Neptune's Needle

A principal founder and chronicler of Plymouth Colony, William Bradford was born the son of Yorkshire farmers. Although nothing is known about his formal education, he was well-read and in adulthood possessed considerable literary skill. His Of Plymouth Plantation , first published in 1857, is considered a masterpiece of early American literature.

As a teenager Bradford attached himself to dissenting elements within English Protestantism and soon aligned himself with a group headed by William Brewster and centered in Scrooby, Nottinghamshire, favoring complete separation from the Church of England. In 1609 this group, with Bradford among them, having declared their views and been threatened with imprisonment, left England for Amsterdam, Holland, which they reached after some difficulties with English authorities and a rough passage across the North Sea. The Separatists, as they were called, then took up residence in Leiden, where Bradford earned a living as a weaver. In 1613 he married another English religious exile, Dortothy May.

Fearing assimilation into the religiously latitudinarian Dutch society, the Separatists in 1617 began planning yet another move, this time to America. A plan to settle in Dutch-claimed area around what is now New York was considered but never effected. Another to settle in the northern reaches of the English-claimed Virginia colony went further, although here too, negotiations (in which Bradford participated) securing royal approval and financial backing, proved difficult to consummate. Only in the late summer of 1620, were two contingents of Separatists (now self-described as "Pilgrims"), one from Leiden on the Speedwell and another from England on the larger Mayflower ready to set sail for America. Two false starts by the Speedwell, which was eventually left in Plymouth, and most of its passengers transferred to the Mayflower, delayed the start of the sea passage by six weeks. Once underway on September 6th, the 65-day passage proved hard on the 102 would-be settlers, few of whom had ever experienced an extended time at sea. Nor did rowdy members of the ship's crew, who took delight in the passengers' seasickness, help the time pass any more pleasantly.

When land was sighted on November 9, off the east end of Cape Cod, it proved to be more than 100 miles north of where their patent permitted them to settle, Attempts to sail further south along the Atlantic side of the Cape were thwarted by the shoaling at Pollocks Rip, just north of Nantucket and the Mayflower was forced back to the top of the Cape, where it anchored in Provincetown Harbor. There the crew set about reconstructing the 35' shallop that had been carried over in the Mayflower's hold, a job that took several weeks. On December 6th, Bradford and nine other settlers, along with the Mayflower's master, Christopher Newport and some sailors, set out in the shallop to cruise the backside of the Cape in search of a suitable place to settle. Two days of sailing and poking around in unacceptable harbors (e.g., Barnstable) brought them to Plymouth Harbor, a site earlier explored by Samuel de Champlain in 1605 and included on John Smith's 1614 map of New England. Even as Bradford went ashore in Plymouth his wife, back in Provincetown harbor and depressed by the long sea passage and the protracted time at anchor, slipped over the side of the Mayflower , a likely suicide. Little wonder that Bradford later described the Pilgrims' final arrival on shore as one where they thanked God for having "brought them over the vast and furious ocean, and delivered them from all the perils and miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm and stable earth, their proper element."

Yet Bradford and his fellow Pilgrims were nothing if not resilient. Three years after landing in Plymouth, Bradford had married again, had assumed the governorship of the colony, a post he was to hold for all but four of the next 33 years, and had reason to rethink his initial antipathy to the sea. For one thing, its bounty of fish and shellfish provided the Plymouth settlers who survived the first winter (52 of the 102 did not) with otherwise unavailable sustenance. For another, the herring that ran up the freshwater creeks draining into Plymouth harbor in the spring proved to be essential fertilizer in their Indian-instructed efforts to raise corn on the sandy and acidic local soil. Some of the earliest efforts at trading with the local Indians and with the fising fleet off the coast of Maine were by boat. In 1626 Bradford's friend, political ally and fellow landsman Edward Winslow, took upon himself command of the colony's shallop to sail 150 miles across open water to Kennebec, Maine, "for seamen they had none." A year later Bradford himself took the helm of the same boat to lead a rescue mission around to the ocean side of the Cape where the Sparrowhawk , bound for Virginia, had gone aground.

Although most of the Plymouth settlers, himself included, were engaged in farming, Bradford developed a keen appreciation of the crucial role the sea played in Plymouth's prospects. In 1626 he supported the establishment of a trading post at the top of Buzzard's Bay, then Manomet, later Apotexent, now Bourne, from whence Plymouthers had open to the Atlantic sea lanes south to Virginia and the Caribbean and westward to Rhode island, Connecticut and Long Island, all regions with which Plymouth developed trading links in the 1630s. His plans for Plymouth regularly challenged by sharp dealing merchants like Isaac Allerton or unbalanced clerics like the Anglican troublemanker John Lyford or later Roger Williams, or so he depicts them in his History, Bradford heaps generous praise upon an unnamed ship's carpenter who, in 1622, put the colony's modest and battered fleet of boats (two shallops, a lighter, and two ketches)fishing boat)in seagoing order, and later upon a house carpenter who refitted the colony's shallop by extending it from the middle outwards, such that it "sailed for the next seven years."

In 1627 Bradford and eleven other "Undertakers" agreed to assume the colony's outstanding debt in exchange for the exclusive rights to conduct the colony's trade and "to have and freely enjoy the pinnace lately built at Manomet, and the shallop called the bass boat." In effect, Bradford and his Undertakers, in laying claim to the colony's fleet, conformed the crucial role maritime activities played in the economy of Plymouth. And so it was when the "Great Migration" to Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s allowed Plymouth its only decade of real prosperity, it came largely through the sale of cattle raised in Plymouth on sea grass that grew along the coastal creeks and transported to Boston by sea.

By the 1630s the inadequacies of the Plymouth location -- a harbor limited by shoals and low water, the absence of a navigable river inland, and sandy soil along an narrow arable strip-- prompted growing pressure from recent settlers to disperse beyond the confinces of Plymouth. Although Bradford and other leaders regretted these efforts, they were unable to prevent the establishment of distinct towns with their own churches, first to the north along the coast (Duxbury, Marshfield), then out onto the Cape (Barnstable, Eastham) and then to the south and west (Taunton, Rehoboth, Mount Hope). It is noteworthy that all of these towns, except Taunton, which fronted on a river that fed into Narragansett Bay, were along the coast, and that their subsequent histories were all linked to the sea as transport points for agricultural goods heading to Boston or Newport for reshipment, as fishing villages, or as shipbuilding centers. Thus, In Bradford's accounting of a proposed move in 1644 of the Plymouth church to Nauset [now Eastham], out on the elbow of the Cape, he had cause to lament, "And thus was this poor church grown old and foresaken of her children." Still, he acknowledged that it was "not in their affections yet in regard to their bodily presence and personal helpfulness," which his own experience prefigured had become for younger Plymouthers-on-the-move inextricably linked to the sea. And so it would remain for the next two centuries.

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Peter Richards