Preface. It was recently Thanksgiving so I thought I’d post something from Mann’s 1491 about the pilgrims that I later found out was grievously wrong from an expert who gives lectures on the Mayflower history. Here is a more subtle, accurate, and interesting account of what happened. Though Thanksgiving is never mentioned in this book…

It seems like everything is related to energy. This book may be useful for younger folks to see what skills might be useful in their future “going back to the past” life as energy decline relentlessly proceeds and we return to the pre-fossil fuel lifestyle.

What follows are some kindle notes from parts of Chapter 11 in: Bailyn B (2012) The Barbarous Years. The Peopling of British North America: The conflict of civilizations, 1600-1675.

I must say I do wonder after reading how nuts some of the religious groups were who settled here, that Europe was glad to get rid of, if that hasn’t led to how irrational so many Americans are today as you can see in my posts in category Critical Thinking.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Financial Sense, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Bailyn B (2012) The Barbarous Years. The Peopling of British North America: The conflict of civilizations, 1600-1675

He would never see them again, nor would many of the others who hoped to join the exodus. Families had divided. The Brewsters left three of their children behind, the Bradfords their five-year-old son, and at least eight of the men departed from their wives, hoping someday to be reunited. There was a reunion of sorts at their first stop, in Southampton, not with the Leiden people but with a contingent of co-religionists who had remained in England and who now wished to join the emigration. They had been brought from London in the chartered Mayflower, a commercial transport vessel most recently in the French wine trade, along with servants and artisans selected by the merchant backers to help in the fishing, hunting, and other lines of work by which they hoped to recoup their investment. After some days of greetings and further planning, the overall company was divided between the two vessels, and on August 5 the voyage began—disastrously, as it turned out for the 150 people on board. Twice they had to return to England when the Speedwell reported leaks and general weakness, perhaps exaggerated by the rather fearful crew.

They had no choice but to abandon the smaller vessel, and stuff what they could of its provisions into the Mayflower, together with some of the Speedwell’s passengers—those who were still willing to face the dangers and those who were not considered to be too young or unfit to face the voyage.12

The Mayflower, “an ordinary pot-bellied merchantman” of 180 tons’ burden, was a small vessel for the cargo it bore: perhaps 113 feet in length, twenty-six feet wide, with eleven-foot depth of hold. When it left Plymouth on September 6, it carried—in addition to barrels and crates of supplies of all kinds, piles of household goods, and some domestic animals—approximately 132 people, of whom about 30 were crew. The 102 passengers crowded into every available corner of the ship not occupied by the crew or cargo, sleeping in double bunks in the poop house, the cabin, and wherever they could find space—in hammocks in the ’tween decks beneath the grated hatch, in the shallop they carried aboard, on the gun deck, and among the goods and furniture. And of this jumbled, “ununited,” undisciplined population, living “compact together” for over two months in a severely restricted space, the committed Pilgrim group was a minority: perhaps 44 souls in all—18 men, 11 women, and 15 children. They were a huddled, defensive cluster, harassed even by the vessel’s official “governor,” Christopher Martin, their own backers’ agent, who, when in charge of purchasing and accounts in Southampton, “insulteth over our poor people,” the Pilgrims’ business agent Robert Cushman reported from Dartmouth, “with such scorn and contempt, as if they were not good enough to wipe his shoes. It would break your heart to see his dealing, and the mourning of our people.”13

But Martin was only one of the many “strangers” who contested with the pious sect day and night for space, food, and the primitive sanitary facilities. Two-thirds of the passengers were servants or workmen hired by the merchant backers; they shared none of the Pilgrims’ religious convictions and often mocked their piety. Among the many children aboard—thirty-four in all—seven were vagabonds who had been snatched up from the London streets and pressed into servitude; three were illegitimate children from Shropshire who had ended up servants in one of the merchants’ houses; and among the hired workers and adult indentured servants were several vagrant journeymen, some of them respectable, some, in Bradford’s eyes, profane, obscene, and arrogant. The worst person on board, Bradford reported, was a “lusty … haughty” seaman, always “contemning the poor people in their sickness and cursing them daily with grievous execrations,” even threatening to throw them overboard. But such was “the just hand of God” that the sailor was smitten with a “grievous disease” that killed him, and so it was he and not the pious worshippers, Bradford wrote with some satisfaction, who ended in the sea.14

The sailors were always difficult, but they were a transient population. The hired help and independent workers aboard the Mayflower would be a more permanent part of the community, and some of them were little better than the sailors. They were drawn from every corner of the land, and they brought with them attitudes and experiences of all kinds. “One of the profanest families,” Bradford would later recall, was the Billingtons, originally from Lincolnshire. The father, John, was trouble from the start; the son Francis, age eight in 1620, almost blew up the Mayflower when he fired a gun into a barrel of gunpowder in the main cabin; and John’s wife, Eleanor, would be sentenced to time in the stocks and a whipping for slander. Stephen Hopkins, of a Gloucestershire family, alone of the people aboard had once lived in America, having arrived in Virginia after surviving the shipwreck of the Seaventure in Bermuda in 1609, where he had barely escaped hanging for defying the governor’s authority. Sometime during his short stay in Virginia he had probably sailed along the New England coast and had become acquainted with the local natives, and so he would prove to be of great help to the Pilgrims in their relations with the Indians. But despite that, and despite the fact that he would hold public office in the colony from time to time, he was forever in trouble with the authorities—at one point charged with battery, at another with allowing excessive drinking on his premises, at still another with contempt of court. Two of Hopkins’s servants, Edward Doty and Edward Leister, were so angrily at odds with each other on board ship that they ended in a duel with swords and daggers, for which they were condemned to be tied up neck and heels. Leister would ultimately escape to Virginia, while Doty would spend much of his thirty-five years in the colony defending himself from charges of assault, slander, and theft.15

Though the Pilgrims were harassed at times by the strangers aboard and were always apprehensive of their contaminating influence, they had supporters among them too. Their military leader, the tough 36-year-old veteran of the Low Country wars, Miles Standish, who would be a rock and pillar of the settlement though some would describe him as a small man with “a very hot & angry temper,” had made contact with the congregation’s leaders before they left Leiden, yet he was never of their church. And there was John Alden, the “hopefull” twenty-one-year-old cooper, hired in Southampton for purely economic reasons; in his sixty-seven years in the colony, he would prove to be not only faithful to the Leideners’ creed but one of the most rigorous in enforcing it.

But however bedeviled the sectarians were by the profane majority around them, the expedition in the end was theirs, its goal the realization of their dreams. To bring the miscellany of people into a purposeful community were leaders of personal dignity, competence, and presence if not of affluence or gentry status. The fifty-three-year-old Brewster, the senior of the Leideners’ project, the original organizer of the Scrooby conventicle, was now the ruling elder. His capacities, Bradford would write in an elegy after his death, were superior “above many.” Perched precariously on the cusp of gentry status, he was uniquely sensitive to the despair of the suddenly dispossessed and the vulgarity of the nouveaux riches. He was “wise and discreet,” Bradford wrote, and well spoken, having a grave and deliberate utterance, of a very cheerful spirit, very sociable and pleasant amongst his friends, of an humble and modest mind.… He was tenderhearted and compassionate of such as were in misery, but especially of such as had been of good estate and rank and were fallen unto want and poverty either for goodness and religion’s sake or by the injury and oppression of others; he would say [that] of all men these deserved to be pitied most. And none did more offend and displease him than such as would haughtily and proudly carry and lift up themselves, being risen from nothing and having little … to commend them but a few fine clothes or a little riches more than others.

And then there was Bradford. He was thirty when the Mayflower left England, still in the shadow of his seniors in the search for the simple, uncluttered, austere Christian life. It could easily be seen that he was intelligent, thoughtful, pious, well read, and adept at languages—fluent in Dutch, familiar with French, a master (Cotton Mather later wrote) of Latin and Greek, and a student of Hebrew. But no one on board the Mayflower could have known that he had a heightened consciousness of the drama in which they were involved, the imagination to cast it all as a central passage in Christian history, and the literary capacity to express their fortunes as a heroic epic, in biblical cadences. He must have lived, even then, a deeply considered life, exquisitely responsive to the people around him, keenly aware of their and his own achievements and failures in what he took to be the eyes of God. Convinced of his people’s transcendent mission and that they were finally, after many years of searching, approaching the ultimate realization of their dreams, he noted each fluttering motion, however slight, of progress or regression. The strangers’ sins, vulgarities, and indifference aboard the Mayflower disturbed him deeply, seared his sensibilities; later he would recall them bitterly. So too would he rejoice in remembering the resolution, faithfulness, and sanctity of the truly pious in this travail of mind and soul and body.

He would never forget the voyage or its immediate aftermath. After a tranquil start the Mayflower hit storms that shook every timber in the ship, created leaks in the upper areas, and cracked one of the main beams. They had no choice but to reduce their sails and drift, pitching and tossing wildly. One of Carver’s six servants, “a plain-hearted Christian,” was thrown overboard as the ship tipped far over to one side, and was dragged underwater, clinging to a loose halyard until hauled back on board with a boat hook. The sailors panicked. They were willing, they said, to earn their wages but not to risk their lives. Their fear spread to the passengers. A group of them confronted the ship’s officers demanding that they consider returning to England. But repairs, it was decided, could be made, and stress could be reduced by shortening sails, and so “they committed themselves to the will of God” and completed the voyage. On November 11 they dropped anchor in Provincetown harbor, in the northernmost tip of Cape Cod.

They had been at sea for nine weeks, and though only one passenger had died on the voyage, they were not only severely “weatherbeaten” but debilitated to an extent they did not yet know. Fresh food supplies had been consumed early in the voyage, firewood too, and signs of scurvy had appeared among both crew and passengers. Sickened and exhausted, when they came to the shore they were shocked by the scene before them. On one side, as Bradford would later write in one of his most vivid passages, there was “a hideous and desolate wilderness full of wild beasts and wild men … the whole country full of woods and thickets”; on the other side there was “the mighty ocean which … was now as a main bar and gulf to separate them from all civil parts of the world.

The crew threatened not to budge from the temporary anchorage until the Pilgrims discovered a permanent location for their settlement, and if they delayed too long, the sailors said they would simply abandon them on the nearby sandy shore. And from the servants and other strangers came grim mutterings, to the effect that once ashore they would strike out on their own, which they said they were legally free to do since they were not in Virginia and hence not under any patented jurisdiction.

The shipboard community was thus riven by conflict, bereft of legitimate civil authority, and likely to splinter into fragments. It was to restore order, to counter the mutinous speeches, and to begin the construction by consensus of a governing structure, that the Pilgrim leaders drew up an agreement, a compact, to create a “civic body politic.” The brief document, signed on shipboard, was simply a commitment by the signatories to obey the “just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions and offices” that would be promulgated by a government still to be formed. It was no constitution, only an effort to unite and direct to the public good the energies of the colony’s diverse population—saints and sinners, servants and masters, the pious from Scrooby and Leiden and the profane from London and Southampton.

Forty-one men signed the compact, pledging “all due submission and obedience” to whatever regulations would emerge. The first to sign were the main organizers and sectarian leaders, those who had carried the major burdens—Carver, Bradford, Winslow, and Brewster. They were followed by other respected figures—Allerton, Standish, Alden, Martin, and Hopkins; and they in turn were followed by some of the lesser members of the community, servants, and hired workers. The belligerent Billington signed, as did the feuding pair, Leister and Doty. Since the pledge of householders committed their dependents—wives, children, and servants—the forty-one signatories in effect committed the entire shipboard population, save for the sailors, to the Leideners’ aspirations.

For Carver, endorsed as governor, and for the other leaders there was much to fear. In addition to the divisiveness of the community, there was the likely violence of the natives, possible abandonment by the crew, and starvation if their supplies ran out without help from the natives. But no one had imagined what the consequences would be of the malnutrition that had resulted from two months at sea, the accidents that could befall people coping with a strange environment, and above all the ferocity of a New England winter.

