A long-time member of a Puritan group that separated from the Church of England in 1606, William Bradford lived in the Netherlands for more than a decade before traveling to North America aboard the Mayflower in 1620. He was governor of Plymouth Colony for over 30 years, recounting his experiences in a journal which has become the authoritative account of the Pilgrim Colony and Plymouth.
Bradford’s youth and their religious beliefs
Bradford was born in 1590 in Austerfield, a farming community in Yorkshire, England. Orphaned at a very young age, he was brought up by relatives. A long illness made him too weak to do much farm work, and instead he concentrated on reading the Bible and other religious texts. As a teenager, Bradford was drawn to a growing Puritan sect known as the Separatists, and a congregation led by William Brewster and John Robinson in the nearby village of Scrooby. The separatists sought to recreate what they saw as the simpler and more pious life of the early Christians by breaking free from the rituals and hierarchies of the Church of England.
Under threat of legal action from King James I, the group fled to the Netherlands in 1608, living briefly in Amsterdam before settling in the small town of Leiden in 1609. Bradford and his exiled companions lived there. for over a decade under Brewster’s leadership. and Robinson. Bradford had a workshop in the fabric trade and in 1613 married Dorothy May, the daughter of a prosperous English family living in Amsterdam.
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Journey to the New World
By 1619, many Scrooby exiles had embraced the idea of emigrating to America, where they could form their own colony and raise their children according to English rather than Dutch customs. After returning emissaries to England, the group was given permission to form a colony in the northern parts of the Virginia Colony, which at the time extended to the Hudson River.
In July 1620, William and Dorothy Bradford left behind their three-year-old son with his parents and sailed for England aboard the Speedwell. In need of money, the Bradford separatist group (who called themselves “Saints”) had been forced to join with so-called “foreigners”, people outside the church who were seeking economic opportunities. in the New World. Finally, the group numbered 102 people, including 35 children.
In England, the group was forced to leave behind the leaked Speedwell, and crowd aboard the Mayflower, the other commercial vessel chartered for the trip. The Mayflower set out from Plymouth, England on September 6, 1620 and took 66 days to cross the Atlantic before sighting land on November 9.
READ MORE: The miserable journey aboard the Mayflower
Despite attempts to navigate further south to their intended destination in the Colony of Virginia, bad weather brought them back to what is now the port of Provincetown, off Cape Cod. Shortly before the ship dropped anchor, Bradford became one of 41 male passengers on the ship to sign the Mayflower Compact, the first document governing their new colony.
Formation of the Plymouth Colony
In early December, Bradford joined an expedition to explore the area and find the best place to settle. The group chose a location on the south shore of Massachusetts that was home to a now deserted Native American village called Patuxet. When Bradford returned to the Mayflower, he learned that his wife had fallen from the deck of the ship and drowned in the freezing waters.
The Mayflower sailed south of Provincetown and arrived at their installation site in Plymouth Bay on December 20. They began to build the first houses in the colony, but many of them were soon struck by a disease that had started to spread on board the ship. Half the company died in that harsh first winter, including John Carver, the colony’s first governor. Bradford, who fell ill but survived, was elected to succeed Carver in April 1621. He was re-elected over 30 times and, with the exception of a five-year interval, he would serve as governor of the Colony of Plymouth until his death over 35 years later.
Bradford’s leadership and the writing of pilgrim history
Under Bradford’s rulership, the colony survived its early years, thanks to largely friendly relations with the local Wampanoag people, led by Massasoit. Other settlers arrived in the 1620s, and in 1623 Bradford married Alice Southworth, a newly arrived young widow with two sons who had been a member of the Separatist congregation in Leiden. Bradford’s son John eventually joined his father in Plymouth, and Bradford and Alice would have three more children together.
In 1630 Bradford began to write the account of Mayflower’s journey and the early years of the colony which would later become of the Plymouth plantation. As more settlers arrived in Plymouth fewer were members of the Separatist Faith, and by the early 1630s Bradford noted that the original colony was starting to disperse as as the settlers moved away. He remained governor of the colony until 1656, working to manage relations with the Native Americans as well as with the Dutch settlers of New York and the Puritans of the much larger and more prosperous colony of Massachusetts Bay. After a long illness, Bradford died in May 1657 at the age of 68.
Bradford had stopped writing his journals in 1650; he brought the record of the Plymouth colony to 1646, including a list of the Mayflower’s passengers and their status at the time. His family preserved the manuscript of his history of the Plymouth Colony, and later Puritan historians borrowed and copied it. Stolen by the British during the War of Independence, the document was rediscovered by American historians in London in 1855, transcribed and finally published for the first time in 1856. It remains the authoritative account of the pilgrims’ journey and of the foundation and the early years of Plymouth. Colony.
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Bernard Bailyn. The Barbarian Years – The Settlement of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012)
Dorothy Honiss Kelso. Beyond the Pilgrim’s Story: William Bradford. Museum of the pilgrims’ room.
Martyn Whittock. Mayflower lives (Pegasus Books, 2019)
