Mayflower

“sodomy and buggery.” In 1642, seventeen-year-old Thomas Granger, a servant to “an honest man of Duxbury,” was convicted of having sexual relations with “a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves and a turkey.” Taking their lead from Leviticus, Bradford and his fellow magistrates executed Granger on September 8, 1642, but not until the boy had witnessed the killing of his animal paramours, which were all buried in a pit. Bradford speculated that “Satan hath more power in these heathen lands,” but he also feared that a pernicious complacency had infected the colony.
    In 1655, Governor Bradford delivered an ultimatum. If his subordinates did not do something to improve the spiritual state of the colony, he must resign his office. Promises were made, and Bradford continued on as governor, but that did not prevent a profound despair from overtaking him in his final years. Late in life Bradford looked back on the manuscript pages of his history of the colony. Beside a copy of a letter written by Pastor Robinson and Elder Brewster back in 1617, in which they referred to their congregation’s “most strict and sacred bond,” Bradford wrote, “I have been happy in my first times, to see, and with much comfort to enjoy, the blessed fruits of this sweet communion, but it is now a part of my misery in old age, to find and feel the decay, and…with grief and sorrow of heart to lament and bewail the same.”
    There may have been another dimension to Bradford’s sadness—a sadness that reached back to his decision in 1620 to leave his son John in Holland. After his second marriage in 1623, Bradford and his wife Alice had been blessed with three children: William junior, born in 1624; Mercy in 1627; and Joseph in 1630. Bradford adopted Alice’s two sons, Constant and Thomas Southworth, as well as eighteen-year-old Thomas Cushman when his father, Robert, died at about the same time as Robinson’s death in 1625. Other members of Bradford’s extended family included the boys Nathaniel Morton, Joseph Rogers, and William Latham. But as late as 1627 there was one missing member. John, Bradford’s son from his first marriage with Dorothy, was still in Europe. By the time he finally did join his father, John was eleven years old; he had been just three when he had last seen his parents, and he must have had little memory of his father.
    Bradford’s stepson Nathaniel Morton was almost precisely John’s age. But while Morton became the governor’s right-hand man in the years ahead, John, his firstborn, drifted, eventually moving to Norwich, Connecticut—about as far away from the home of his famous father as it was possible for a New Englander to get.
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    No one knew what the future held, but Bradford had his suspicions. If New England continued its “degenerate” ways, God would surely wreak his vengeance. In Bradford’s view, the seeds for this terrible apocalypse had been sown more than thirty years before, when Thomas Morton of Merrymount had begun selling guns to the Indians. Almost immediately, the Natives had become more effective huntsmen than the English “by reason of their swiftness of foot and nimbleness of body, being also quick-sighted and by continual exercise well knowing the haunts of all sorts of game.” They were also quick to master the mechanical aspects of operating a musket and were soon able to perform their own repairs and manufacture their own lead bullets.
    The conservatism of the English made it difficult for them to abandon their old and cumbersome matchlock muskets for the newer flintlocks. The Indians, on the other hand, knew from the start that they wanted only flintlocks. “[T]hey became mad (as it were) after them,” Bradford wrote, “and would not stick to give any price they could attain to for them; accounting their bows and arrows but baubles in comparison of them.” Suddenly the English were no longer the technological superiors of the Native Americans, and when they happened on “the Indians in the woods armed with guns in this sort, it was a terror unto them.”
    Over time, however, the English became accustomed to the sight of an Indian with a gun. Indians armed with flintlocks brought in more game and furs to English trading posts. And besides, if the Indians did not get their weapons from the English, they could easily buy them from the French