There was a foretaste of things to come when, two days after their arrival, the passengers first went ashore. To get to dry land they had to wade through almost half a mile of shallow water, “which caused many to get colds and coughs, for it was … freezing cold weather.” For a month thereafter scouting expeditions were sent out to explore the land, establish relations with the natives, forage for supplies, and identify a site for the permanent settlement. They were successful in making reasonably peaceful contact with the natives and, with their help, in locating and digging up some of the Indians’ buried food supplies. But the cost was heavy. They had to dig into ground frozen a foot deep to reach the buried corn and beans, and to reach the ship after working on shore they had to wade “to the middle of the thigh, and oft to the knees … it brought to the most, if not all, coughs and colds … which afterward turned to the scurvey, whereof many died.” The exploring teams faltered again and again in the face of driving winds and rain: “some of our people that are dead tooke the originall of their death here.” December 6: “the weather was very cold and it froze so hard as the spray of the sea lighting on their coats, they were as if they had been glazed” (Bradford); “like coats of iron” (Winslow). December 8: After some hours’ sailing [in the small shallop they had brought on the Mayflower] it began to snow and rain, and about the middle of the afternoon the wind increased and the sea became very rough, and they broke their rudder … the storm increasing, and night drawing on, they bore what sail they could get in, while they could see. But herewith they broke their mast in three pieces and their sail fell overboard in a very grown sea.… And though it was very dark and rained sore, yet in the end they got under the lee of a small island … but were divided in their minds, some would keep [in] the boat for fear they might be amongst the Indians, others were so wet and cold they could not endure, but got ashore, and with much ado got fire (all things being so wet). Finally they found the pleasant hillside at Patuxet, the cleared, cultivated, well-watered site of a deserted Indian village which they would call Plymouth. Its advantages were obvious, but there were problems too, and they had to consider that other, as yet unknown sites might be better. When they weighed the pros and cons, one “especiall reason” convinced them to settle on that hillside:

The heart of winter and unseasonable weather was come upon us, so that we could not goe upon coasting and discovery, without danger of loosing men and boat, upon which would follow the overthrow of all.… Also cold and wett lodging had so taynted our people, for scarce any of us were free from vehement coughs, as if they should continue long in that estate, it would indanger the lives of many, and breed diseases and infection amongst us.

In fact, the damage had already been done, and the ravages were beginning to mount.19 Death was everywhere. America, for these hopeful utopians, had become a graveyard, and the record keeper was the faithful Bradford. Day after day he registered in a small notebook the deaths as they occurred, along with the marriages and punishments. The young and the old died first. On December 4: Edward Thompson, one of William White’s servants; White himself would follow in February. On December 6, one of Carver’s young servants, the boy Jasper, died. On December 7, Bradford’s own wife, then twenty-three, drowned, it was said, after a fall from the Mayflower. On December 8 the elderly James Chilton, who had survived a vengeful mob in Leiden, succumbed. And there were two other deaths that month. January was worse: eight deaths were registered, including Miles Standish’s wife and the imperious Christopher Martin, whose last act was to give Carver a report on the state of their accounts. Early that month Bradford, who had caught cold on one of the expeditions, suffered such severe “griefe and paine” in his legs that his life was despaired of: it was “Gods mercie,” Winslow wrote, that he survived. By February the dangerous illnesses had become so general that a special house had been built as an infirmary, but in that month seventeen people died, among them Allerton’s wife, Mary Norris, after a miscarriage. And in March death took thirteen more, including Governor Carver, who suffered a stroke (his “senses failed”) after working in the fields. His wife, “a weak woman,” followed him a few weeks later. By then, Bradford noted that in two or three months time half their company died, especially in January and February, being the depth of winter, and wanting houses and other comforts; being infected with the scurvy and other diseases which this long voyage and inaccommodate condition had brought upon them. So as there died some times two or three of a day … that of 100 and odd persons, scarce fifty remained. And of these, in the time of most distress, there was but six or seven sound persons…[who] spared no pains night nor day, but with abundance of toil and hazard of their own health, fetched them wood, made them fires, dressed them meat, made their beds, washed their loathsome clothes, clothed and unclothed them. In a word did all the homely and necessary offices for them which dainty and queasy stomachs cannot endure to hear named.

There was no such benevolence among the crew, who refused to help each other or the passengers, muttering “if they died, let them die.” Almost half of the crew, including the “lustiest,” were dead by early April, when the Mayflower returned to England.

