ABSTRACT
For American Puritans more concerned with the business of the emerging colonies, the strains and temptations were greater. People like William Bradford of Plymouth Plantation and the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company, John Winthrop — not to mention Samuel Mather’s brother and nephew, Increase and Cotton — confronted problems beyond those faced by ordinary Puritans on the frontier. William Bradford’s account of the Plymouth Colony’s landfall at Provincetown, from which the extract is taken, illustrates this drama of Bradford probably never intended his manuscript history Of Plymouth Plantation to be printed. Bradford’s nephew Nathaniel Morton made extensive use of it in his New England’s Memorial , the first published history of a New England colony. The rest of Of Plymouth Plantation is a running dialogue between advances and disappointments in the colony’s for-tunes; between attacks by Indians in America and detractors in London, countered by Bradford’s explanations, justifications and accounts of minor providences.
