. Peirce had ^Ashley &^ the Goods in Him, & was to land them at Penobscot. But whether He did so after June 12, 1630, when Gov. Winthrop found Him in Salem Harbour, I am yet uncertain.” William Pierce was a ship captain rather than an investor in colonial ventures, but he appears to have taken a financial interest in the attempt to establish this trading post.

53. It soon became apparent that accounts were not kept separate, and this was the source of dissatisfaction with Allerton. Ashley used trading goods intended for the Plimoth colony to obtain beaver skins which were sent to London, with the profits going to the London Undertakers as private investors in the Penobscot venture only. Supplies expected in Plimoth in 1630 were sent to Ashley instead. A mixing of the funds for the two ventures continued.

54. The Letter Book version adds: “(as I cannot see but it is for your good to do)” (54).

55. The Letter Book version adds: “for though some speak or write not of it, but are contented to do as I do, and wholly rely on me, yet I would be loath they should think themselves hardly dealt with all; but I know . . .” (54-55).

56. The Letter Book version adds: “Mr. Fogge, Mr. Coalson, and Mr. Thomas, though they seemed earnest to be partners, yet when they saw the debt and charge fell themselves off, and left you, us, and the business; but some though honest, yet I think they minded their own particular profit so much, as both you and we may be glad we are rid of them: For Mr. Collier verily I could have wished it would have sorted with his other affairs, to have been one of us, but he could not spare money, and we thought it not reasonable to take in any partner, unless he were willing and able to spare money, and to lay down his portion of the stock; however, account of him as a sure friend, both ready and willing to do you all the offices of a firm friend” (55).

57. Here Prince drew a cue to his comment on MS p. [169v]: “I conclude, according to the Old English account—March 19, 1629/30. So that Ashley came to Penobscot in the spring, & to Plimoth in ye Fall of 1630: and the 4 following Paragraphs belong to 1630.”

58. The underlinings on this page of the MS are in a different ink, bearing a resemblance to Prince’s comments and cue marks. It is believed that the site of Ashley’s post was at or near present-day Castine.

59. MS: “hapily”; “haply,” as in “perhaps” or “perchance,” fits the context.

60. Thomas Willett (c. 1608-1674) had been a member of the Leiden congregation, was admitted a freemen at Plimoth in 1634, and became involved in the fur trade on behalf of Plimoth. In later years he accompanied the English expedition that captured New Netherlands in 1664 and was appointed the first English mayor of New Amsterdam. He returned to Plimoth after 1667 and settled in Swansea. Anderson, Great Migration, 497-503.

61. The underlinings on this page of the MS are in a different ink, bearing a resemblance to that in which Prince wrote his cue marks and comments.

62. The interlineation and deletion are by Bradford in a darker ink.

63. This manicule appears to have been written in the same ink as the underlinings on this page, and so may have been drawn by Prince.

64. Here Prince drew a cue to his comment on MS p. [170v]: “I suppose in the Fall of 1630.”

65. This interlineation appears to be written by Bradford in a different ink.

66. Underlinings on this page appear to be in a different ink.

67. Here Prince inserts a cue pointing to his comment on MS p. [171v]: “This might be in the Beginning of 1629, as also the following Paragraphs.”

68. Ralph Smith was born in 1590, received his BA from Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1614, and came to New England on the Talbot in 1629 along with colonists sent by the Massachusetts Bay Company to Salem. He was a longtime friend of Hugh Goodyear, pastor of the English Reformed Church in Leiden. The Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company in England wrote to John Endecott that “Mr. Ralph Smith, a minister, desired passage in our [ships], which was granted before we understood of his difference of judgment in some things from our ministers [Francis Higginson, Samuel Skelton, and Francis Bright].” Despite the fact that they had “a very good opinion of his honesty,” they feared the disruption that might develop from his “different judgments.” Thus, they stipulated to Endecott that “unless he will be conformable to our government, you suffer him not to remain within the limits of our jurisdiction” (Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, Vol. 1, 1628-1641, ed. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff [Boston: William White, 1853], 390). Francis Higginson (1586-1630), who also sailed on the Talbot, recorded in his journal of the voyage at least one occasion when he and Smith joined in consecrating a “day as a solemn fasting and humiliation to Almighty God as a furtherance to our present work” (New England’s Plantation with the Sea Journal and Other Writings [Salem, Mass., 1908], 67).

69. MS: “Nantascoe.” Two hash marks appear in the left margin beside this portion of the sentence, of uncertain origin.

70. Insertion by Bradford in a later ink.

71. I.e., Deacon Samuel Fuller.

72. This interlineation and the deletion appear to in a different ink.

73. Conjectural reading where the MS is stained. The Deane ed. (264) reads “it.”

74. On God’s people being marked (not to be confused with the mark of the Beast, as mentioned in Rev. 13-16), see Ezek. 9:4, 6; and being sealed, 2 Cor. 1:22, Eph. 1:13 and 4:30, and especially Rev. 7:2-8 and 9:4.

75. This interlineation and the deletion are by Bradford in a different ink.

76. The Native name of the site that English colonizers renamed Salem.

77. This interlineation appears to be a later insert.

78. Implicit in this process is the fact that the church, which was gathering for prayer, fasting, and election of clergy, was already formed in Salem by laity who came together and agreed to a covenant.

79. I Tim. 3:2, “A bishop therefore must be unreproveable, the housband of one wife, watching, sober, modest, harberous, apt to teach”; “bishop” in this case referred to one ministering to a group of Christians.

80. Acts 8:36, “And as they went on their way, they came vnto a certeine water, and the Eunuche said, See, here is water: what doeth let me to be baptized?”

81. Omitted here was the following description of the process: “Their choice was after this manner, every member wrote, in a note, his name whom the Lord moved him to think was fit a pastor, and so likewise, whom they would have for teacher”; and the next sentence is slightly different from what Bradford includes: “so the most voice was for Mr. Skelton to be pastor, and the Mr. Higginson to be teacher” (Letter Book, 48). Two points are to be made: the specification that it was members who voted reinforces the fact that the congregation was formed before Skelton and Higginson were accepted as ministers; also, it is clear that the choice of Skelton was not unanimous.

82. Samuel Skelton (1592-1634) was baptised in Coningsby, Lincolnshire, in 1593, received his baccalaureate from Clare Hall, Cambridge, in 1612 and his master’s degree in 1615, and after serving as the rector of Sempringham and as chaplain to the Earl of Lincoln, came to Salem, Massachusetts, in 1629 where he was teacher until his death in 1634. Francis Higginson was born in Claybrook, Leicestershire, in 1586, and completed undergraduate study at Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1610; he occupied several curateships and vicarships until he was suspended in 1620 for advocating reform. He came with Skelton to New England in 1629 and lived only a year after his installation as the pastor of Salem, but not before authoring New-Englands plantation. Or, A short and true description of the commodities and discommodities of that countrey (London: T. Cotes and R. Cotes for Michael Sparke, 1630).

83. This was the practice of congregational ordination, with lay members of the church not only choosing, but empowering a clergyman through the imposition of their hands. Significantly, this indicated a rejection of the episcopal process of ordination as practiced in the Church of England.

84. What follows in this text is an abbreviation of the original, which reads: “but since Thursday, being (as I take it the 5th of August) is appointed for another solemn day of humiliation, for the full choice of elders and deacons and ordaining them” (Letter Book, 48). Note that in OPP Bradford has the ordination occurring on Aug. 6, while in the Letter Book it is the 5th. According to Nathaniel Morton, the ordination of the two clergymen occurred on Aug. 6 and that Bradford and other representatives of the Plymouth church set out to attend, but “coming by Sea, [they] were hindred by cross winds that they could not be there at the beginning of the day, but they came into the Assembly afterward, and gave them the right hand of fellowship” (New-Englands memoriall, 75).

85. Charles Gott (c. 1600-c.1667), born in Cambridgeshire, had sailed to New England on the Abigail with his wife, Gift Palmer Gott, and at least one child, in 1628, and was a founding member of the church at Salem, Mass.

1. Here Prince drew a dagger, referring to his comment on MS p. [173v]: “† I suppose This was in the Fall of 1630.”

2. I.e., the London investors.

3. Here Prince draws a cue to his comment on MS p. [173v]: “They; i.e., The New-Plimoth Undertakers.” The underlinings on page of the MS are in a different ink, resembling that in which Prince writes his cue marks and his comments on the versos.

4. Here Prince draws a cue to his comment on MS p. [173v]: “This must be the spring of 1631, i.e., the spring after Ashley went to Penobscot.”

5. Here Prince draws a cue to his comment on MS p. [173v]:

• Mr. Pierce is found by Gov. Winthrop at Salem, June. 12. 1630. Sails for Ireland or England about Aug. 1630.
• Set sail from England viz. à Bristol Dec. 1, 1630.
• Arrives from England at Natasket, Feb. 5, 1630/1.
• Sails from Salem April 1, arrives at London Apr. 29. 1631.
• Arrives again from England at Natasket. Nov. 2, 1631. As Gov. Winthrop informs us, & see the Note below: By all which Gov. Bradford seems to be mistaken or misinformed of the name of the Master of This ship.

See Journal of John Winthrop, 59.

6. Here Prince inserts a cue to his comment on MS p. [173v]: “Gov. Winthrop says, the News ^of this^ comes to Boston by ^Letters from^ Mr. Allerton ^at Saco^ in the White Angel on June 27, 1631.” Journal of John Winthrop, 53.

7. Seventeenth-century colloquialism for affairs, events, or proceedings.

8. Here Prince drew a dagger, but there is no corresponding comment on MS p. [173v], unless he meant to repeat the note at the top of the page with a similar cue: “I suppose This was in the Fall of 1630.”

9. Here Prince draws a cue to his comment on MS p. [173v]: “The Friendship arrives at Boston on July 14, 1631, as Gov. Winthrop tells us.” Journal of John Winthrop, 54.

10. The underlinings on this page of the MS are in a different ink, resembling that in which Prince writes his cue marks and his comments on the versos.

11. MS: “Bastable,” which perhaps indicates Bradford’s pronunciation of the city’s name. The same pertains to the repetition of the word three sentences down.

12. Prince’s cue to his comment on MS p. [174v]: “I.e., other Fishing Crew.”

13. Prince’s cue to his comment on MS p. [174v]: “I.e., The White Angel at Saco, in June 1631.”

14. A spiced or medicated variety of mead.

15. A flacket is a small vessel or container.

16. Editorial italics.

17. Prince inserts a dagger, referring to his comment on MS p. [175v]: “Mr. Sherley being unmindful that according to the ^Old^ English way, 1630 ended on March 24, 1630/1, happens to misdate his Letter, which should have been March 25, 1631.”

18. Prince inserts a cue, referring to his comment on MS p. [175v]: “I.e., The Friendship.” The underlinings on this page of the MS are in a different ink, resembling that in which Prince writes his cue marks and his comments on the versos.

19. Prince inserts a cue, referring to his comment on MS p. [175v]: “I.e., The White Angel.”

20. Prince inserts a cue, referring to his comment on MS p. [175v]: “Which seems to ^be^ before July 14, ^1631,^ when the Friendship arrived with Mr. Hatherley at Boston.”

21. Prince inserts a cue, referring to his comment on MS p. [175v]:

• By this it appears, that Mr. Allerton & Hatherley arrive in the spring or summer of 1631.
• Mr. Hatherley arrived in the Friendship at Boston, July 14, 1631.
• Mr. Allerton arrived in the White Angel at the Massachusetts Bay, July 22, 1631.
• The Friendship sails ^à Boston^ for Christopher Isle [i.e., St. Kitts] on July 29, 1631.
• The White Angel sets sail à Boston for New Plimoth, but hindered by contrary Winds, & a week after runs ashore at the Gurnet’s Nose (& no doubt Mr. Allerton & Hatherley go to New Plimoth in Her).

22. Prince inserts a cue, referring to his comment on MS p. [175v]: “I.e., after she had been forced back to Barnstable & discharged of her Fishing-Crew, & now came on Freight.”

23. Bradford skipped p. 177 in his pagination.

24. The underlinings on this page of the MS are in a different ink, resembling that in which Prince writes his cue marks and his comments on the versos.

25. I.e., ropes.

26. The ink and hand in which Bradford wrote this insertion matches that of what appears to be a new sitting, beginning with the next paragraph.

27. A mattress-like bag made of cloth, stuffed with materials such as straw or feathers, which could be used on the floor or on a rope bed.

28. A slightly larger hand indicates a new sitting.

29. The underlinings on this page of the MS are in a different ink, resembling that in which Prince writes his cue marks and his comments on the versos.

30. I.e., Porto, Portugal.

31. Here Prince inserts a cue, referring to his comment on MS p. [178v]: “I.e., before Mr. Hatherley returned in the New Plimoth Boat à Kennebec & Penobscot in Aug. 1631.”

32. A medieval prison in London, built on the banks of the River Fleet.

33. In close quarters with, or close to.

34. The underlinings on this page of the MS are in a different ink, resembling that in which Prince writes his cue marks and his comments on the versos.

35. Prince inserts a cue, referring to his comment on MS p. [179v]: “1631, Sep. 6. The White Angel set sail à Boston to Marble Harbour: & so with Mr. Allerton & Mr. Hatherley to Bristol, where They arrive before Nov. 16, 1631, as appears à Mr. Edward Winslow’s Letter of Nov. 16, & Mr. Sherley’s of Nov. 19, 1631, [MS] pp. 182, 183.”

36. This interlineation by Bradford is in a different ink.

37. MS: “Rev^d.” Variant reading: “Revered.”

38. Isaac Johnson (1601-1630), who came on the Arbella, and was instrumental in the settlement of Boston before dying in 1630.

39. July 26, 1630, when this letter is dated, was a Monday, so by “present week” was meant the upcoming Friday, July 30.

40. I.e., Charlestown (soon thereafter Boston First), Dorchester, and Watertown. See Harold F. Worthley, “An Inventory of the Records of the Particular (Congregational) Churches of Massachusetts Gathered 1620-1805,” The Proceedings of the Unitarian Historical Society XVI (1966-69): 53, 91, 644.

41. The version of this letter in Bradford’s Letter Book includes the names of Edward Winslow and Samuel Fuller (58).

42. Thomas Dudley (1576-1653) and Rev. John Wilson (c. 1588-1667).

43. William Coddington (b. 1601) became treasurer of Massachusetts Bay before joining the antinomian party and removing to Rhode Island.

44. John Cotton, Gods promise to his plantation·as it was delivered in a sermon, by Iohn Cotton, B.D. and preacher of Gods word in Boston (London: William Jones for John Bellamy, 1630). Cotton nowhere in the printed sermon mentions Plimoth, but the letter’s author states, from Coddington, that it was in his “Charge” that Cotton exhorted his hearers to consult with the older colony; the Charge being a distinct part of a service, particularly of ordination, it may not have been included in the published version. It is also possible that the charge was omitted from the publication for fear of linking the enterprise to Separatism.

45. Gal. 6:16, “And as many as walk according to this rule, peace shall be upon them, and mercy, and upon the Israel of God.”

46. The version of this letter in Bradford’s Letter Book includes the name of Samuel Fuller (59).

47. Morison (p. x) rightly avers that there are problems with the 1896 facsimile of OPP, highlighting an instance that he thinks proves his point: namely, the monotone shading of a supposed mistaken blot of “un” in “unto,” so that he asserts the reading here should be “unto many.” However, this is not merely a blot but a deliberate deletion by Bradford in one of his later reviews of the MS, making the correct reading “to many.” For a more recent edition of OPP that relies on the 1896 facsimile, modernizes spelling, capitalization, and punctuation, and does not take later changes into account, see Of Plymouth Plantation: Along with the full text of the Pilgrims’ journals for their first year at Plymouth, ed. Caleb H. Johnson (Xlibris, 2006).

1. The underlinings on this page of the MS are in a different ink, resembling the ink of Prince’s cue marks and verso-side comments. At this point Prince inserts such a cue, referring to his comment on MS p. [181v]: “In Aug. 1631.”

2. Prince inserts a cue, referring to his comment on MS p. [181v]: “Arriving at Boston, on June 5, 1632.” Winslow came on the William and Francis, as reported in Journal of John Winthrop, 70.

3. This interlineation by Bradford is in a different ink.

4. This interlineation by Bradford is in a different ink.

5. The underlinings on this page of the MS are in a different ink, resembling the ink of Prince’s cue marks and verso-side comments.

6. This insertion appears to be in a different ink.

7. This interlineation by Bradford is in a darker ink.

8. Editorial quotation marks.

9. The underlinings on this page of the MS are in a different ink, resembling the ink of Prince’s cue marks and verso-side comments.

10. The underlinings on this page of the MS are in a different ink, resembling the ink of Prince’s cue marks and verso-side comments.

11. Prince inserts a cue, referring to his comment on MS p. [183v]: “I.e., Jan. 2, 1631/2.”

12. A maritime contract by which a shipowner charters or hires out a ship.

13. Richard Vines and John Oldham had obtained a patent from the Council for New England in February 1630 for land on the west side of the Saco River, including Cape Porpoise harbor. Part of the cargo on the White Angel was intended for Vines, who had taken possession of his grant in June.

14. John Stratton and Ralph Fogg were two of the original adventurers who backed out of the enterprise; Fogg had been a skinner in London. Both came to New England and settled at Salem; Stratton did business at Cape Porpoise. On Fogg, see Anderson, Pilgrim Migration, 206-10, and on Stratton, see Anderson, The Great Migration Begins, 1782-85.

15. The underlinings on this page of the MS are in a different ink, resembling the ink of Prince’s cue marks and verso-side comments.

16. William Collier, who came to Plimoth in 1633, had been a grocer in Southwark, Surrey; it was he with whom Allerton invested 400 pounds in a brewhouse. See Anderson, Pilgrim Migration, 128-33.

17. This underlining appears to have been made by Bradford at the time of original composition. In quoting the biblical text, he elides the Geneva and King James translations. In the Geneva translation the verses read: “For they that will be rich, fall into temptation and snares, and into many foolish and noisome lusts, which drown men in perdition and destruction. For the desire of money is the root of all evil, which while some lusted after, they erred from the faith, and pierced them selves through with many sorrows.” In the King James version they read: “But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.”

18. Approximately one and a quarter lines are struck through so thoroughly (whether by Bradford or by someone else is unascertainable) as to be indecipherable. The first several words may read, “He also ought to . . . ,” but this must remain highly conjectural.

19. As the above and following passages indicate, Bradford was very critical of Allerton, blaming him for committing the colony to ventures the undertakers had not explicitly approved (though his commission could be interpreted as justifying this behavior), improperly mingling his own business with that of the undertakers, and employing the colony’s enemy Thomas Morton. The fact that at this time James Sherley defended Allerton was interpreted by Bradford as evidence that Allerton had deceived Sherley and the other English undertakers. Without copies of the actual accounts, it is impossible to determine whether Bradford’s suspicions were justified. It is clear that Allerton, described by Edward Winslow as one “whose head is always full of such projects,” was more adventurous than Bradford.

20. The underlinings on this page of the MS are in a different ink, resembling the ink of Prince’s cue marks and verso-side comments.

21. The English undertakers.

22. William Dennison, who came to Massachusetts in 1631 and settled in Roxbury.

23. This interlineation is written by Bradford in a different ink.

24. Bradford leaves the equivalent of approximately five blank lines before resuming.

25. MS: “portingall.”

26. “In effect.”

27. The underlinings on this page of the MS are in a different ink, resembling the ink of Prince’s cue marks and verso-side comments.

28. The interlineation and deletion are by Bradford in different ink.

29. Elder William Brewster; Allerton had married his daughter Fear Brewster in 1626.

30. Underlined in a different ink, whether by Bradford or someone else is uncertain.

31. 1 Sam. 10:2, “When thou shalt depart from me this day thou shalt find two men by Rachel’s sepulcher in the border of Benjamin, even at Zelzah, and they will say unto thee, the asses which you wenteth to seek are found: and lo, thy father hath left the care of the asses and sorroweth for you, saying What shall I do for my sons?”

32. The underlinings on this page of the MS are in a different ink, resembling the ink of Prince’s cue marks and verso-side comments.

33. This interlineation by Bradford appears to be in a darker ink.

34. See Sherley’s letter of Mar. 19, 1629, above, p. 344–45.

35. Prince inserts a cue, referring to his comment on MS p. [187v]: “In the Beginning of 1632. N.B. Gov. Winthrop places This in June 1632, i.e., I suppose the News at Boston of this Transaction.” See Journal of John Winthrop, 70-71.

36. Unsteady; ready to be upset or overturned.

37. A port city in southern Wales that shares its name with the bay on which it is situated.

38. The underlinings on this page of the MS are in a different ink, resembling the ink of Prince’s cue marks and verso-side comments.

39. John Winthrop recorded in his Journal in 1633: “News of the taking of Machias by the French. Mr. Allerton of Plymouth & some others had set up a trading wigwam there, & left in it 5 men & store of commodities: La Tour, governor of the French in those parts making claim to the place, came to displant them, & finding resistance killed 2 of the men & carried away the other 3 & the goods” (103).

40. Josiah Winslow (1606-c. 1675).

41. This interlineation by Bradford appears to have been made later.

42. The underlinings on this page of the MS are in a different ink, resembling the ink of Prince’s cue marks and verso-side comments.

43. MS: “3 or 400.^ll ^.500.^ worth ^as y^e cast first peny^ in beauer.” The difficulty of this passage, particularly Bradford’s problematic placing of the carets and the poorly written interlineation, has led to some different treatments in past editions. The Deane (293), Commonwealth (Bradford’s History “Of Plimoth Plantation”: From the Original Manuscript: With a Report of the Proceedings Incident to the Return of the Manuscript to Massachusetts [Boston: Wright & Potter Printing Co., State Printers, 1898], 250), and Ford (2:134) editions render it “as y^e cost first peny worth,” while Morison (246) reads “worth as they cost first penny.” However, to “cast one’s pennyworth” is an archaic proverb meaning to reckon what has been (or, in this case, could have been) received for an expenditure or outlay, considering not only the actual cost in money but other considerations (as in a “good pennysworth”).

44. The presence of a “false,” or, to Bradford’s view, turncoat Scot amongst the French reflects the sympathy between France and some Scots constituencies, based on their Catholic faith and opposition to English domination.

45. From the French, congé, meaning a courteous bow.

46. Referring to the failed attempt by forces under the command of the Duke of Buckingham to capture the French fortress of Saint Martin de Ré in 1627, during the Anglo-French War, which ended in 1629. John Winthrop in his Journal reported that, in June 1632, “The French came in a pinnace to Penobscot, & rifled a trucking house belonging to Plymouth, carrying thence three hundred weight of beaver, & other goods” (70). The date of June 1632 may have been when the news reached Boston.

47. Gardiner (1596-1662) claimed to be related to Stephen Gardiner (1483-1555), Bishop of Winchester (1531-51, 1553-55), who had persecuted Protestants in the reign of Queen Mary Tudor. Christopher had studied at Cambridge University and the Inns of Court, then travelled to the continent where he converted to Roman Catholicism and served in the army of the Holy Roman Empire. He was probably a Knight of the Golden Melice, a minor title bestowed by the pope. Returning to England and reconverting to Protestantism, he came to New England with his mistress Mary Grove in 1630, in part to escape prosecution by two wives he had abandoned in England.

48. This deletion and interlineation by Bradford appear to be in a different ink.

49. According to Winthrop (Journal, 51), Capt. John Underhill and Lieut. Samuel Dudley were sent to Plimoth to bring Gardiner to Boston.

50. Gardiner left Massachusetts in August 1631. In England he joined forces with Thomas Morton and Philip Ratcliffe in supporting Sir Ferdinando Gorges’ campaign against the Massachusetts charter. Morton’s New English Canaan included a chapter on Gardiner’s story and a sonnet (p. 8) written by him, critical of “The Humors of the seperatiste” and lauding Morton. During the English Civils Wars of the 1640s, Gardiner served in the royalist forces.

51. To accommodate more materials for this year’s annal, Bradford utilized the versos of the two following leaves.

52. This letter is not in the Winthrop Papers.

53. MS: “dan= / er.”

54. At the bottom of MS p. [189v], Bradford notes, “See the other side,” meaning p. 190.

55. I.e., 1632/33.

1. Prince inserts a cue, referring to his comment on MS p. [188v]: “In the Fall of 1632.”

2. The ink used in the underlinings in this page of the MS resembles that of Prince’s cue marks and comments.

3. Conjectural, because the number has been either overwritten or blotted. Deane (298) reads “10,” but Ford, 2:146, leaves it blank. The number was apparently underlined at one point, which may have given the appearance of “12.”

4. Prince insert a cue, referring to his comment at the top of MS p. [189v]: “I.e., 1632.”

5. The ink used in the underlinings in this page of the MS resembles that of Prince’s cue marks and comments.

6. Here a word or words have been struck through so thoroughly as to be illegible; an “X” appears beside this deletion in the left margin.

7. This Thomas Mayhew was probably a Southampton merchant who was associated with Matthew Craddock, the Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company, and, like Allerton, was accused of mixing his own business with that of his employer. Mayhew had come to New England in 1631.

8. Prince’s cue to his comment at the top of MS p. [190v]: “Arriving at Boston, June. 5, 1632,” a date that Prince derived from Winthrop (Journal, 69). Hatherley soon returned to England.

9. See above, annal for 1631, on Dennison.

10. Dennison was then a resident of Roxbury, Massachusetts. The Massachusetts Bay Court of Assistants on July 1, 1634, ordered “that Mr. Isaac Allerton shall pay the sum of 40s to Mr. William Dennison, for charges in suit about a debt of an hundreth pound.” The Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, vol. 1, 1628-1641, 122.

11. MS: “rea=.”

12. Here several words, amounting to approximately half of a line, are so thoroughly blotted out as to be irretrievable; whether Bradford or a later owner of the MS did this is unascertainable.

13. In the left margin is a vertical serpentine line, accented by two diagonal hash marks, highlighting this sentence, apparently not made by Bradford.

14. This interlineration by Bradford is in a different ink.

15. By 1641 Green Harbor became known as Marshfield.

16. The ink used in the underlinings in this page of the MS resembles that of Prince’s cue marks and comments. An “X” appears in the left margin beside this underlined phrase, whether made by Bradford, or Prince, or by another is unascertainable.

17. A serpentine vertical line appears in the left margin beside this sentence, whether drawn by Bradford or another is unascertainable.

18. The ink used in the underlinings in this page of the MS resembles that of Prince’s cue marks and comments.

19. Bradford’s interpolation.

20. I.e., weaned.

1. I.e., Sherley’s previous letter, sent on March 22, as Bradford’s marginal comment indicates.

2. The ink used in the underlinings on this page of the MS resemble that of Prince’s cue marks and comments.

3. Prince inserts a cue, referring to his comment on MS p. [193v]: “1632/3, Feb. 11, Night till morning (Laud’s Diary).” In this fire, more than 40 shops on the northern end of London Bridge, as well as eighty or so buildings on adjacent Thames Street, were destroyed. Prince (with no indication of irony) refers to The history of the troubles and tryal of the Most Reverend Father in God and blessed martyr, William Laud, Lord Arch-Bishop of Canterbury wrote by himself during his imprisonment in the Tower; to which is prefixed the diary of his own life, faithfully and entirely published from the original copy (London: Printed for Ri: Chiswell, 1695), 47.

4. MS: “∫ayle”? Deane (308) renders it so, but see Ford ed., 2:159n, which asserts that Bradford first wrote “safe,” then overwrote it.

5. This interlineation by Bradford appears to be in a slightly darker ink.

6. Bradford’s interpolation.

7. The ink used in the underlinings on this page of the MS resemble that of Prince’s cue marks and comments.

8. A double hash mark in the left margin, most likely not by Bradford, highlights this sentence. Roger Williams (c. 1600-1683) was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and served as a family chaplain before emigrating to New England in 1630. He declined a ministerial post in the Boston church because that congregation would not renounce all of its ties to the Church of England. He ministered for a time in Salem, but then moved on to Plimoth, hoping to find a more rigid separatist stance in that colony. He was disappointed by the moderate separatism of that congregation, but remained there for a time. While there he began to develop radical ideas that would get him into trouble after the Plimoth church dismissed him so he could return to Salem. These included questioning the use of the cross on the English flag, whether women should be veiled in church, the right of civil magistrates to impose oaths, and the legitimacy of infant baptism.

9. See above, annal for 1627, pp. 316–19, and annal for 1628, pp. 327–28.

10. Possibly the Matianuck or “Windsor Indians,” whose sachem Natawanute, sold a planting field to the Plimoth traders along the river, is mentioned below; this band had been displaced by the Pequots, who had come to dominate this portion of the Connecticut River Valley following a treaty with the Dutch in 1633. See William D. Love, The Colonial History of Hartford (Hartford: Case, Lockwood & Brainard, 1935), 81, 84.

11. This interlineation is a later insert, possibly not by Bradford.

12. This word is heavily overwritten.

13. See below, annal for 1635, pp. 430–35.

14. In June 1633 Wouter van Twiller, the Dutch Director-General of New Netherlands, sent a party to make a treaty with the local tribes whereby they obtained land upon which they established Fort Good Hope, which was on the Connecticut River near the present site of Hartford.

15. I.e., the Pequots.

16. Looking back on these events in a letter to John Winthrop in 1644 (Winthrop Papers, IV, 1638-1644 [Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1944], 453-54), Winslow wrote that “I had a place given (and the place we after possessed) the year before the Dutch began in the River. That the Dutch came in way of prevention and stept in between us and our purpose, etc.”

17. A palisado is a fence made of stakes enclosing a structure or area. The site of the Plimoth trading post is today’s Windsor, Connecticut, where there is still a “Palisado Avenue.”

18. MS: “Monhatas.”

19. This was late in 1634. In his Journal, John Winthrop wrote (Dec. 22, 1634), “By a letter from Plimoth it was certified that the Dutch of Hudson’s River had been at Connecticut, & came in warlike manner to put the Plimoth men out of their house there, but when they stood upon their defense they departed without offering any violence” (139).

20. The infectious disease was smallpox. Thomas Blossom was one of the members of the Leiden congregation who was forced to return when the Speedwell was unable to continue the 1620 voyage; he and his wife had finally come to Plimoth in 1629. Richard Masterson was also a member of the Leiden congregation; he wrote to Bradford and Brewster in 1625 expressing his hope of joining them in Plimoth, and is believed to have arrived in 1629.

21. The ink used in the underlinings on this page of the MS resemble that of Prince’s cue marks and comments.

22. Bradford is describing the cicada, which emerges once every seventeen years.

1. It is likely that full texts were copied into Bradford’s Letter Book, but the fragment of the manuscript that survives does not include these years.

2. Dated Jan. 13, 1629/30.

3. I.e., the Council for New England, which was largely controlled by Sir Ferdinando Gorges and the Earl of Warwick.

4. MS: “Cobi∫econte.”

5. The Cobbesacontee is now a lake, but was once a river that emptied from the west into the Kennebec River near present-day Augusta, Maine; it was here that the Plimoth colonists established a trading post at a site called Cushnock. The Nequamkick rapids are upstream on the Kennebec River.

6. MS: “pascataway.” By virtue of a grant given in 1622, David Thomson, a Scotsman, with others, settled on the Piscataqua River near the present site of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Thomson abandoned this grant by 1626, moving to Thomson’s Island in Massachusetts Bay. The land in question in this story is the grant to Edward Hilton on Mar. 12, 1629/30 by the Council for New England of Hilton’s Point, which would become Dover, further up the Piscataqua than Thomson’s grant. Within a year or two, Hilton had sold this patent to “some Bristol men,” who sold it to Brooke and Saye and Sele in 1633. Their agent, John Hocking, was simply poaching on the territory of the Plimoth men. On Dover, see Robert C. Anderson’s article in The Great Migration Newsletter 6 (1997): 171-72. (Thanks to Robert C. Anderson for clarifying the chronology of this story.)

7. John Howland was one of the Plimoth undertakers and was in charge of the colony’s trading post on the river.

8. Moses Talbot (see Ford ed., 2:263n).

9. I.e., Hocking’s associates at Piscataqua.

10. A double hash mark in the left margin, to all appearances not by Bradford, highlights this sentence.

11. John Alden, also one of the Plimoth undertakers, who had been with Howland. He was arrested on the complaint of one of Hocking’s relatives, who accused Alden of being the one who shot and killed Hocking. At least some in Massachusetts feared offending Viscount Saye and Sele and Lord Brooke, and, viewing Hocking as an agent of the English lords, they decided to involve themselves. But since the shooting had occurred where Massachusetts had no legal jurisdiction, the Plimoth authorities were incensed at the need to defend themselves before the Massachusetts court.

12. In a letter date May 22, 1634, John Winthrop wrote about the incident to Sir Nathaniel Rich, a prominent puritan supporter of Massachusetts in England:

I shall now acquaint you with a sad accident which lately fell out between our neighbors of Plimoth and some of the Lord Saye his servants at Pascat[aqua]. They of Plimouh having engrossed all the Chief places of trade in N[ew] E[ngland] viz: Kennebec, Penobscot, Narragansett, and Connecticut, have erected trading houses in all of them. The Lord’s Pinnace going with 3 men and a boy to trade at Kennebec, were forbidden, and persisting in their purpose 2 of the magistrates of Plimoth viz: John Alden and John Howland and about 9 more, came up to them in their pinnace and sent 3 men in a Canoe to cut the Cables of the Pas[cataqua] pinnace (her master one Hocking having given them provoking speeches) and stood in their own pinnace with their pieces charged and ready to shoot: after they had cut one Cable, Hocking came up, and asked them if they meant to cast away his vessel, etc: and sware withal that he would kill them that should come to cut the other: whereupon (the Canoe being driven away with the strength of the stream) they took out him that steered her and put in another, and sent them again to cut the other Cable, which while one was doing (for it was cut), Hocking shot one of them in the Canoe dead, upon which one of the Plimoth men out of their Pinnace shot at Hocking and killed him upon the place, whereupon another of Hocking’s company coming up upon the deck one of Plimoth men asked Howland if he should kill him also, but he forbade him saying he feared there had been too many killed already: the pinace being then driven on shore and in danger, the Plimoth men saved her, and put one of their own men into her to carry her homewards towards Pasc[ataqua]. Upon the report of this we were much grieved, that such an occasion should be offered to our enemies to reproach our profession and that such an injury should be offered to those hon[our]able persons who for love of us and furtherance of our beginnings here, had so far eng[aged] themselv[es] with us, so as we wrote to them [Plimoth authorities] to know the truth of the matter, and whither they would advow it: the[y] wrote to us again relating the matter in effect as I have expressed, with justification of the fact etc: yet declaring their sorrow, that it had happened so sadly, otherwise than they intended: but they did not doubt that their Grant would bear them out: upon this, we refuse to hold communion with them, till they give better satisfaction, and having the said Alden before us, at a gen[era]l Court, we took security of him for his forthcoming and wrote to them what and wherefore we had done it: and upon their answer, that themselves would do justice in the Cause, we remitted him to them, having no jurisdiction in it, to try it ourselves. All that we aim at is that they may come to see their sin and repent of it: which if they shall do, I would entreat you to intercede with the Lords for them, that the injury and discourtesy may be passed by, upon such satisfaction as they can make.

Winthrop Papers, Vol. III, 1631-1637, ed. Allyn B. Forbes (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1943), 167-68.

13. This was addressed to Bradford by Thomas Dudley, the newly elected Governor of Massachusetts.

14. Thomas Prence was then governor of Plimoth.

15. Ink comparisons suggest that it is likely that the manicule in the left margin was drawn by Bradford.

16. MS: “pascattaway.”

17. In April 1634 King Charles appointed Archbishop William Laud, a strong opponent of the puritans, to head a Commission for Regulating Plantations, with authority to establish the Church of England in the colonies, to review previous colonial decisions and appoint governors for the New England colonies, and to reform local government. (Bradford copies this commission into his text on the versos.) At the same time, the king responded to a request by the Council for New England and appointed Sir Ferdinando Gorges as Governor of all New England, suppressing the existing colonies and subordinating them to the new regime. While none of these threats were realized, all of the colonists were concerned about them. Massachusetts took steps to defend itself. Edward Winslow was sent to England to explain the Hocking murder to Viscount Saye and Sele and Lord Brooke, and to generally represent the interests of Plimoth and Massachusetts.

18. Ink comparisons suggest that it is likely that the manicule in the left margin was drawn by Bradford.

19. Bradford’s spelling of “Counselour” is retained in this document, though technically the term might more properly be rendered “Councilour.”

20. MS: “Counterbery,” which is how Bradford (perhaps engaging in some wordplay), with some variation, spells this word throughout his transcription of the commission.

21. Fines or compulsory payments.

22. Bradford’s note at the bottom of MS p. [200v]: “∫ee y^e other ∫ide,” i.e., MS p. [201v].

23. A serpentine vertical line in the left margin, probably not drawn by Bradford, highlights the following part of the sentence.

24. A double hash mark in the left margin, probably not drawn by Bradford, highlights the following part of the sentence.

25. Mal. 2:7, “For the priest’s lips should preserve knowledge, and they should seek the law at his mouth: for he is the messenger of the Lord of Hosts.”

26. John Winthrop provided details of this meeting in his Journal, under the date of July 9, 1634:

Mr. Bradford & Mr. Winslow two of the magistrates of Plimoth with Mr. Smith their Pastor came to Boston by water to confer with Mr. Winthrop [and] some of our magistrates & ministers about their case of Kennebec. There met hereabout Mr. Winthrop, Mr. Cotton, & Mr. Wilson. And after they had sought the Lord, they fell first upon some passages which they had taken some offense at, but these were soon cleared. Then for the matter itself, it fell into these two points: 1, whether their right of Trade there were such as they might lawfully hinder others from coming there; 2, admitting that, whether in point of conscience, they might so far stand upon their right, as to take away or hazard any man’s life in defense of it.

For the 1[st] their right appeared to be good: for that besides the King’s grant, they had taken up that place as vacuum domicilium, & so had continued without interruption or claim of any of the natives for diverse years. And also had by their charge & providence drawn down thither the greatest part of the Trade, by carrying wampampeag thither, which none of the English had known the use of before.

For the 2[nd] they alleged that their servant did kill Hocking to save other of their men whom he was ready to have shot: yet they acknowledged that they did hold themselves under guilt of the breach of the 6[th] Commandment in that they did hazard man’s life for such a Cost, & did not rather wait to preserve their right by other means, which they rather acknowledged, because they wished it were not done, and hereafter they would be careful to prevent the like.

The Governor [Dudley] & Mr. Winthrop wrote their letters into England to mediate their peace, & sent them by Mr. Winslow.

Journal of John Winthrop, 122-23. Winthrop recorded on August 19th that Bradford and a Plimoth investor, William Collier, had attempted to come to Boston for a further meeting about the Hocking affair, but were delayed a week by bad weather (125). Bradford does not mention this and Winthrop does not provide details on the purpose of the meeting.

27. A broader handwriting begins at this point, suggesting a new sitting.

28. About the death of Hocking at Kennebec; see above, p. 404–05.

29. This interlineation appears to have been made by Bradford in a slightly darker ink.

30. See below, annal for 1635 pp. 419–29.

31. In his Journal, Winthrop confirms Plimoth’s “great trade of beaver” in this year and adds what he called a “pleasant passage” concerning Winslow: “Mr. Winslow coming in his bark from Connecticut to Narragansett, . . . he went to Osamequin the Sagamore [Massasoit] his old ally, who offered to conduct him home to Plimoth. But before they took their journey Osamequin sent one of his men to Plimoth to tell them that Mr. Winslow was dead, & directed him to show how & where he was killed: whereupon there was much fear & sorrow at Plimoth. The next day when Osamequin brought him home, they asked him why he sent such word, &c. He answered, that it was their manner to do so, that they might be more welcome when they came home” (124-25).

32. Captain John Stone was an English trader and privateer with a reputation for smuggling and other illegal actions. He was described by Winthrop as someone who “carried himself very dissolutely, in drawing company to drink, etc.” (Journal, 97), and had been seized in September 1633 on charges of adultery, though a grand jury did not bring an indictment. He stopped in New Amsterdam enroute from Virginia to Massachusetts, carrying a cargo of cattle and salt.

33. I.e., the island of St. Kitt’s in the West Indies.

34. This was probably still Sebastiaen Jansen Krol, who left New Netherlands in May or June of 1633, to be succeeded by Wouter van Twiller.

35. A Plimoth trading vessel also in the harbor.

36. “As you please.” This underlining may be a later addition.

37. A marginal note in the left margin, “N.” (presumably for “N.B,” noto bene), along with a vertical serpentine line, to all appearances not by Bradford, highlights this sentence.

38. The Plimoth authorities had sent Miles Standish to apprehend Stone and bring him to Plimoth for trial, but the Massachusetts magistrates sought to send him to England to be tried in the Court of Admiralty. However, fearing what complaints he might make about the colonies, they decided to release him.

39. The strikethroughs and insertions in this paragraph were written by Bradford in a different ink.

40. MS: “staued,” i.e. staved, meaning “make a hole in,” but later overwritten, possibly by someone other than Bradford, as “stabbed.” The Deane ed. (324) reads “staped,” while the Ford ed. (2:191) renders this “stapted.”

41. Walter Norton, who met the same fate as Stone. See Robert C. Anderson, Puritan Pedigrees: The Deep Roots of the Great Migration to New England (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2018), ch. 2.

42. Originally, Bradford placed the caret for this insert, written at the end of a line, after “carried.”

43. Bradford originally placed the caret for this insertion outside of the parenthesis.

44. Winthrop, writing in his Journal on Jan. 21, 1634 (108), reported news from Plimoth of Stone’s death. Stone’s murder was a consequence of a rivalry between the Dutch traders on the Connecticut River and the Pequot tribe, which was dominant in the region. When the Pequots intercepted and killed some Natives who were enroute to the Dutch Ft. Good Hope to conduct trade, their objective being not to drive out the Dutch but to dominate the trade themselves, the Dutch retaliated by seizing and killing the Pequot sachem Tatobem. The attack on Stone was intended as retaliation for the murder of Tatobem, the Pequots not distinguishing between the different European nations. And it should be noted that Stone had strong connections with the Dutch in some of his ventures. If Winthrop received news of Stone’s murder in Jan. 1634, the earlier episodes recounted by Bradford must have occurred in 1633. See Alfred A. Cave, The Pequot War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 58-59.

45. This was the English name for a breech-loading swivel gun.

46. Referring to the Plimoth trading post on the site of what is now Windsor, Connecticut. This interlineation appears to be written by Bradford in a slightly darker ink.

47. This tribe has not been positively identified, but it may have been the one under the sachem Sequassen, whose people lived in the area of present-day Windsor and to the north and west. They were eventually subjugated by the Pequot following a series of battles, though this epidemic may have been a major factor in their downfall. Sequassen welcomed the Dutch as a way to gain back ascendancy in the area. John W. deForest, History of the Indians of Connecticut From the Earliest Known Period to 1850 (Hartford: Wm. Jas. Hamersley, 1852), 52-53, 61-62. Thanks to Paul Grant-Costa and Tobias Glaza, the staff of the Native Northeast Research Portal (formerly the Yale Indian Papers Project), for their suggestions on this and related questions on indigenous peoples of New England.

48. This interlineation appears to be written by Bradford in a slightly darker ink.

49. MS: “feb=,” coming at the end of a line.

50. I.e., Plimoth’s.

51. Orig. “lining.”

52. I.e., to suppurate or discharge pus.

53. MS: “y^e ^y^e Engli∫h^ house.” This interlineation appears to have been written by Bradford in a slightly darker ink.

54. This interlineation appears to be written by Bradford in a slightly darker ink.

1. MS: “account,” but a final “s” is now missing at the right edge of the page, as the Deane (327), Commonwealth (390) and Ford (2:196) editions all read “accounts.”

2. These were likely the complaints lodged by Thomas Morton and other critics of Plimoth and Massachusetts.

3. As related above, annal for 1631, p. 385. Winthrop disagreed with Winslow about petitioning the Council for “a commission to withstand the intrusions of the French & Dutch, . . . for such precedents might endanger our liberty that we should do nothing hereafter but by commission out of England” (Journal, 159).

4. A later interlineation by Bradford, in a slightly different ink.

5. A marginal note in the left margin, “N.,” along with a vertical serpentine line (similar to that previous, above, p. 416, n. 37), in all likelihood not by Bradford, highlights this sentence.

6. See above, annal for 1634, p. 408, n. 17.

7. In the left margin on this page is a vertical line, stretching some eighteen or nineteen lines (ending approximately with the sentence that concludes, “when they wanted better means, which was not often”), supplemented by the letter “N.” and a double hash mark alongside the statement, “he [the Archbishop] began to question Mr. Winslow of many things.” None of these marks appear to have been made by Bradford.

8. The Plimoth congregation, dating back to its time in England and in Leiden, had accepted the practice of lay prophesying. The term “prophesying” as used by puritans at this time did not mean to foretell future events as had many of the Old Testament prophets; rather, it referred to a believer sharing an interpretation of a scriptural passage or any other religious viewpoint that he or she had learned from the inspiration of the holy spirit. While some clergy believed this was a gift bestowed only on ministers, other reformers believed any believer could be so empowered. John Robinson defined it as “a kind of preaching” not to be limited to the ministry, “but that others having received a gift there unto, may and ought to stir up the same, and to use it in the Church, for aedification, exhortation, and comfort” (A iustification of separation from the Church of England Against Mr Richard Bernard [n.p., 1610], 235). Members of the congregation could by this means share their insights in public as well as private settings, and lay men could preach to the congregation. During the years when the Plimoth church was without a settled minister, Elder William Brewster regularly preached or repeated sermons, and others, such as Robert Cushman and Edward Winslow, were also known to have preached.

9. A double hash mark in the left margin, most likely not by Bradford, highlights this sentence.

10. A short vertical line in the left margin, most likely not by Bradford, highlights this portion of the sentence.

11. It is a point of contention whether one of the innovations of the Plimoth church, adopted by the churches elsewhere in New England, was the practice of civil as opposed to church marriages. This was the practice in the Netherlands, which was adopted by the congregation and brought to America.

12. In the left margin is the notation, “N.B.,” which appears not to have been written by Bradford.

13. Winslow answered some of the complaints against him and the colony in a further petition to the Council, which sheds light on the colony’s religion, relations with Natives, and other matters. He wrote in part,

First, . . . he confessed that he had both spoken by way of exhortation to the people, & married, yet that in America, and at such a time as necessity constrained them that were not only to these but many other things far differing from a settled Common weal. And if he had been here would not have married nor should have needed to preach as your lordships term it. But having no minister in 7 or 8 years at least, some of us must do both; or lese for want of the one we might have lost the life & face of Christianity. And if the other, which is marriage, had been neglected all that time we might have become more brutish than the heathen, when as in doing it we did but follow the precedent of other reformed Churches. 2. That however we disliked many things in practice here [England] in respect of church ceremony, yet chose rather to leave the country than be accounted troublers of it, and therefore went into Holland. And that from thence we procured a motion to be made to his Majesty of late memory [James I] for liberty of Conscience in America under his gracious protection, which his majesty thinking very reasonable (as Sir Robert Naunton, principal Secretary of State in that time can testify) we cheerfully proceeded, and afterwards procured a commission for the ordering of our body politic. . . . 3. That we were to be tender of his Majesty’s honor as we would not enter into league with any of the Natives that would not together with ourselves acknowledge our sovereign for their king. . . . 4. That however the main objection against us is that we are Brownists, factious Puritans, Schismatics, &c., if there be any position we hold contrary to the Word of God, contrary to the royal honor of a king & due allegiance of a subject, then let his majesty reject us & take all severe courses against us. But if we be found truly loyal we humbly entreat to be embraced & encouraged as subjects. . . . 5. That however we follow the discipline rather of other the Reformed Churches than this, yet the accusation is false that we require of those that join in church communion with us to censure the Church of England & her bishops. All we require being to render a reason of that faith & hope they have in Christ, which together with a good testimony of an honest life, we admit them, not meddling further with the Church of England than as we are bound to pray for the good thereof. 6. That the country of New England is fruitful where we live, as well for English grain as Indian, the air temperate, agreeing with our bodies, the sea rich in fish, the havens commodious. . . . If his majesty and the state be pleased to continue our liberty of conscience, to keep open the passage of such as will resort to us, & give us a free commission for displanting French & Dutch, as planting the place by us, his Majesty’s loyal subjects, your honors shall soon see his majesty’s revenues of custom by reason of this plantation enlarged many thousands per annum. . . . 7. Consider, I beseech your Lordships what our adversaries that accuse us are, and you shall see them to be such as Morton, who hath been twice sent hither as a delinquent. . . . 8. Whereas they have formerly accused us unjustly with correspondency with French & Dutch themselves may justly be suspected. . . . And if your Lordships for want of due information, I speak with all submissive reverence, should send such a governor as between whom & the country there is personal distaste & difference, he might be more prejudicial to the plantations than the swords of French & Dutch . . .

The complete text is found in the National Archives, PRO, State Papers, Colonial Series, 1575-1660, and is printed in Jeremy D. Bangs, Pilgrim Edward Winslow: New England’s First International Diplomat—A Documentary Biography (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2004), 149-52.

14. Meaning his representation of the interests of Massachusetts.

15. Because Winslow was in prison, Sherley took control of the cargo that had been sent to England for sale. He sold it without keeping proper accounts and claimed that he had to sell the furs at below the expected price. Andrews and Beauchamp, also London undertakers, later claimed that they had not their shares of the proceeds.

16. Possibly a reference to Hab. 3:2, “O Lord, I have heard thy voice, and was afraid: O Lord, revive thy work in the midst of the people, in the midst of the years make it known: in wrath remember mercy.”

17. Charles de Menon, Sieur d’Aunay de Charnise. In 1629 an English fleet had forced the surrender of the French colony of New France, including Quebec, Acadia, and Cape Breton Island; four years later, the treaty of St. Germain returned these territories to France. The French king appointed Claude de Razilly to take possession and govern the restored lands. When de Razilly died in 1635, his authority passed to d’Aunay, who had been his second in command, but his authority was challenged by Charles de la Tour, who had been commissioned by Louis XIII as governor of Acadia. This precipitated what was in essence a civil war in Acadia between the two French leaders. Both asserted that the 1632 treaty of St. Germain gave the French control of the Maine coast. In November 1632, Winthrop recorded that “La Tour Governor of the French in those parts making claim to the place [the Maine coast], came to displant them [the Plimoth trading post], & finding resistance killed 2 of the men & carried away the other 3 & the goods” (Journal, 103).

18. This was the Plimoth post at Castine on Penobscot Bay.

19. Thomas Willett (see above, p. 353, n. 60).

20. See above, annal for 1631, pp.384-85.

21. According to Winthrop, the ship was the Great Hope (Journal, 155). The captain was in all probability Richard Girling, a mariner who had bought land in Newtown, Massachusetts, in 1635. See Anderson, Great Migration: Immigrants to New England, 1634-1635, 3:66-69.

22. Bradford leaves a blank space in the MS to provide the number, but he never did. Depending on the exact weight and type of this ship, it could have had approximately two dozen guns of carriage and swivel varieties.

23. This interlineation appears to have been written by Bradford in a darker ink.

24. Winthrop (Journal, 155-56) described this episode and its aftermath in his Journal:

[W]hen they came [to the trading post] they found the French had notice, & had so strongly entrenched themselves (being 18) as having spent near all their powder and shot, the Bark left the ship there & came here [Massachusetts] to advise with us what further to do: for they had lately lost another Bark laden with Corn & could not spare this to send back again.

The general Court being assembled agreed to aid them with men & munition, & therefore wrote to them to send one with Commission to treat with us about it, resolving to drive them out whatever it should cost (yet first to put them [Plimoth colony] to bear the charge if it might be), for we saw that their neighborhood would be very dangerous to us.

The next week they sent Mr. Prence and Capt. Standish to us with Commission to treat; 4 of the [Massachusetts] Commissioners gave them a meeting: which grew to this issue, that they refused to deal further in it, other than as a Common Cause of the whole Country, & so to contribute their part: we refused to deal further in it otherwise than as in their aid: & so at their Charge.

25. I.e., the Massachusetts authorities.

26. The signatories were the governor, deputy governor, and all the recently elected members of the Court of Assistants chosen in the May 1635 elections, except for John Winthrop Jr., who was absent from the colony.

27. This interlineation appears to have been written by Bradford in a slightly darker ink.

28. This interlineation appears to have been written by Bradford in a slightly darker ink.

29. Bradford is asserting that Massachusetts merchants were engaged in trade with the French at the seized outposts.

30. Most likely sometime in the period from 1648 to 1650; see “Dating Landmarks in OPP” (above, p. 72).

31. Pemaquid (present-day Bristol, Maine) was to the southwest of the Plimoth post at Penobscot, on the coast, between Muscongus Bay and the Damariscotta River.

32. MS: “Hauricanes, and Tuffons.”

33. This interlineation appears to have been written by Bradford in a slightly darker ink.

34. Obsolete form of “drowned.”

35. A band made of twisted branches.

36. I.e., the Plimoth representatives.

37. In 1635 the Rev. John Warham and members of his Dorchester, Massachusetts church, deciding they needed more land, migrated to the Connecticut River Valley. They visited the Plimoth trading post there and then decided to settle at Matianuck (now Windsor), which was clearly in the land claimed by Plimoth.

38. I.e., stored their goods in the Plimoth house.

39. William Pynchon (1590-1662), who would found a post upriver at Agawam, present-day Springfield, Mass.

40. Here, approximately two-thirds of a line is struck out, whether by Bradford or someone else is unascertainable, to the point that the text is indecipherable.

41. The Native name for the area in which the Plimoth house was situated (now Windsor, Conn.).

42. The oldest son of William Brewster.

43. In the following dialogue, “Theirs” refers to those who were justifying the movement of settlers from Massachusetts to the Connecticut River Valley, but it is unclear whether these statements were from representatives of the new towns such as Windsor or from the authorities in Massachusetts who sought to assert their control over these new settlements.

44. This interlineation appears to have been written by Bradford in a slightly darker ink.

45. This interlineation appears to have been written by Bradford in a slightly darker ink.

46. This verse reads, “And God blessed them, and God said to them, Bring forth fruit and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and rule over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the heaven, and over every beast that moveth upon the earth.”

47. I.e., the Plimoth plantation.

48. This interlineation appears to have been written by Bradford in a slightly darker ink.

49. I.e., the Dorchester settlers.

50. Bradford is suggesting that the lack of opportunity at Plimoth (“a barren place, where they were by necessity cast”) had led to the purchase from the Native inhabitants of a large amount of land along the Connecticut River as a possible place for relocating their colony.

51. In March 1632 the Earl of Warwick, serving as president of the Council for New England, sold a patent he had been awarded to lands that would become Connecticut, the purchasers being Viscount Saye and Sele, Lord Brooke, and nine others, including Sir Nathaniel Rich, Sir Richard Saltonstall, John Hampden, John Humfry, and John Pym. Nothing was done by this group, which became known as the Saybrook Company, until 1634 (by which time some of the members involved had changed), when Humfry was sent to New England to prepare the way for a settlement. In 1635, the partners named John Winthrop Jr. governor of the territory along the Connecticut River and the harbors adjoining. On the advice of John Davenport and Hugh Peter, they hired Lion Gardiner, an engineer and master of works fortification in the Netherlands, to build a fort at the mouth of the river at Saybrook. At this time, the Connecticut River Valley was claimed by Plimoth by virtue of purchase of land from the Natives, settlers from Massachusetts who claimed it as virgin land they had settled on (and which Massachusetts claimed jurisdiction over), and the Saybrook proprietors by virtue of a patent derived from the Council for New England.

52. MS: “aduenenturs.”

53. This interlineation appears to have been made by Bradford in a slightly darker ink.

54. In 1635 the Massachusetts General Court gave permission to residents of Newtown, led by the Rev. Thomas Hooker, to settle along the Connecticut River. They established the town of Hartford.

55. The dispute was finally settled in May 1637, when Plimoth’s governor Thomas Prence reached an agreement with the inhabitants of Windsor.

56. An “N.” in the left margin, which appears not to have been written by Bradford, highlights this portion of the sentence. No information on this individual has been found; the suggestion by Morison (284n) that this was Joseph Glover, whose widow established the printing press in Cambridge, Mass., in 1639 is plausible but not confirmed.

57. John Norton (1606-1663) received degrees from Peterhouse, Cambridge, in 1623 and 1627 and, after some brief service as a curate and chaplain, emigrated to New England in 1635; after preaching at Plimoth for “about a year,” as Bradford states, Norton was settled at Ipswich in 1638, where he ministered until 1653, when he accepted a position as John Cotton’s successor in the First Church of Boston.

58. See preceding note; Norton was still in Ipswich when Bradford wrote this, which would have been well before 1653, when Norton left Ipswich.

1. The Dutch at the Fort Good Hope.

2. Tobacco, most likely from Virginia, packaged in a tight roll.

3. In the left margin is the word “Plague,” which appears not to have been written by Bradford.

4. Weekly bills of mortality were issued by the London authorities.

5. It is estimated that more than 10,000 Londoners died of this outbreak of the plague.

6. Possibly referring to the occurrence of the plague in London in 1625, in which anywhere from 35,000 to 40,000 people died.

7. Not further identified.

8. In the left margin is a double hash mark, apparently not written by Bradford, highlighting this part of the sentence.

9. In the left margin is a double hash mark, apparently not by Bradford, highlighting this sentence.

10. During major outbreaks of plague many clergy abandoned their parishes for their own safety, while parishes whose clergy remained frequently suspended services to avoid the disease spreading in the congregation.

11. I.e., the Plimoth Undertakers.

12. Josiah (or Josias) Winslow, younger brother of Edwards Winslow, who was hired back in 1631 (see above, p. 348, n. 40).

13. The underlining here and in next line appear to have been made later, and possibly not by Bradford.

14. In 1632; see above, pp. 384–85.

15. This interlineation is written by Bradford in a different ink.

16. MS: “manoanscu∫ett.”

17. These supplies may have been intended for the Massachusetts settlers who had left Newtown to settle along the Connecticut River, including the town of Hartford.

18. As previewed in the annal for 1634 (see above, pp. 416–17).

19. In October 1634.

20. MS: “Wampam:” In almost all cases Bradford reserves use of the colon for abbreviations, thus the full word is used here and below.

21. At this point the Pequots were in conflict with the Dutch and with neighboring tribes, including the Narragansetts. See Mark Meuwese, “The Dutch Connection: New Netherland, the Pequots, and the Puritans in Southern New England, 1620–1638,” Early American Studies 9 (2011): 295-323.

22. Bradford misnumbered this page.

23. Bradford misidentifies the author of this letter as Winthrop. The date of the letter as given actually describes events (according to Winthrop’s Journal, 133-34) in November 1634, when the governor of Massachusetts was Thomas Dudley (May 1634-35). He was succeeded by John Haynes (May 1635-36), and then by Henry Vane (May 1636-37).

24. MS: “Oldom.”

25. In September 1636, the Massachusetts authorities sent John Endecott with a force of about eighty men to put to death the Native men on Block Island in response to the murder of John Oldham, and then to proceed to the main Pequot village to demand the surrender of Stone’s murderers. The expedition was a failure, serving only as a trigger to Pequot attacks on English settlements and the start of the Pequot War.

26. A horizontal line between this and the previous paragraph, and the letter “N.” in the left margin beside this sentence, does not appear to have been written by Bradford.

27. In a letter to Hugh Goodyear, the pastor of the English Reformed congregation in Leiden, written in 1638, after he had left Plimoth, Smith indicated that prior to arriving in New England he had been worn down by “long sickness in London and many-fold sorrows in Europe and America here in New England.” He was “weakened and unable to labor as formerly.” He also referred to having gained “freedom 20 months since”——which would have been about when he left Plimoth——“of mine intolerable charge pressing me nigh 7 years.” Most likely he was referring to the burden of responsibilities he had labored under as the congregation’s pastor since his arrival in New England. Ralph Smith to Hugh Goodyear, in Daniel Plooij, The Pilgrim Fathers from a Dutch Point of View (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1932), 114.

28. Bradford misnumbered this page.

29. John Rayner (1600-69) had emigrated to New England in 1635, served at Plimoth from 1636-54, and then at Dover, N.H., from 1655 till his death.

1. For a history of this conflict, see Cave, The Pequot War.

2. Saybrook fort.

3. Sir Henry Vane the Younger (1613-1662), whose father was mentioned in documents by the King’s Privy Council previously included by Bradford. Vane was one of the principal supporters of Anne Hutchinson in the Free Grace Controversy that divided Massachusetts in 1636-38. He was governor when John Endecott had been dispatched to punish the Natives on Block Island in the previous year, and at the outbreak of the Pequot War. Replaced as governor by John Winthrop in the elections of May 1637, he returned to England in 1639. He achieved prominence in the Puritan Revolution and was one of those exempted from pardon and executed as a regicide in 1662.

4. The Plimoth magistrates sent Edward Winslow to Massachusetts in May 1637 to discuss joint operations against the Pequots, and he carried with him letters to the Bay officials. Winthrop reported in his Journal (213) that “Mr. Winslow was sent from the governor and council of Plimoth to treat with us about joining against the Pequots. He declared first their willingness to aid us; but that they could not do any thing until their general court, which was not till the first Tuesday in the 4^th month [July]. Then he made some objections: as 1. Our refusal to aid them against the French. 2. Our people’s trading at Kennebec. 3. The injury offered them at Connecticut by those of Windsor, in taking away their land there. 4. Their own poverty, and our ability, which needed not any help from them.” The situation at Windsor to which Winthrop alluded was the occupation of land claimed by Plimoth by settlers moving into the region from Massachusetts.

5. In the time since the conflict started, John Winthrop was re-elected governor in May 1637, after being denied office in 1634 and succeeded by Thomas Dudley, John Haynes, and Sir Henry Vane the Younger.

6. Henry Vane.

7. These marginal numbers, 1-6, appear to have been added later, probably by Bradford.

8. In March 1636 the Massachusetts General Court had created a Standing Council of leaders who had life terms and were granted broad but unspecified powers, including charge of all military affairs between sessions of the General Court. In 1637 the Council included John Winthrop, John Endecott, and Thomas Dudley.

9. The interlineation and deletion are by Bradford in a slightly later ink.

10. This refers to the failure of Massachusetts to support Plimoth in its efforts to recapture its Maine trading post from the French in 1635.

11. In May 1637 the Massachusetts General Court passed a law prohibiting any resident of Massachusetts to trade with any Native outside the colony’s jurisdiction. The law was, however, repealed in the following November.

12. This parenthetical was squeezed in later.

13. I.e., May.

14. This underlining may be later, though it compares to the line above under “1637,” which in all likelihood is original.

15. An archaic form of “forthwith,” meaning immediately, at once.

16. This interlineation by Bradford appears to be in a slightly darker ink.

17. This decision was taken by the Plimoth General Court on June 7. Lieutenant William Holmes was chosen to command the force, with Thomas Prence of the colony’s council of war chosen to accompany the expedition. But they were too late, and never were part of the expedition.

18. See, for example, John Underhill, Nevves from America; or, A new and experimentall discoverie of New England containing, a true relation of their war-like proceedings these two yeares last past, with a figure of the Indian fort, or palizado. Also a discovery of these places, that as yet have very few or no inhabitants which would yeeld speciall accommodation to such as will plant there, viz. Queenapoik. Agu-wom. Hudsons River. Long Island. Nahanticut. Martins Vinyard. Pequet. Naransett Bay. Elizabeth Islands. Puscat away. Casko with about a hundred islands neere to Casko (London: Printed for Peter Cole, 1638); and Philip Vincent, A True Relation of the late Battell fought in New England, between the English, and the Pequet salvages in which was slaine and taken prisoners about 700 of the salvages, and those which escaped, had their heads cut off by the Mohocks: vvith the present state of things there (London: Printed by M[armaduke] P[arsons] for Nathaniel Butter, and John Bellamie, 1637; rev. ed., 1638). While Underhill’s account was based on personal experience, it is likely that Vincent’s was based on information from other observers.

19. The Connecticut towns contributed a contingent of 90 men under the command of Capt. John Mason. Capt. John Underhill led a Massachusetts contingent of 40, with more to follow.

20. This “fort” or stockaded village was located near the mouth of the Mystic River, on its western bank.

21. Alluding to Old Testament texts in Leviticus and Numbers that describe burnt offerings as having a “sweet savor,” such as Lev. 2:1-2, “And when any will offer a meat offering unto the Lord, his offering shall be of fine flour, and he shall pour oil upon it, and put incense thereon, and shall bring it unto Aaron’s sons the Priests, and he shall take thence his handful of the flour, and of the oil with all the incense, and the Priest shall burn it for a memorial upon the altar: for it is an offering made by fire for a sweet savor unto the Lord.”

22. I.e., the English soldiers.

23. MS: “be.”

24. This interlineation by Bradford is in a slightly darker ink.

25. MS: “Mowakes.”

26. This underlining may have been added later.

27. Edwards Riggs of Roxbury; Thomas Jeffrey (d. 1661) of Dorchester, later New Haven.

28. Roger Ludlow was a member of the Massachusetts Bay Council who emigrated to Connecticut; Capt. John Mason was, like Ludlow, a founding member of Connecticut Colony who lived more than thirty years after the war in Connecticut and died at Norwalk; Capt. Daniel Patrick had been a resident of Watertown but came to Connecticut in 1640, eventually living in Norwalk, where he was killed in 1643; William Trask was a resident of Salem, who died in 1666; Lt. Richard Davenport was also a resident of Salem, and was probably the same individual who, as an ensign, had participated in the assault on Block Island under Endecott.

29. Thomas Stanton was one of the first settlers of Hartford. He had learned enough of the local Native languages to serve as an interpreter for John Winthrop Jr. in 1636, and then served as an interpreter for the English forces in the Pequot War.

30. This interlineation by Bradford appears to be written in a slightly darker ink.

31. I.e., Connecticut Colony.

32. This interlineation by Bradford appears to be written in a slightly darker ink, the term “maid children” apparently meaning unmarried young women.

33. These captive Natives were condemned into slavery in the Caribbean or in New England. On Native enslavement during this period, see Margaret E. Newell, Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2015); Wendy Warren, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (New York: Liveright Pub. Co., 2016);

34. The tactics of the English during this war surprised and horrified the Natives, including the Narragansetts who withdrew from the English forces after the attack on the Pequot’s Mystic fort. These tactics were typical of warfare among Europeans. Examples include Spanish armies sacking cities, killing civilians, and raping women during their efforts to suppress the Dutch revolt in the 1570s. The English efforts to assert control in Ireland offered other examples. Humphrey Gilbert suppressed an Irish uprising in 1569 by slaughtering men, women, and children. Five years later the Earl of Essex seized and executed over two hundred men and women at a banquet. So the language was not remarkable when Shakespeare (Henry V, Act Three, Scene 3) had Henry V warn the citizens of Harfleur that if their city did not yield, the English would grant no quarter, “mowing like grass your own fresh virgins and your flowering infants,” “your fathers taken by the silver beards and their most reverend heads dashed to the walls,” and “your naked infants spitted upon pikes.” Such methods of waging war were alien to the Natives of New England, though Philip Vincent and other colonists pointed to the murder of English women and children by Powhatan warriors in the “Great Massacre of 1622” in Virginia. See Ronald Dale Karr, “’Why Should You Be So Furious?’: The Violence of the Pequot War,” Journal of American History 85 (1998): 876-909.

35. Israel Stoughton, one of the commanders of the Bay forces.

36. MS: “Neepnett.”

37. This interlineation by Bradford appears to be written in a slightly darker ink.

38. One of the principal Pequot sachems, a supporter of Sassacus.

39. MS: “they.”

40. At the outset of the conflict, in April 1637, Pequots had attacked Wethersfield, a recently settled town on the Connecticut River, killed three women and two men, as well as much of the settlement’s cattle, and had carried off two women. These are the captives that Winthrop says that Mononotto’s wife had saved.

41. Gallop was the trader who, sailing back from Long Island, had discovered Oldham’s ship and, after fighting, killing or capturing a number of Natives, then found Oldham’s body.

42. Boston’s Rev. John Wilson, who served as a chaplain to the Massachusetts forces.

43. James Ley, third Earl of Marlborough (1618-1665), who served in both the English army during the Civil War on loyalist side, and after the Restoration in the navy, commanding several vessels.

44. I.e., July.

45. MS: “Monotto.”

46. They, along with other Pequot leaders, fled to take refuge with the Mohawks, who killed Sassacus (as Bradford reports in the next paragraph) and wounded Mononotto, who escaped (Cave, The Pequot War, 161).

47. MS: “Mowhakes.”

48. MS: “monhiggs.”

49. This interlineation by Bradford appears to be written in a slightly darker ink.

50. An “X” appears in the left margin beside the beginning of this paragraph, apparently not by Bradford.

51. This refers to oral contracts concluded with a round of drinks in the presence of witnesses, who shared in the round, who could be called on later to give testimony about the agreement.

52. This interlineation by Bradford appears to be a later addition.

1. As noted in the annal for 1628 and the account of Merry Mount (pp. 329–36), these were indentured servants who were often exploited by their owners, which made them sometimes seek an opportunity to escape.