Families had been destroyed—not only Christopher Martin but his wife and both servants had died; not only John Turner but both his sons as well; both Carvers and three of their six servants; both Mullinses, their son, and a servant; both Tinkers and their son; Mrs. Winslow and two of their servants. 4

Their struggle to maintain their identity and realize their hopes in this increasingly complex demographic situation was fierce, unending, and in the end unsuccessful. For a while, however, they seemed victorious. They could accommodate the 67 “rough and unruly” men whom Thomas Weston sent over in 1622. For as expected, Weston’s “rude fellows,” led by his “heady … and violent” brother, moved off, after three months, to Wessagusset (Weymouth), thirty miles to the north, to establish a fishing station and trading post. Plymouth had been warned that these “are no men for us,” indeed that they were “not fit for an honest man’s company.” In the event they proved to be worse than their reputation and the cause of the Pilgrims’ most barbarous episode.

Throwing together a few log huts and a blockhouse surrounded by a stockade, Weston’s men set out to extract what they could from the neighboring Indians, who had recently been devastated by a severe epidemic. Furs and food were not forthcoming, and as the group “neither applied themselves to planting of corn, nor taking of fish … but went about to build castles in the air … when winter came … many were starved to death, and the rest hardly escaped.” The survivors (at least ten died that winter) scrounged for ground nuts, clams, and mussels for food and haunted the Indian encampments for help. When one of them was caught stealing the Indians’ seed corn, thus threatening any future assistance the natives might give, he was hanged by his own people “to give the Indians content.” By then the pressure on the natives had reached the point of brutality. In retaliation, the Indians began planning an assault that would wipe out the Wessagusset settlement altogether. Plymouth had recently heard of the Virginia massacre, and when word was received of a pending conspiracy at Wessagusset that might engulf them all, Standish, ruthless as were all of the veterans of the Netherlands’ wars, and a small troop were sent off to repel the attack before it began.21 They did their work quickly and savagely. They lured the leading warriors into the blockhouse and then stabbed them to death, one after the other. It was incredible, Winslow wrote, how many wounds the chiefs suffered before they died, “not making any fearful noise, but catching at their weapons and striving to the last.” The youngster who accompanied the warriors Standish “caused to be hanged.” Then, apparently on instruction, Standish cut off the head of the “bloody and bold villain” believed to have inspired the conspiracy and brought it back to Plymouth in triumph, where it was displayed on the blockhouse together with a flag made of a cloth soaked in the victim’s blood.

When word of the affair reached Leiden, the Reverend Robinson sent off a severe condemnation. Instead of murdering the Indians, why, he asked, had Standish not tried to convert them? And did he and his men have legal jurisdiction over them? It is not a question, he wrote, of what the Indians deserved but of what treatment was absolutely necessary. The murders were excessive.

FOOTNOTES  CHAPTER 11 God’s Conventicle, Bradford’s Lamentation

1. The proposal to allow “full and free tolerance of religion to all men that would preserve civil peace,” backed by most of Plymouth’s deputies in 1645, horrified Bradford and the other leaders. They refused to allow it to come to a vote, so certain were they that it “would eat out the power of Godliness.” Edward Winslow to John Winthrop, Nov. 24, 1645, in Winthrop Papers, V (Boston, 1947), 56.

2. Philip F. Gura, A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620–1660 (Middletown, Conn., 1984), 53–54; Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (New York, 1963), 53.

3. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647 (Samuel E. Morison, ed., New York, 1952), 33 [hereafter: Bradford, Plymouth; other editions will be specifically cited].

4. Nick Bunker, Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World (New York, 2010), 103, 125ff. [hereafter: Bunker, Pilgrims]; Robert C. Anderson, The Pilgrim Migration: Immigrants to Plymouth Colony, 1620–1633 (Boston, 2004), 67–68; Henry M. Dexter and Morton Dexter, The England and Holland of the Pilgrims (Baltimore, Md., 1978), 40, 154–57, 215ff., 259ff., 320–29, 395; B. R. White, The English Separatist Tradition: From the Marian Martyrs to the Pilgrim Fathers (Oxford, England, 1971), 91–92; M. M. Knappen, Tudor Puritanism (Chicago, 1939), 313–14 and chap. 15 generally.

