William Bradford
Other than the soldier Miles Standish and the lovebirds John Alden and Priscilla Mullins, probably the most well-known of the Plymouth colonists today is William Bradford. Without the records he left behind in his writings we would know very little of the intrepid band of religious dissenters who settled in Plymouth. Of Plymouth Plantation, which he based on a journal he kept of the formative years of the colony, is the primary first-hand account of the events as they unfolded in Leiden, during the voyage of Mayflower, and in Plymouth. Bradford signed the Mayflower Compact and may have helped write it along with John Carver, and served several terms as the Governor of Plymouth.
When Bradford fled England for Holland he at first lived with the Brewster’s in Amsterdam, later relocating to Leiden where he eventually worked as a weaver of a heavy padded cloth known as fustian. This brought him considerable financial success and by 1611 he was able to receive an inheritance from his family. In 1613 he married Dorothy May, who brought with her a respectable dowry. In the spring of 1620 the Bradford’s were residing in London, in an area of the city which housed many fellow dissenters and successful Dutch merchants. At some point Bradford returned with his family to Amsterdam.
Bradford and his wife left their young son with her parents in Amsterdam when they departed for America in Speedwell, transferring to Mayflower in English waters and making the difficult crossing in 1620. During the early explorations for a suitable site to build a settlement Bradford began to assume a leadership role with the surviving settlers. When he returned to Mayflower after exploring the area where Plymouth would be laid out Bradford learned of his wife’s death, not from the diseases which killed so many of the party, but from accidentally falling overboard and drowning in the frigid waters where Mayflower lay anchored.
After the death of John Carver Bradford was elected Governor of the colony, an office he would hold five separate times as the colony grew and gradually revised the manner in which it was governed. Bradford kept a personal journal throughout the early days of the colony. Around 1630 he began work on a comprehensive journal which described the colony’s settlement and the people who populated it, called Of Plymouth Plantation. He also contributed to works written by Edward Winslow including Mourt’s Relation, again relying on the personal journals he kept earlier in the colony’s development.
Bradford remarried in 1623, to a widow who arrived at Plymouth in one of the later ships which brought additional settlers and needed supplies to the colony, returning with furs to be sold by the Merchant Adventurers and other investors. His son by his first wife arrived in Plymouth in the same manner. He had three additional children with his second wife. He died in 1657 and was buried at Plymouth’s Burial Hill. Among his descendants are Clint Eastwood, Julia Child, Civil War General George McClellan, and noted pediatrician Benjamin Spock.