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- Herausgeber: Charles River Editors
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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OF PLYMOUTH PLANTATION
William Bradford
LACONIA PUBLISHERS
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Copyright © 2016 by William Bradford
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
PLYMOUTH PLANTATION.
CHAPTER I.: Discontent of the Puritans. Decision to go to Holland.
CHAPTER II.: Their Departure into Holland, and their Troubles there; with an Account of some of their Many Difficulties.
CHAPTER III.: Settlement in Holland, and Manner of Living There.
CHAPTER IV.: Showing the Reasons and Causes of their Removal.
CHAPTER V.: Showing what Means they used in the Preparation for this Great Voyage.
CHAPTER VI.: Plans proposed by London Merchants to assist in the Undertaking.
CHAPTER VII.: Departure from Leyden. Arrival at Southampton, where they all met together and took in their provisions.
CHAPTER VIII.: Their Departure from England and Voyage to America.
CHAPTER IX.: Search for a Landing.
CHAPTER X.: Arrival at Cape Cod.
CHAPTER XI.: The Remainder of the Year 1620.
CHAPTER XII.: Events of 1621.
CHAPTER XIII.: The Arrival of “The Fortune” and “The Charity.” Trouble with the Indians.
CHAPTER XIV.: Arrival of “The Charity.”
CHAPTER XV.: Lyford and Oldham.
CHAPTER XVI.: Expulsion of Lyford and Oldham from the Colony.
CHAPTER XVII.: Events of 1626 and ’27. Return of Standish. Distribution of Land.
CHAPTER XVIII.: Kennebec Patent. Intercourse with the Dutch. Expulsion of Morton.
CHAPTER XIX.: Mr. Allerton’s Mistakes. Return of Morton, 1629-30.
CHAPTER XX.: Roger Williams. Settlement of the Connecticut River.
CHAPTER XXI.: Scourge of Small-pox among the Indians.
CHAPTER XXII.: Events from 1635-1645.
HISTORY
OF
Plymouth Plantation.
BY
WILLIAM BRADFORD,
The Second Governor of the Colony.
puritans going to church
Arranged and Annotated for Schools.
LIFE OF WILLIAM BRADFORD.
William Bradford was born in 1590 at Austerfield, an obscure town in Yorkshire, England. “Here and in some other places,” writes Cotton Mather, to whom we are indebted for what is known of Bradford’s early life, “he had a comfortable inheritance left him of his honest parents, who died while he was yet a child and cast him on the education, first of his grandparents, and then of his uncles, who devoted him, like his ancestors, unto the affairs of husbandry. Long sickness kept him, as he would afterwards thankfully say, from the vanities of youth, and made him the fitter for what he was afterwards to undergo. When he was about a dozen years old, the reading of the Scriptures began to cause great impressions upon him; and those impressions were much assisted and improved when he came to attend the ministry of Rev. Mr. Richard Clifton, not far from his abode; he was then also further befriended, by being brought into the company and fellowship of such as were then called professors. . . . Nor could the wrath of his uncles, nor the scoff of his neighbors, now turned upon him as one of the Puritans, divert him from his pious inclinations.”
When about eighteen years of age, Bradford, with a company who had separated from the established church, went to Holland. He was twice arrested for having fled from England; but an explanation of his reasons secured his early release, and he was permitted to join his friends at Amsterdam. While there he became apprenticed to a Frenchman engaged in the manufacture of silks. On coming of age he promptly converted the property left him in England into money, and engaged in business for himself at Leyden, Here he continued until, with a portion of Mr. Robinson’s church, he embarked in the Mayflower for New England.
The perils and hardships endured by the Pilgrims on this famous voyage are faithfully and graphically recorded in the History from which these selections have been made, and no doubt Bradford was an equal sharer in the many trials of the colonists on land. He was chosen the second governor of the colony in 1621, and continued in that office, with the exception of five years, until his death in 1657.
“He was a person for study as well as action; and hence, notwithstanding the difficulties through which he passed in his youth, he attained unto a notable skill in languages. . . . He was also well skilled in history, in antiquity, and in philosophy; and for theology, he became so versed in it, that he was an irrefragable disputant against the errors, especially those of Anabaptism, which with anxiety he saw rising in his colony; wherefore he wrote some significant things for the confutation of those errors.” At length he fell sick, and so continued through a winter and spring, and died on the 9th of May following, in the sixty-ninth year of his age.
