Mayflower

ELEVEN- The Ancient Mother
    On Edward Winslow’s diplomatic career, see Jeremy Bangs’s Pilgrim Edward Winslow, pp. 315–400. Samuel Maverick describes Winslow as “a smooth tongued cunning fellow” in his “Brief Description of New England,” written about 1660, MHS Proceedings, vol. 1, 2nd ser., p. 240. In his introduction to OPP, Samuel Eliot Morison tells of how Bradford might have become “the sole lord and proprietor of Plymouth Colony,” p. xxv. John Demos in “Notes on Plymouth Colony” in WMQ, 3rd ser., vol. 22, no. 2, writes of the extraordinary mobility of the Pilgrims and their children and grandchildren, particularly compared to Massachusetts-Bay: “The whole process of expansion had as one of its chief effects the scattering of families, to an extent probably inconceivable in the Old World communities from which the colonists had come,” p. 266. For an excellent look at those leading the development of towns in Plymouth, including John Brown and Thomas Willett, see John Frederick Martin’s Profits in the Wilderness, pp. 79–87. Martin also discusses Bradford’s fears about the evil influences of growth in the colony, p. 111. For information about John Brown, Thomas Prence, and Thomas Willett, see the biographies in Robert Anderson’s The Pilgrim Migration, pp. 81, 374–81, 497–503. Roger Williams’s reference to “God Land” is in his Complete Writings, vol. 6, p. 319. John Canup in Out of the Wilderness: The Emergence of an American Identity in Colonial New England cites the reference to Joseph Ramsden’s living “remotely in the woods” in the Plymouth records, p. 51. George Langdon provides a good summary of what was involved in purchasing a lot and building a house in a typical Plymouth town in Pilgrim Colony, pp. 146–47. On the amount of wood required to build a house in the seventeenth century, see Oliver Rackham’s “Grundle House: On the Quantities of Timber in Certain East Anglian Buildings in Relation to Local Supplies,” p. 3; on the wood consumption of an average seventeenth-century New England home and town, see Robert Tarule’s The Artisan of Ipswich: Craftsmanship and Community in Colonial New England, p. 36. My thanks to Pret Woodburn and Rick McKee of Plimoth Plantation for bringing these two resources to my attention.
    The Granger execution is detailed by Bradford in OPP, pp. 320–21. Langdon in Pilgrim Colony discusses Bradford’s 1655 ultimatum, p. 67. Bradford’s mournful note about the congregation’s “most strict and sacred bond” begins, “O sacred bond, whilst inviolably preserved! How sweet and precious were the fruits that flowed from the same! But when this fidelity decayed, then their ruin approached,” OPP, p. 33, n. 6. Bradford Smith in Bradford of Plymouth describes Bradford’s extended family and the difficulty his son John had being assimilated, pp. 210–12, as does John Navin in Plymouth Plantation, pp. 584–86. Bradford writes of the speed with which the Indians took to hunting with muskets in OPP, p. 207. In The Skulking Way of War, Patrick Malone discusses the “excellent judgment” the Indians possessed when it came to their preference for flintlocks over matchlocks, pp. 31–33; Malone also chronicles colonial attitudes toward selling guns to the Indians, pp. 42–51. Bradford writes of the danger of armed Indians in the poem “In This Wilderness,” which can be found in the extremely useful collection The Complete Works of the Mayflower Pilgrims, edited by Caleb Johnson, pp. 486–95. Isidore Meyer in “The Hebrew Preface to Bradford’s History of the Plymouth Plantation” in American Jewish Historical Society Publications, no. 38, part 4, cites Bradford’s own words about learning Hebrew, p. 291. Cotton Mather writes of Bradford’s last days in the Magnalia, book 2, pp. 207–8.
    My account of the Indian burials at Burr’s Hill is based on Burr’s Hill: A Seventeenth-Century Wampanoag Burial Ground in Warren, Rhode Island, edited by Susan Gibson, especially pp. 13–14. Eric Schultz and Michael Tougias in King Philip’s War: The History and Legacy of America’s Forgotten Conflict refer to the existence of “a copper necklace thought to have been presented by Edward Winslow to Massasoit,” p. 238. Constance Crosby in