2. The interlineation, probably by Bradford, appears to be a later addition.

3. This was a place called Misquamsqueece, located in modern Seekonk, Massachusetts. According to John Winthrop (Journal, 260) this was not within the jurisdiction of any of the existing English colonies. Bradford asserted that Massachusetts had at the time accepted that this was within Plimoth’s jurisdiction, but later asserted a claim to it.

4. His name as given in the colony records was Penowanyanquis. Bradford believed he was a Narragansett, but Ousamequin, the Pokanoket Massasoit, told Roger Williams that the boy had been born a Nipmuc (Roger Williams to John Winthrop, August 14, 1638, in The Correspondence of Roger Williams, ed. Glenn W. LaFantasie [2 vols., Providence, R.I.: Brown University Press, 1988], 1:177).

5. In the sense of “imbibing” or “taking in.”

6. This interlineation by Bradford may be a later addition.

7. MS: “wampam:” Bradford almost exclusively used colons in abbreviations.

8. To crawl on one’s hands and feet.

9. MS: “aquidnett,” i.e., Rhode Island. The culprits were apprehended near Providence, but since the crime occurred in Plimoth’s jurisdiction, they were sent there for trial.

10. After Roger Williams created controversy in Massachusetts, that colony’s General Court sought to ship him back to England. Warned by John Winthrop, he escaped and settled in what became Rhode Island and established the town of Providence. He learned Native dialects and criticized English methods of securing land through treaties, and so was respected by the Natives in the region. He had assisted the English in getting Narragansett support during the Pequot War.

11. Thomas James of Providence, who, along with John Greene, treated the wounded Native youth, Penowanyanquis (Ford ed., 2:264n).

12. Roger Williams offered information on this incident in an Aug. 1, 1638, letter to John Winthrop: “So we found that he had been run through the leg and the belly with one thrust. We dressed him and got him to town next day, where Mr. James and Mr. Greene endeavored, all they could, [to save] his life; but his wound in the belly, and blood lost, and fever following, cut his life’s thread. Before he died he told me that the four English had slain him. . . . Arthur [Peach] called him to drink tobacco, who coming and taking the pipe of Arthur, Arthur run him through the leg into the belly, when, springing back, he, Arthur, made the second thrust, but missed him; that another of them struck at him, but missed him, and his weapon run into the ground; that getting from them a little way into the swamp, they pursued him until he fell down . . . ; afterwards, towards night, he came and lay in the path, that some passenger might help him” (Correspondence of Roger Williams, 1:170-75).

13. Referring to the execution of John Billington in 1630 (see above, pp. 368–69).

14. Meaning the original or earliest colonizers.

15. Bradford misnumbered the page.

16. This interlineation and deletion are a later revision by Bradford.

17. MS: “they.”

18. Bradford squeezed this word in at a later time.

19. A conflated allusion to Old Testament descriptions of God’s power: Hag. 2:7 (“sea to shake”); Jer. 4:24, Nah. 1:5, and Hab. 3:10 (“mountains to tremble”); and Dan. 4:32 (“who can stay his hand”).

1. The records of this grant are published in The Seventeenth-Century Town Records of Scituate, Massachusetts, ed. Jeremy D. Bangs (3 vols., Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1999), “The Conihasset Grant,” 2:376 ff.

2. This interlineation by Bradford appears to be a later addition.

3. John Smith’s fold-out map of New England is found between pp. 16 and 17 in his Advertisements for the unexperienced planters of New-England, or any where. Or, The path-way to experience to erect a plantation (London: Iohn Haviland, 1631); see “Of Patuxet,” above, p. 26.

4. This underlining is drawn in a different ink, whether by Bradford or someone else is uncertain.

5. MS: “Chonaha∫ett.”

6. The underlinings on this page of the MS are drawn in a different ink, whether by Bradford or by someone else is uncertain.

7. MS: “Coaha∫∫ett.”

8. MS: “Naem∫chatet.”

9. MS: “Acoughcouß.” The Ford ed., 2:286, supplies “Accouquesse, alias Acockus.”

10. MS: “Acu∫hente.” The Ford ed., 2:286, supplies “Acqussent.”

11. The Ford ed., 2:286, supplies “Nickatay.”

12. Or Cowsumpsit, present-day Bristol, R.I.

13. The Warwick Patent of 1630 had been granted to William Bradford and his heirs, giving them the entire territory of the colony. Bradford extended his control to the “Old Comers” or “Purchasers,” who had been considered proprietors under the Peirce Patent. While these men could have controlled all of the land for their own use, they assumed the stance of being trustees for all who lived in the colony. When the colony’s General Court accepted the land from them in March 1640, the court reimbursed them for their gift by paying the 58 Purchasers £300 and reserved the three tracts Bradford identifies for their use. These tracts of land included portions or the entirety of the following present-day towns: 1. Brewster, Harwich, and south Orleans, Cape Cod; 2. Dartmouth, Fairhaven, and New Bedford, Mass., and Little Compton, R.I.; and 3. Swansea, Rehoboth, Seekonk and Attleboro, Mass., and East Providence, Cumberland, and Pawtucket, R.I. (see Ford ed., 2:287n, and Morison ed., 429-30n).

14. A later addition by Bradford in the left margin.

15. Bradford is likely reminding the reader of the efforts of Laud and the Council for Plantations to suppress the independence of the colonies, and of Edward Winslow’s imprisonment on his previous mission. Winslow also wrote to John Winthrop on June 27, 1640, of his concern that, with the death of Lord Keeper Coventry and the retirement of the Secretary of State Sir John Coke, the colonists had lost two valued advocates at court. Winthrop Papers, IV, 258.

16. MS: “time,” written at the right edge of the page; The Deane (375), Commonwealth (447) and Ford (2:290) editions all read “times,” indicating that the final letter has been lost due to MS damage.

17. This interlineation by Bradford appears to be in a slightly darker ink.

18. MS: “mett.” Alternative reading: “[have] met.”

19. England at this time was moving towards civil war. In 1638, many Scots signed a national covenant opposing any interference in that country’s religious affairs by England; efforts to suppress the uprising in Scotland had proven unsuccessful, forcing the king to turn to parliament for funding. The Short Parliament (1640) refused and was dissolved. The Long Parliament had convened in November 1640 and presented the king with numerous demands.

1. MS: “too,” i.e., “to and again,” in the sense of “back and forth.”

2. MS: “heare.” “Cleave the hair” has a similar meaning to the more modern saying of “splitting hairs,” or making unnecessary distinctions between things that are very similar.

3. I.e., to be spoken of critically.

4. As events unfolded in England, and the Long Parliament demanded changes in England’s religious order, many puritans expressed a hope that the circumstances which had forced puritans to leave England would change and many colonists would return. The story of those who did end up returning is well told in Susan Harman Moore, Pilgrims: New World Settlers and the Call Home (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). At the same time, immigration to the colonies declined due to the hope of change in England, and this led to a decline in the sale price of the livestock that was normally sold to new arrivals.

5. MS: “Machauillian.”

6. Throughout this chapter, Bradford spells this name as “Atwode” or a variant thereof.

7. This underlining is in a different ink, whether drawn by Bradford or someone else is uncertain.

8. MS: “Bristow.”

9. MS: “Barnstable.”

10. This interlineation by Bradford appears to be in a slightly darker ink.

11. This later interlineation by Bradford appears to be in a slightly darker ink.

12. The underlining is in a different ink. John Rayner had been called to the ministry in the Plimoth church in 1636; Bradford here indicates that he had been elected Teacher, one of the two Teaching Elder positions (along with Pastor) in a congregational church.

13. MS: “Willilliam.”

14. Charles Chauncy (1589-1671) arrived in Plimoth in 1638 and would serve the church there on trial for three years, but then moved to Scituate. A graduate and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, as well as lecturer there in Hebrew and Greek, Chauncy had been appointed vicar of Ware in Hertfordshire in 1627. On more than one occasion he was called before the High Commission to answer for his views and deprived of his living for refusing to read the “Book of Sports”——a royal proclamation authorizing Sabbath practices puritans found objectionable——to his parishioners. The length of his probationary period at Plimoth was likely due to some of Chauncy’s unusual views, including a belief that the Lord’s Supper was to be administered every Sabbath in the evening, and that baptism had to be by immersion. The congregation did not agree that immersion was the only scripturally approved way to baptize, and they brought in Duxbury’s Ralph Partridge and others to dispute him publicly on this point.

15. Ralph Partridge (1579-1658), A graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, Partridge had been licensed in 1605 and appointed a curate in Sutton-by-Dover, Kent, in that same year. He was evidently a puritan nonconformist. Cotton Mather colorfully described him as “one that bore the Name, as well as the State, of an hunted Partridge,” who, “being distress’d by ecclesiastical Setters, had no Defence, neither of Beak, nor Claw, but a Flight over the Ocean.” Mather also wrote of him as having “the Innocency of the Dove, conspicuous in his blameless and pious Life [ . . . ]; but also the Loftiness of an Eagle, in the great Soar of his intellectual Abilities” (Magnalia Christ Americana, Bk. III, ch. XI, p. 99). Nathaniel Morton, who knew Partridge, likewise attested to his personal character and his “sound and solid judgement in the main Truths of Jesus Christ, and very able in Disputation to defend them” (New-Englands memoriall, 153). He was called to the ministry of Duxbury in 1637 and represented that church in the Cambridge Synod of 1637 that dealt with the radical ideas circulating in the Free Grace Controversy. He later represented the Plimoth colony at the Cambridge Assembly and was invited to prepare one of the drafts of what became the Cambridge Platform. On his death he had a library of over 418 volumes.

16. MS: “Sityate.”

17. Chauncy remained at Scituate until 1654, when he left to become president of Harvard College.

1. I.e., difficulty.

2. This second interlineation appears to be in a slightly darker ink.

3. MS: “Aquidnett.” The leaders of the Bay were bothered that individuals whom they had condemned or viewed as heretics were finding refuge in Rhode Island. At this time Roger Williams was settled at Providence; he, of course, had proved helpful to Massachusetts and Plimoth during the Pequot War. On Aquidneck Island those who had been involved in the Free Grace controversy had themselves split, with Anne Hutchinson in Portsmouth and William Coddington at Newport.

A supporter of Anne Hutchinson against Coddington was Samuel Gorton (1593-1677), a radical spiritist and antiauthoritarian leader in early New England who inspired a number of followers; he was forced first out of Plimoth (in 1638, which Bradford does not mention at all), clashed with the authorities in Portsmouth, R. I., and alienated Roger Williams in Providence. It was against the likes of Gorton that Winslow wrote Hypocrisie Unmasked. (See Philip F. Gura, A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620-1660 [Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1984]). In 1641, Williams wrote to John Winthrop that “Master Gorton having foully abused high and low at Aquidneck, is now bewitching and bemaddening poor Providence, both with his unclean and foul censures of all the ministers of this country . . . and also denying all visible and external ordinances in depth of Familism,” a heresy that was perceived as leading to sexual excess (Roger Williams to John Winthrop, 8 March 1641, in LaFantasie, Williams Correspondence, 1:215). Williams succeeded in ridding Providence of Gorton, who established a fourth Rhode Island community at Shawomet (now Warwick, R.I.) on land claimed by Massachusetts. In 1644, Williams succeeded in obtaining a charter for Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, which precluded action against the settlements by Massachusetts and Plimoth.