The opportunities which Governor Bradford had for writing the history of the Plymouth colony were superior to those of any other colonist; and although his duties as chief magistrate “would seem to afford him little leisure for writing, yet he thereby acquired an entire familiarity with every subject of a public nature in any way connected with the colony. This, taken in connection with the high character which he has always enjoyed, has caused this work to be regarded as of the first authority, and as entitled to take precedence of anything else relating to the history of the Pilgrims.”
The History of the book is by no means uninteresting. After the death of the author the manuscript passed into the hands of his nephew Nathaniel Morton, who drew quite copiously from it for the facts in his “New England’s Memorial.” It afterwards came into the possession of Thomas Prince, who made use of it in his Chronological History of New England. On the death of Prince it was left in the New England Library, in the tower of the Old South Church, Boston. When Boston was occupied by the British in 1775-76, the church was used by the British soldiers for a riding-school, and it is quite likely that Bradford’s manuscript history was among the spoils carried to Nova Scotia. In 1855, the manuscript, which had long been given up for lost, was found in Fulham Library, among a rare collection belonging to the Bishop of London. How it ever got from Boston to London still remains a mystery.
Permission to copy the history was readily given, and in 1856 it was for the first time published in the Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and through the courtesy of the librarian, Mr. Samuel A. Green, we are now enabled to publish these selections.
Inasmuch as the complete History covers a period of over twenty-six years, it is necessarily too voluminous for school purposes. In attempting, therefore, to acquaint the pupils of our schools with the trials encountered by the Pilgrim Fathers and especially through the medium of this early American classic, it has been necessary to abridge the narrative by omitting unimportant details of little or no interest to the general reader. Care has been taken, however, not to omit any incident of historical value or anything that might shed light on the general conditions in which the first settlers of Massachusetts were placed. Because of the somewhat antiquated style of Governor Bradford’s narrative, it has been thought best occasionally to simplify it with more modern language, but as far as possible the original has been retained; so that the reader may obtain a knowledge not only of the history but of the literature as well.
“Next to the fugitives whom Moses led out of Egypt, the little shipload of outcasts who landed at Plymouth two centuries and a half ago are destined to influence the future of the world. The spiritual thirst of mankind has for ages been quenched at Hebrew fountains; but the embodiment in human institutions of truths uttered by the Son of Man eighteen centuries ago, was to be mainly the work of Puritan thought and Puritan self-devotion.”—James Russell Lowell.
“Bradford and Winslow were both marked personages in that scene of interest unparalleled, that scene of few and simple incidents, just the setting out of a handful of not then very famous persons, on a voyage; but which, as we gaze on it, begins to speak to you as with the voices and melodies of an immortal hymn, which dilates and becomes idealized into the auspicious going forth of a colony, whose planting has changed the history of the world; a noble colony of devout Christians, educated, firm men, valiant soldiers, and honorable women; a colony, on the commencement of whose heroic enterprise the selectest influences of religion seemed to be descending visibly; and beyond whose perilous path are hung the rainbow, and the western star of empire.”—Rufus Choate.
“That mixed and strong feeling, which we call love of country, and which is, in general, never extinguished in the heart of man, grasped and embraced its proper object here. Whatever constitutes country, except the earth and the sun, all the moral causes of affection and attachment which operate upon the heart, they had brought with them to their new abode. Here were now their families and friends, their homes, and their property. Before they reached the shore, they had established the elements of a social system, and at a much earlier period had settled their forms of religious worship. At the moment of their landing, therefore, they possessed institutions of government, and institutions of religion, and friends and families, and social and religious institutions, constituted by consent, founded on choice and preference, how nearly do these fill up our whole idea of country!”—Daniel Webster.
PLYMOUTH PLANTATION.
CHAPTER I.
DISCONTENT OF THE PURITANS. DECISION TO GO TO HOLLAND.
IT IS WELL KNOWN UNTO the godly and judicious, what wars and oppressions Satan hath raised, maintained, and continued against the saints, from time to time, and in one sort or other, ever since the first breaking out of the light of the gospel in our honorable nation of England. Sometimes it has been by bloody death and cruel torments; at other times by imprisonment, banishment, and other hard usage; as if he were loath that his kingdom should go down, the truth prevail, and the churches of God revert to their ancient purity and recover their primitive order, liberty, and beauty.