5. For book collection, James Deetz and Patricia Scott Deetz, The Times of Their Lives (New York, 2000), 195; Bunker, Pilgrims, 129, 170–77, 106–10; 165–66; Bradford, Plymouth, 326, 9–10; Dexter, England and Holland, 377ff., 239; Timothy George, John Robinson and the English Separatist Tradition (Macon, Ga., 1982), iii; White, Separatist Tradition, vi; Bradford Smith, Bradford of Plymouth (Philadelphia, 1951), 36–38, 55, 57. On Bradford’s family background, his peripatetic childhood, and his defiance of his family’s expectations, see Bunker, Pilgrims, 115–17.

6. Bradford, Plymouth, 8, 11, 14; Bunker, Pilgrims, 113, 187, 191. For Cushman’s description of the economic distress that contributed to the Pilgrims’ determination to leave England (“each man is fain to pluck his means, as it were out of his neighbour’s throat … There is such pressing and oppressing in town and country … so as a man can hardly any where set up a trade, but he shall pull down two of his neighbors”), see ibid., 269.

7. George D. Langdon, Jr., Pilgrim Colony … 1620–1691 (New Haven, Conn., 1966), 6; Bradford, Plymouth, 20n, 19n. Bradford in his “First Dialogue” (Alexander Young, ed., Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers … 1602 to 1625 [Boston, 1841], 455–56) estimated the Leiden congregation at “not much fewer” than three hundred; Dexter, England and Holland, 648, estimates the number at 473. On the geographical distribution, ibid., 650. On the “purging,” Bradford, Plymouth, 18. For a comprehensive account of the Pilgrims in Leiden—the city, the circumstances, and the fortunes of the Pilgrims there—see Jeremy Bangs, Strangers and Pilgrims, Travellers and Sojourners: Leiden and the Foundations of Plymouth Plantation (Plymouth, Mass., 2009).

8. Ibid., 17n, 25; Johanna W. Tammel, comp., Pilgrims and Other People from the British Isles in Leiden, 1576–1640 (Isle of Man, 1989), 57, 6; Dexter, England and Holland, 601–41, 565–67.

9. Bradford, Plymouth, 28, 30–31, 25–26; Edward Winslow, Hypocrisie Unmasked… (London, 1646, reprint ed., Providence, R.I., 1916), 91; David B. Quinn, England and the Discovery of America, 1481–1620 (New York, 1974), xiii.

10. Bradford, Plymouth, 27, 36, 368; Ruth A. McIntyre, Debts Hopeful and Desperate (Plymouth, Mass., 1963), 20, 32–33, 45.

11. Winslow, Hypocrisie, 90, 91; Smith, Bradford, 113–14; Dexter, England and Holland, 587–88; Bradford, Plymouth, 48.

12. William Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647 (Worthington C. Ford et al., eds., Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1912), I, 142n, 145 [hereafter: MHS, ed., Bradford, History]; W. Sears Nickerson, Land Ho!—1620 (1931; rev. ed., East Lansing, Mich., 1997), 16; Bradford, Plymouth, 53.

13. Nickerson, Land Ho!, 17, 19–28; Eugene A. Stratton, Plymouth Colony (Salt Lake City, 1986), 21, 31n, 323–24; Smith, Bradford, 121–22; Bradford, Plymouth, 55. Martin called the Pilgrims “froward and waspish, discontented people.” McIntyre, Debts, 19. Bunker, Pilgrims, 55, identifies twenty-four households aboard the Mayflower, of whom at least fifteen were led by men who had lived in Leiden.

14. George F. Willison, Saints and Strangers (New York, 1945), 454; Stratton, Plymouth Colony, 328; Bradford, Plymouth, 58.

15. Willison, Saints, 440, 441; Stratton, Plymouth Colony, 245, 308–9, 283–85; Henry M. Dexter, ed., Mourt’s Relation or Journal of the Plantation at Plymouth [London, 1622] (Boston, 1865), 42–43; Annie L. Jester and Martha W. Hiden, comps., Adventurers of Purse and Person (3rd ed., revised by Virginia M. Meyer and John F. Dorman, Richmond, Va., 1987), 374–75; Charles E. Banks, The English Ancestry and Homes of the Pilgrim Fathers (New York, 1929), 61–63.