4. There is no folio numbered 243 in the MS, which, as Bradford states, contained Bellingham’s addendum on the particulars of the “heinous offences in point of uncleanness.” In the beginning of the MS volume [L. 5r.], Thomas Prince has the following note: “P. 243—missing when the Book came into my hands at first.” The “at first” is curious: could it mean he eventually came into possession of the missing leaf, or that he found the original or a copy of Bellingham’s letter? Whatever the case, once having found the source, did he preserve it? Without a thorough search of Prince’s papers, we cannot tell. More than a century later, Charles Deane (387n), after recording Prince’s note about the missing leaf——and no doubt uncomfortable with the content of the following pages——goes on to state, “If five or six more of the original folios following had shared the fate of the one now missing, no serious loss would have been sustained.” Morison (318n) conjectures that Bradford either forgot or decided not to include the note, in the process misnumbering the pages, which seems ingenuous, since, as Deane states, the leaf plainly was “cut out.” The details of the offenses were presented by John Winthrop in his Journal (370-74). Three servants of John Humfrey, an early leader of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, were accused of having sexually abused two of Humfrey’s daughters, Dorcas and Sarah, when they were as young as seven years old. When charged, Daniel Fairfield, Jenkin Davis, and John Hudson confessed to “all but entrance to her body.” There was no law that dealt specifically with what they were willing to admit to, and there was uncertainty as to whether they could be charged with rape, sodomy, or some other offense, and if so what the penalty should be. The Bay authorities solicited the views of the elders in Plimoth, Connecticut, and New Haven. Because the accused denied penetration, Bellingham evidently inquired about whether torture might be acceptable to obtain that confession.

5. Exod. 21:22, “Also if men strive and hurt a woman with child, so that her child depart from her, and death follow not, he shall be surely punished, according as the woman’s husband shall appoint him, or he shall pay as the Judges determine.” Deut. 19:12, “Then the Elders of his city shall send and set him thence, and deliver him to the hands of the avenger of the blood, that he may die.” Numb. 35:16, 18, “And if one smite another with an instrument of iron that he die, he is a murtherer, and the murtherer shall die the death. . . . Or if he smite him with a hand weapon of wood, wherewith he may be slain, if he die, he is a murtherer, and the murtherer shall die the death.”

6. I.e., May.

7. “With penetration of the body.”

8. Levit. 18:22, “Thou shalt not lie with the male as one lieth with a woman: for it is abomination.” Levit. 20:13, “The man also that lieth with the male, as one lieth with a woman, they have both committed abomination: they shall die the death, their blood shall be upon them.” Gen. 19:5, “Who crying unto Lot said to him, Where are the men, which came to thee this night? bring them out unto us, that we may know them.”

9. “Contact and friction, with effusion of semen.”

10. Rom. 1:26, 27, “For this cause God gave them up to vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature. And also likewise the men left the natural use of the woman, and burned in their lust one toward another, and man with man wrought filthiness, and received in themselves such recompense of their error, as was meet.”

11. Levit. 18:23, “Thou shalt not also lie with any beast to be defiled therewith, neither shall any woman stand before a beast, to lie down therewith: for it is abomination.” Levit. 20:16, “And if a woman comes to any beast, and lie therewith, then thou shalt kill the woman and the beast: they shall die the death, their blood shall be upon them.”

12. Exod. 21:14, “But if a man come presumptuously upon his neighbor to slay him with guile, thou shalt take him from mine altar, that he may die.”

13. “No one is obligated to betray himself.”

14. Job 29:16, “I was a father unto the poor, and when I knew not the cause, I sought it out diligently.” Pro. 24:11, 12, “Deliver them that are drawn to death, and wilt thou not preserve them that are led to be slain? If thou say, Behold, we knew not of it: he that pondereth the hearts, doth not he understand it? and he that keepeth thy soul, knoweth he it not? will not he also recompense every man according to his works?” Pro. 25:2, “The glory of God is to conceal a thing secret: but the King’s honor is to search out a thing.”

15. Deut. 21:1, 9, “If one be found slain in the land, which the Lord thy God giveth thee to possess it, lying in the field, and it is not known who hath slain him . . . So shall you take away the cry of innocent blood from thee, when thou shalt do that which is right in the sight of the Lord.” Deut. 22:13, 21, “If a man take a wife, and when he hath lain with her, hate her. . . . Then they shall bring forth the maid to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones to death: for she hath wrought folly in Israel, by playing the whore in her father’s house: so thou shalt put evil away from among you.”

16. Levit. 18:24, 25, “Ye shall not defile your selves in any of these things: for in all these the nations are defiled, which I will cast out before you: and the land is defiled: therefore I will visit the wickedness thereof upon it, and the land shall vomit out her inhabitants.” Josh. 22:18, “Ye also are turned away this day from the Lord: and seeing ye rebel today against the Lord, even tomorrow he will be wrath with all the Congregation of Israel.” Psa. 106:30, “But Phineas stood up, and executed judgement, and the plague was stayed.”

17. Pro. 30:33, “When one churneth milk, he brings forth butter: and he that wringeth his nose, causeth blood to come out: so he that forceth wrath, bringeth forth the strife.”

18. Eph. 6:4, “And ye, fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in instruction and information of the Lord.”

19. The ex officio oath, developed in early seventeenth-century England, was a religious oath that was mandatory before one testified before the Star Chamber, requiring the individual to answer all questions truthfully, with no protection of a right against self-incrimination. The person called before the court had to choose between admitting something illegal or breaking an oath. See, for example, Jonathan M. Gray, “Conscience and the Word of God: Religious Arguments Against the Ex Officio Oath,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 64 (July 2013): 494-512.

20. “Equivalent.”

21. Numb. 35:30, “Whosoever killeth any person, the judge shall slay the murtherer, through witnesses: but one witness shall not testify against a person to cause him to die.” Deut. 17:6, “At the mouth of two or three witnesses shall he that is worthy of death, die; but at the mouth of one witness, he shall not die.” Deut. 19:15, “One witness shall not rise against a man for any trespass, or for any sin, or for any fault that he offendeth in, but at the mouth of two witnesses or at the mouth of three witnesses, shall the matter be stablished.”

22. “By the lying together.”

23. “Like sleeping with a woman.”

24. MS: “con=.” An incomplete word at the end of a line; Deane (391) conjectures “confident” (cf. Ford ed., 2:319n).

25. MS: “Indict.” The Deane ed. (391) reads “Indict:,” which would have been Bradford’s abbreviation for “Indictments.”

26. “Be falsehoods.”

27. The title in English roughly translates as: “Should touching and rubbing to the point of spilling seed, without penetration of the body, constitute sodomy that should be punished by death?”

28. Martin Luther (1483-1546). Morison (408n) discovered that the group of citations in this paragraph was actually culled from Wilhelm Zepperus, Legum Mosaicarum forensium Explanatio (1604; rep. Herborn, 1614), lib. 1, cap. XII, pp. 108-18.

29. Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560), Lutheran Reformer, Professor of Greek and Theology at Wittenberg, Defensio Conivgii Sacerdotvm Pia & erudit, missa ad Regem Angliae (n.p., 1540; Wittenberg: Johann d.Ä Krafft, 1549).

30. Jean Calvin (1509-1564), Institutio Christianae Religionis, first published in 1536. The cited section treats “Consecration by the metropolitan.”

31. Francis Junius (1545-1602), French Reformed scholar and pastor, initially studied law, but later studied theology in Geneva under John Calvin and Theodore Beza, and then became a minister in Antwerp. After serving in other posts, he was appointed professor of theology at Leiden in 1592. Chauncy refers to De Politiae Mosis Observatione (Lugduni Batavorum [Leiden], 1593). Thesis 29: “Ac Mosis quidem leges quaecunque iuris communis sunt, aut ratione communi obligant, aut analogia: quapropter aut ipsas leges servari opus est, aut earum analogiam; ut de suis legibus Iurecoss praecepere” (“And indeed the statutes of Moses in whatever way they possess the law, they possess the common law, obligating either by a common reason or by analogy, and thus it is necessary to preserve either the laws or their analogy, just as the jurists teach regarding their own laws”); and Thesis 30: “Sed haec analogia in circumstantiis solum mutabilis est, in fundamento rationis vel substantia minimè. Proinde qui iure communi civiliter ex lege Mosis reus mortis est, idem reus mortis hoc tempore habendus est: nam unica est iustitiae ratio & immutabilis. Circumstantiae verò, ut in factis, sic in iure variant quam plurimùm, quadam rationis analogia” (“But this analogy is only mutable in the circumstances, not in the foundation of reason or in its substance. Accordingly, whoever civilly by the common law is liable to the death penalty according to the law of Moses, likewise the same person must be considered liable to the death penalty in our time because there is a single and immutable rationale of justice. But circumstances vary to the greatest extent, just as much in facts as they do in the law, by a certain analogy of reason”). The English translations of the theses are taken from The Mosaic Polity: Franciscus Junius, ed. Andrew M. McGinnis and transl. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: CLP Academic, 2015), 33-34.

32. Heinrich Bullinger (1504-1575), Swiss protestant theologian, Sermonum decas tertia, de potissimis Christianae religionis capitibus, in tres tomos digestae (Zurich, 1550). Sermon VIII, beginning on p. 148, is headed, “De Usu vel effectu legis divinae, de impletione & abrogatione eiusdem: de similitudine & differentia utriusque cum Veteris tum Novi testamenti & populi.”

33. MS: “explicaci.” Wolfgang Musculus (1497-1563), Professor of Theology at Bern, Loci communes Sacrae Theologiae, jam recensa recogniti et emendati (Basil, 1573).

34. Martin Bucer (1491-1551), German protestant reformer who worked in Strasbourg and later was Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, De Regno Christi Iesu seruatoris nostri, Libri II (Basil, 1557). Ch. 17 (pp. 127-29) is entitled, “Quos homines conueniat iungi matrimonio” (“Which people ought to be joined in marriage?”).

35. Theodore de Beza (1519-1605), French Reformed theologian, De Haereticis a Ciuili Magistratu puniendis libellus (Geneva, 1554). P. 154 is part of a longer series of rhetorical questions, within an explication of the Parable of the Tares, for those who would oppose the authority of ecclesiastical law, of which the following is a sample: “Neque item quaerunt, Num vis ut scelestum & blasphemum atque adeò factiosum hunc maiestatis tuae & Ecclesiasticae auctoritatis perturbatorem è vita deturbemus? Respondisset enim profectò Paterfamiliâs si per Servos, civiles Magistratus accipias, hoc ipsum quod per Mosen edixit in blasphemos & factiosos pseudoprophetas” (“Similarly, they do not ask, ‘Do you wish for us to deprive of life the wicked man and the blasphemer and even this seditious man who disturbs your sovereign power and the authority of the Church?’ For the father of the family [if you take the servants to mean civil magistrates] would have replied, ‘{Just do} what {God} proclaimed through Moses against blasphemers and seditious false prophets’”).

36. MS: “.3. precept:” Girolamo Zanchi (1516-1590), Italian protestant pastor and Professor of Dogmatics at Heidelberg, De Decalogo, De Tertio Praecepto, in Operum Theologicorum (8 vols., Geneva, 1617-19), tom. 4, cap. XVIII, pp. 547-648.

37. MS: “contra:” Zacharias Ursinus (1534-1583), Explicationum Catecheticarum Absolutum Opus (Neostadium Palatinorum, 1598). Bradford’s misreading of whatever Chauncy’s abbreviation for “catecheticarum” was as “contra:” is the first indication that Bradford had problems reading Chauncy’s handwriting, not to mention when he was writing in Latin.

38. Johann Piscator (1546-1625), German Reformed theologian and professor at Herborn Academy, Aphorismi Doctrinae Christianae, ex Institutione Calvini excerpti (Herborn: Corvinus, 1589). For the section on De Lege Dei, the reference is actually to Aphorism XVI, but Zepperus (Legum Mosaicarum, pp. 117-18) mistakenly refers to a seventeenth, which Chauncy, and Bradford after him, repeated.