William Bradford's Death

William Bradford's Death

William Bradford, the governor of Plymouth colony and historian of the Pilgrims, was probably born in March 1590, at Austerfield in the English county of Yorkshire. He was only a year old when his father died, leaving the boy's rearing, as a farmer, to his uncles and grandfather. When he was 12, Bradford first read the Scriptures. At Scrooby in Nottinghamshire, he ignored the counsel of friends in order to attend meetings of a dissident religious sect, the Separatists, in the home of Elder William Brewster. The group, which favored separation from the “pudle of corruption”—the established Church of England—was the target of local persecution and also felt the wrath of King James I, who warned the Separatists to conform or be harried out of the land. Under the leadership of Elder Brewster and pastor John Robinson, members of the Scrooby congregation fled to a tolerant Holland in 1608. Bradford, who was not more than 19 at the time, went with them, first to Amsterdam and a year later to Leyden, where he was apprenticed to a silk manufacturer. Despite his relative youthfulness, he became a leader of the group.

Although the congregation's membership tripled in exile, life was economically hard for its members, their children were increasingly “Dutchified,” and the group lacked the kind of autonomy best suited to the unhampered carrying out of its religious ideals. By 1617, with the prodding of Bradford and others, a number of members had determined to move to the New World. Lengthy negotiations brought forth the offer of financial backing by London merchants, a charter from the Virginia Company of London, and a proposal that the Separatists form a joint-stock company to set up a trading post in America. Bradford and Brewster were among the 35 who accepted the offer. With 67 Londoners (most of them probably not Separatists), they boarded the Mayflower at Plymouth, England, and set sail on September 16, 1620. Contrary to their plans, they dropped anchor outside Virginia Company jurisdiction, and consequently outside the legal provisions of their patent, in the harbor of what is now Provincetown, Massachusetts, on November 21, 1620. Before landing, they drew up the Mayflower Compact, which became one of the written landmarks of democracy. It was designed, according to Bradford's account, to prevent the defection of certain restless souls who threatened to strike out on their own when they found themselves in a legal no man's land.

Bradford, who was among the 41 adult males who had signed the compact, was also among those who set out by small boat to find a spot that might prove more “fitt for situation” than Provincetown's barren sand dunes. The die was cast when they sighted Plymouth, across Cape Cod Bay, on December 21, 1620, and returned to Provincetown for the rest of the voyagers, who have been referred to as Pilgrims ever since their permanent settlement at Plymouth.

The discovery of what was variously known as Plymouth, New Plymouth, and Plimoth Plantation as a suitable place for habitation was preceded by tragedy. While Bradford helped choose a permanent site, his wife Dorothy May drowned in Cape Cod Bay on December 17. It was the beginning of the tragedies that filled the Pilgrims' first winter. Their “victuals being much spente” in the course of their ocean voyage, their struggle to build houses and find food at Plymouth was made more difficult by exposure, pneumonia, tuberculosis, and scurvy. Over half the group died during the first few years. Bradford himself was seriously ill but recovered, fortunately for the surviving colonists, who unanimously elected him governor after the death of Governor John Carver in 1621.

Although he pressed for rotation of the office, Bradford, who exercised wide governmental and religious authority in the settlement's early years, was reelected governor for all but five of the next 35 years. Under his prudent guidance, fortified by the judicious advice of Elder Brewster, the colony became politically and economically sound. One of the governor's early acts was the signing of a treaty with neighboring native tribes, who instructed the colonists in cultivation and partook with them of the first American Thanksgiving feast in the fall of 1621. The colony was put on a sounder legal footing the same year, when it obtained a charter from the New England Council. In 1623 Bradford put an end to the communal land system first employed and granted each male colonist an acre as his own. A plentiful harvest followed and the settlers subsequently also found some small profit in the fur trade. By 1627 Bradford and the other Pilgrim fathers were able to buy out the London merchants who had financed their expedition, thus severing their financial connection with England. Although it was his purpose to maintain Plymouth as a separate and independent colony, Bradford cooperated with other colonies in such enterprises as the war against the Pequot tribe and was four times a delegate to, and twice president of, the New England Confederation (a military alliance of Plymouth with the colonies of Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and New Haven).

A self-taught man, Bradford was skilled in several languages and possessed a simple and direct prose style. The most notable of his several writings, History of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647, is among the major literary accomplishments of his day. Although the manuscript was completed in 1651, six years before Bradford's death at Plymouth on May 19, 1657, it was not published in full until 1856, after its discovery in London following a long disappearance.

Although the Plymouth colony, which sent out offshoots in the form of neighboring towns, grew to include a sizable area, it was eventually overshadowed by the Massachusetts Bay Colony, by which it was absorbed in 1691. Plymouth nevertheless retains historical significance as the second permanent English settlement in America; and Bradford as its historian and leading statesman.