16. MHS, ed., Bradford, History, I, 394n; Stratton, Plymouth Colony, 357–59, 373; Bradford, Plymouth, 327–28 and chap. 33 generally; Anderson, Pilgrim Migration, 10–15; Cynthia J. Van Zandt, Brothers Among Nations: The Pursuit of Intercultural Alliances in Early America, 1580–1660 (Oxford, England, 2008), passim. On Allerton’s jumbling of private and community affairs, McIntyre, Debts, 52–58.

17. Banks, English Ancestry, 44; Bradford, Plymouth, 42n, 367; Stratton, Plymouth Colony, 259, quoting William Hubbard’s General History of New England…[1682] (Cambridge, Mass., 1815).

18. Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, Books I and II [London, 1702] (Kenneth B. Murdock, ed., Cambridge, Mass., 1977), 207; Bradford, Plymouth, 58–59, 61–63, 75, 76; Nickerson, Land Ho!, 11; Mourt’s Relation, 7–9.

19. Ibid., 5, 27, 46, 39; Bradford, Plymouth, 68, 70–71; Deetz and Deetz, Times of Their Lives, 57.

20. Thomas Prince, A Chronological History of New-England in the Form of Annals [1736–1755] ([Boston], 1826), xviii; Mourt’s Relation, 70, 72–73, 66, 137–41; Bradford, Plymouth, 77–78; Robert C. Anderson, The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England 1620–1633 (Boston, 1995), III, 1522. [hereafter Anderson, Immigrants]. For a dismissal of the idea that Dorothy Bradford may have committed suicide “after gazing for six weeks at the barren sand dunes of Cape Cod” (Morison, in Bradford, Plymouth, xxiv), see Stratton, Plymouth Colony, 324–25. Cf. Deetz and Deetz, Times of Their Lives, 305.

21. Charles F. Adams, Three Episodes of Massachusetts History (rev. ed., 1892), 55–57, 65–66, 73, 76–79; Phinehas Pratt, “A Declaration of the Affairs of the English People That First Inhabited New England” [1662], Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 4th ser., IV (1858), 479–87.

22. Young, Chronicles, 331–32, 339; Adams, Three Episodes, 92–93, 97, 99; Bunker, Pilgrims, 328–30.

23. Ibid., chaps. 7, 9, 139–40; Bradford, Plymouth, 138.

24. Ibid., 127–30, 132; Willison, Saints, 446–50. On the “great cheer” at Bradford’s wedding feast, see Emmanuel Altham’s report, in Sydney V. James, Jr., ed., Three Visitors to Early Plymouth (Plymouth, Mass., 1963), 29–30.

25. Bradford, Plymouth, 133, 142–44, 148ff, 165, 167, 168, 373–74. Bradford indicates that Oldham brought with him his wife “and family” (157). Details on Oldham’s and Lyford’s backgrounds and careers are in Anderson, Immigrants, II, 1350–53 and 1214–17.

26. John Smith, in his description of the colony, probably based on information Winslow brought back to England late in 1623, summarized here, estimated the value of Plymouth’s goods at hand at £500 and noted that the community still lived “as one family or household, yet every man followeth his trade and profession both by sea and land.” John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles… (London, 1624), in Smith, Works, II, 472. Altham, writing from Plymouth in September 1623, estimated only twenty houses but otherwise agreed with Smith’s description (Three Visitors, 24). McIntyre, Debts, 49, 50; Langdon, Pilgrim Colony, 36; Bradford, Plymouth, 193n, 140–41, 180. For an extended discussion of the housing in Plymouth—the initial pit or cave houses, the predominant, small, simple “earthfast” dwellings, impermanent and fragile, typical of rural England, see Deetz and Deetz, Times of Their Lives, chaps. 5, 4.

27. Young, Chronicles, 373–74.

28. Adams, Three Episodes, 162, 168, 163, 169, 171, 177, 182; Bradford, Plymouth, 205–6; Governor Bradford’s Letter Book (Boston, 1906), 41.

