1620 On this day the Scrooby Separatists, a group of Puritans who had separated from the Church of England, dropped anchor just inside the hook of Cape Cod, offshore of present-day Providence, Massachusetts. Three days later they would begin to explore the New World (see 15 November) before finally settling at Plymouth, and to write up their adventures almost as soon as they lived them.
But though William Bradford may well have written some or all of that earlier account, ten years after the event he was engaged in something much more serious. Up the coast, the Massachusetts Bay colony was beginning to settle the area around Boston. This was a much bigger enterprise than Plymouth’s, better-funded, better-educated, and – being Congregationalist rather than Separatist – better-connected with the London establishment. Would Plymouth’s population and business begin to leak away to the prosperous new colony?
Bradford’s book Of Plymouth Plantation, begun in 1630, was an attempt to establish Plymouth’s primacy – at least in the settlement of Massachusetts, and hence in the history of New England. Whereas in Mourt’s Relation, their contemporary account of exploration, he and his colleagues had been writing for potential backers in England, now he was writing for posterity.
So everything changes. Instead of running away, as they had in the earlier account, the natives are ‘savage barbarians … [who were] readier to fill their [i.e. our] sides with arrows than otherwise’. The weather was ‘sharp and violent, and subject to fierce storms’. Gone are the deer, the vines and the springs of fresh water that so delighted the early explorers; now all is ‘a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men’.
Not only that, but the settlers’ coming was a portent. Though Puritans were not supposed to draw connections between the Bible and their everyday life, Bradford begs an exception. ‘May not and ought not’ their posterity boast that ‘Our fathers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean, and were ready to perish in this wilderness, but they cried unto the Lord, and He heard their voice, and looked on their adversity’? This is Deuteronomy 26:7, almost word for word. In other words, the Scrooby Separatists had now become Pilgrim Fathers, the chosen people brought out of captivity in Europe to found the Promised Land.