OF PLYMOUTH PLANTATION, 1620 – 1648: William Bradford

Of Plymouth Plantation is the detailed first-hand account of the founding of Plymouth Colony and the day to day activities of the lives of its colonists. It covers the years 1608 from when the Puritans fled England to the Netherlands to the early 1650’s when Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut held the cities and civilizations of both the colonist and the native American tribes. Written by William Bradford, the 2nd governor of Plymouth Plantation (settlement), it recounts the harrowing time at sea the passengers of the Mayflower and Speedwell faced on the way to the New World in the late autumn season of 1620. Originally on route to an area around the mouth of the Hudson River, the stormy Atlantic Ocean yielded the Mayflower only as far south as Cape Cod, where the Pilgrims first came to shore at what is now Provincetown. Finding the dunes and windswept landscape unsuitable and without game they sailed the Mayflower southwest to the native American Wampanoag tribe settlement known as Patuxet, where 3,000 native Americans lie dead and unburied, killed by the Great New England plague of 1615 that wiped out 90% of the natives along the coast from Maine down to Rhode Island. Not one Wampanoag was left to survive or even bury their dead along shore at the once bustling Patuxet. At Plymouth, the Pilgrims came to shore on a skiff and stepped foot onto the land of Massachusetts for the first time. Governor William Bradford’s journal goes on to chronicle the hardships, loneliness, death, and political calculations and alliances that had to be made amid the various native Indian tribes of the Wampanoag, Narragansett, Pequot, Massachusetts, Nipmuc, and other native inhabitants of what would eventually become known as New England. Gut wrenching, bold, provocative, it is the true story of the founding of the nation you have never been told.