William Bradford: The Best God Damn Pilgrim Ever! (Interesting Biographies #1)

William Bradford, the second governor of Plymouth is one of my ancestors. Some of you probably at least read an excerpt from his book, "Of Plymouth Plantation" and probably had some sort of test, quiz, or homework assignment based on it. I apologize for that. It was not his original intention to write a book teachers could use to educate children. I also apologize for his use of language, which today is considered boring, inconsistent, and hard to understand. Bradford recorded the struggles and life style of the Pilgrims.

It should be noted that the original  book was 271 pages long and when it was discovered by Thomas Prince, he noticed that page 243 was missing. My family has that missing page and it doesn't have anything important. It just has a treasure map to the hidden stacks of gold that is buried under Plymouth.

However, what is important is Bradford's story. Which I will tell you now.

Bradford was born in Austerfield, Yokeshire, England to a family of farmers on March 19, 1589. Bradford must have had some sort of curse because everyone that cared for him died. After his father died, he moved in with his grandfather and then his grandfather died. Then he moved back to live with his mother and stepfather and his mother died. At age 7, he moved in with his two uncles. Bradford was unable to help his uncles with the farm due to "long sickness", which was clearly just a clever way for him to get out of chores.

Bradford eventually joined the separatists and lived at the Scrooby Manor. However, separatists were being persecuted, so Bradford and the Scrooby congregation decided to attempt to flee England. Their plan was to escape to the Dutch Republic. Bradford and other separatists were captured after their first attempt being betrayed by the Benedict Arnold of separatists, but Bradford did eventually escape to the Dutch Republic. However, the separatists that escaped to the Netherlands were not satisfied. Not because they didn't have religious freedom, but because they noticed their children were being influenced by Dutch culture. Rather than allow their children to learn about other cultures and obtain a more open minded perspective of the world, the separatists board a ship called Speedwell and fled off to the Colony of Virginia in the New World in 1620. Eventually on the journey the passengers of the Speedwell joined the passengers of the Mayflower in England on their ship because Speedwell was breaking down.

On December 20th, the pilgrims landed in the New World, but not at the Virginia Colony. They landed in Plymouth. It's like they sailed using Siri. That winter the 100 passengers were struck with a sickness. Bradford was sick, but eventually healed. Maybe God saved Bradford because Bradford was awesome or he was just lucky. By the end of that winter exactly half of the one hundred settlers were killed.

The pilgrims also had to deal with the Native American inhabitants; the Pakanotet. In March, Governor John Carver created a treaty between Plymouth and the Pakanotet. We all know from history that white men and Native Americans did settle their differences with both parties happy (or with the white men happy). Bradford became the governor of Plymouth after Carter died a few days after he collapsed working in the fields. Either from exhaustion or maybe Bradford poisoned Carter, so he could take over as governor. Bradford was the governor for the majority of the rest of his life.

Bradford died on May 9, 1657.

This is the first edition to my new blog post series, Interesting Biographies. Follow my blog for more posts like this. Also leave a comment if you want to suggest an interesting person you want me to do a humorous biography for.