29. Adams, Three Episodes, chap. 8; Bradford, Plymouth, 208–9; Bradford, Letter Book, 42–43; Thomas Morton, New English Canaan, or New Canaan… (Amsterdam, 1637), reprinted in Publications of the Prince Society, XIV (Boston, 1883), 284, 286–87. Michael Zuckerman, in “Pilgrims in the Wilderness: Community, Modernity, and the Maypole at Merry Mount,” NEQ, 50 (1977), 255–77, argues that Morton and his Merrymount crew have been misinterpreted as a result of the Pilgrims’ animus against them. Morton, Zuckerman claims, a nature lover, simply delighted in the “sensual splendor” of the New England landscape, believed that the Indians were innocents, “full of humanity,” and sought to share food, drink, and sex with them. That frightened the Pilgrims, who “could not countenance carnal pleasure for its own sake,” evoking their fear that intimate association with the natives “would weaken the discipline they maintained so tenuously over their own impulses.” For another sympathetic view of Morton, based on his intercultural familiarity with the Indians, see Van Zandt, Brothers Among Nations, 96–97.

30. Bradford, Letter Book, 17, 18, 19, 1; Bradford, Plymouth, 374.

31. McIntyre, Debts, 31–32, 47, 48; Bradford, Letter Book, 4, 9, 6, 21–22, 45, 50; Bradford, Plymouth, 382; Stratton, Plymouth Colony, 47, 40, App. F.

32. Bradford, Letter Book, 50, 45; Stratton, Plymouth Colony, 38, 246, 324; Young, Chronicles, 481, 483n, 73n.

33. Willison, Saints, 454.

34. Bradford, Plymouth, 210–11; Gura, Sion’s Glory, 39–40; Willison, Saints, 346; Stratton, Plymouth Colony, 353, 42.

35. Bradford, Plymouth, 257; Winthrop, Journal, 82, 50; Willison, Saints, 349; Gura, Sion’s Glory, 40–41.

36. Willison, Saints, 355; Bradford, Plymouth, 293, 313; MHS, ed., Bradford, History, II, 302.

37. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England…Court Orders, vol. I, 1633–1640 (Boston, 1855), 177, 97; Deetz and Deetz, Times of Their Lives, chaps. 3, 4; Stratton, Plymouth Colony, 245; Bradford, Plymouth, 316, 320–21.

38. Stratton, Plymouth Colony, App. G; McIntyre, Debts, 47; John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York, 1970), 9, 11n; Dorothy Wentworth, Settlement and Growth of Duxbury, 1628–1870 (Duxbury, Mass., 1973), 4; Stratton, Plymouth Colony, 58ff.

39. Bunker, Pilgrims, 301; Bradford, Plymouth, 253, 254, 333–34.

40. Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, D.C., 1975), II, 1168; John Demos, “Notes on Life in Plymouth Colony,” WMQ, 22 (1965), 269–71; Demos, Little Commonwealth, 192, 193, tables I, II, III.

41. Bradford, Plymouth, 33n; Mark L. Sargent, “William Bradford’s ‘Dialogue’ with History,” NEQ, 65 (1992), 396–97.

42. William Bradford, “A Dialogue or 3d Conference,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, [XI] (1869–70), 465–82; Smith, Bradford, 300–4.

43. Bradford, Plymouth, xxviii; Isidore S. Meyer, “The Hebrew Preface to Bradford’s History of the Plymouth Plantation,” Publications of the Jewish Historical Society, 38 (1948–49), 296–303. For a full account of Bradford’s Hebrew studies, see Meyer, The Hebrew Exercises of Governor William Bradford (Plymouth, Mass., 1973).

44. Young, Chronicles, 414–58, quotations at 414; Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, XXII (1920), 115–41. For the complicated provenance and bibliography of the Dialogue, see Sargent, “Bradford’s Dialogue,” 391n.

45. Ibid., 390; Young, Chronicles, 457, 415.

46. Ibid., 415–17, 421, 422, 427–32, 436–40, 457; Bradford, Plymouth, 171–72 (cf. Winslow, Hypocrisie, 93–98); David S. Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm in the New World: Heresy to Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 48–61.

47. Bradford, “A Dialogue or 3d Conference,” 407–64, quotations at 420, 421, 423, 424, 428, 452, 464.