Index

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.