Mayflower

pp. 48–55; Robert Arner’s “Plymouth Rock Revisited: The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers,” Journal of America Culture, Winter 1983, pp. 25–35; and John McPhee’s “Travels of the Rock,” New Yorker, February 26, 1990, pp. 108–17. Like the skeletons in the Indian graves in Truro, the Rock has become much more important to subsequent generations than it was to the Pilgrims themselves.
    Concerning Dorothy Bradford, Cotton Mather writes in his Magnalia, “at their first landing, his dearest consort accidentally falling overboard, was drowned in the harbor,” p. 205. In 1869, in a story entitled “William Bradford’s Love Life” in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Jane Goodwin Austin claimed that she had seen documents proving that Dorothy had committed suicide on learning of her husband’s love for Alice Southworth, the woman he would eventually marry in 1623. As George Bowman has shown in “Governor William Bradford’s First Wife Dorothy (May) Bradford Did Not Commit Suicide,” in the Mayflower Descendant, July 1931, Austin’s article was a fabrication, pp. 97–103. However, just because Austin misrepresented the facts does not eliminate the possibility that Dorothy Bradford killed herself. Samuel Eliot Morison writes that Bradford’s “failure to mention [her death] in the History is consistent with his modest reticence about his own role of leadership in the colony; but it may be that he suspected (as do we) that Dorothy Bradford took her own life, after gazing for six weeks at the barren sand dunes of Cape Cod,” OPP, p. xxiv. In “William Bradford’s Wife: A Suicide,” W. Sears Nickerson claims that according to family tradition still current on Cape Cod when he was growing up at the end of the nineteenth century, Dorothy Bradford did, in fact, kill herself. He also points out that “[i]t is a well-known fact among sailors that acute melancholia frequently results from scurvy,” in Early Encounters: Native Americans and Europeans in New England, p. 98. Also to be considered is the psychic trauma of the immigration experience. As Leon Grinberg and Rebecca Grinberg demonstrate in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Migration and Exile, the stresses associated with the early stages of immigration can have a crippling effect on a person: “[I]n the first stage, the predominant feelings are intense pain for all that one has left behind or lost, fear of the unknown, deep-rooted loneliness, need, and helplessness. Paranoid, disorienting, and depressive anxieties may alternate with one another, leaving the person prone to periods of total disorganization,” p. 97. Bradford tells of the settlers’ fear of being abandoned on the Cape in OPP, p. 92. Sears Nickerson suggests in Land Ho!— 1620 that she may have fallen from the poop deck: “I have often wondered if this was the spot from which Dorothy Bradford dropped overboard to her death in Provincetown Harbor,” p. 21. The four lines of poetry are from a much longer poem Bradford wrote toward the end of his life that appears in Nathaniel Morton’s New England’s Memorial, p. 172.
    CHAPTER FIVE- The Heart of Winter
    Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are from MR, pp. 38–50, and OPP, pp. 77–87. As noted in the previous chapter, when it comes to re-creating the sequence of deaths during that first winter, there are several sources: Bradford’s “Passengers in the Mayflower” in OPP, pp. 441–48, and information taken from Bradford’s papers (many of which have since been lost) by Thomas Prince and published in his Chronological History of New England in 1736. In his edition of MR, Henry Martyn Dexter provides a useful timeline, pp. 157–62. Both Champlain and John Smith visited Plymouth Harbor and left descriptions of the area and its people; see introduction to MR, pp. xix–xxiii. On the stunning plentitude of fish, lobsters, and clams at this time, see William Cronon’s Changes in the Land, pp. 22–23, 30–31. I cite Roger Williams’s account of the Narragansetts’ fleeing disease in Abram’s Eyes, p. 50.
    My account of the Pilgrims listening to the cries of Indians owes much to Richard Rath’s How Early America Sounded, particularly his chapter entitled “The Howling Wilderness,” pp. 145–72. See Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic