![]() Let’s begin at the end: with the Latin phrase carved into the small obelisk marking the spot where Bradford’s ashes were buried. The great prize of the governor’s bequest-his unfinished history Of Plimmoth Plantation-would be not be revised by the family, but it would be borrowed by their contemporaries, touched up by later writers, and eventually stolen by British loyalists, well before it was ever published.(4) Only after it was rediscovered in 1855, following a nearly a century in the dark, did Bradford’s revered manuscript finally see print.Īs the published history gained fame, American and British diplomats got caught in some legal shenanigans over the book’s ownership that were resolved only after they renamed the original manuscript “The Log of the Mayflower.” Virtually no one thought it was a ship’s log-we will get to the story of that diplomatic charade in due time. As we journey there, we will take a few peripheral glimpses at the strange voyage of Bradford’s manuscript as it passed, often mysteriously, from hand to hand. My primary focal point today, however, is not the fanfare about a captain’s “log” or the usual saga about the Mayflower’s stormy crossing, but the mind and imagination of Governor Bradford in the late stages of his life and career. Scholars have commonly seen Bradford’s later work as a gesture of resignation or melancholy, an admission that the honor of his colony was in the past rather than in its prospects. Yet my tale today is about a writer reawakened, not silenced, by the intellectual foment of the 1640s. Not simply the gray reminiscence of winter, Bradford's late work is a mix of memory and desire, and it allows us to eavesdrop on one of the most mercurial moments in the history of England, Old and New. And, as we do, it is not hard to hear a few modern reverberations. That his books survive at all is a story in itself, a tale with some cloak-and-dagger intrigue. When he died in the spring of 1657 Bradford left his manuscripts with his family, urging them to improve what he had written. What does survive is a menagerie of "small books" written by William Bradford, a former sheepherder who lost his wife Dorothy during their first month in New England, when the twenty-three-old woman drowned after falling off the Mayflower's stern. Barely escaping his own death from disease that winter, the young widower was appointed governor of Plymouth before he had fully recovered from his illness. But he survived to remarry, write several manuscripts, and serve for more than thirty years as the Pilgrims’ political leader. After only one last run to France for a cargo of salt, its captain, Christopher Jones, died, and in 1624 the vessel, along with its sails and its kettles, would be pawned off in a London dock at a firesale price. If a captain's log from that Mayflower ever existed, it has been lost.(3) (2) In reality, though, the Pilgrims' ship had very little life left at all following that first New England winter. Nathaniel Hawthorne hustled a few rumors about how the Pilgrims' vessel eventually enjoyed a second life as a slave trader, and, as you might imagine, some Confederates were eager to play along. Both the ship and its passengers seemed destined for obscurity. The Pilgrims-who were a rag-tag partnership of religious Separatists, British servants and fortune-seekers-would not inflame the popular imagination until the Romantic age in the nineteenth century. By then historians would discover so many Mayflowers in seventeenth-century maritime records that it was all too easy to confuse the Pilgrims' transport with other vessels, including one Mayflower in the 1660s that carried Africans to the Caribbean.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |