SOURCE: “Silent Partners: Historical Representation in William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation” in Early American Literature, Vol. 33, No. 3, 1998, pp 291-314.

[In the following essay, Read proposes that Bradford's history is best understood as an early development in economic historiography. Read focuses on differences between the first and second books, noting an emphasis on providential and genealogical history in the first and an emphasis on economics in the second.]

William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation remains both one of the most and one of the least readable texts from early colonial New England. Bradford receives praise for his unusually personal and varied style, his humor, his talent for balancing piety and pragmatism; for these reasons, as well as for the contributions of Bradford's book to a particular form of American mythology, Of Plymouth Plantation is more often studied and taught than the works of Bradford's near-contemporaries in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Yet it is a difficult work—difficult to read from end to end and difficult to comprehend as a whole. It hovers uneasily between history and memoir, public and private discourse, theological and secular narrative; its relation to genre is always in question, since it offers no very precise fit with most of the conventional categories. The prevailing critical view appears to be that it is a providentialist history gone awry, that the much longer Second Book reflects Bradford's disappointment at the gradual dissolution of the Pilgrim community and the loss of its original mission. Robert Daly's remark is typical: “Bradford's history,” he says, “begins magnificently, diminishes into a tedious account of unsorted administrative details, and ends, uncompleted, in silence” (557).¹ The loose narrative structures and convoluted digressions of the annals are thus (so the argument goes) a form of mimesis, depicting not only the community's decline from an ideal which is presented with great passion and force in the First Book, but Bradford's cumulative disquiet and bewilderment as a witness to and participant in that decline. Several of Bradford's readers, including David Levin, Alan Howard, and Walter Wenska, have argued eloquently in defense of Bradford's method in the Second Book, but the shadow of the earlier interpretation falls over these efforts as well, for they mainly defend Bradford against the charge that for much of that book he is not writing very good providentialist history. Howard, Levin, and to an extent Wayne Franklin (see esp. 165-78) represent the “Augustinian” school of Bradfordian criticism, in which Bradford is portrayed as deeply conscious, sometimes to the point of melancholy, of the incapacity of sinful humanity to fulfill God's purposes on Earth; the Second Book then becomes an inquiry into this very incapacity. Mark Sargent draws on the same strand in suggesting that the body of Bradford's history constitutes a “quiet confession” of the tensions within the separatist movement (408), tensions which had become more poignant due to the sea-change in English attitudes toward separatism following the Civil War, and which Bradford tried to address more fruitfully in his late Dialogues. But all such readings assume that providential design looms in the background of the Second Book, functioning as a spiritual and moral benchmark even if humanity fails to move toward it.²

In this essay, which will proceed from a comparative look at the First Book to the consideration of several features (as well as persons) of the Second, and include a side-glance at an important factor in the historical background of the Pilgrims' activities, I will argue that the case I have outlined above has been greatly overstated—that in the Second Book Bradford is not actually attempting to write providential history.³ The impatience that Bradford's readers frequently betray with the Second Book seems to arise from a misapprehension of one of its most obvious features, a feature that one of my students summed up quite aptly when he called Of Plymouth Plantation “a New England Bleak House.”⁴ It is an account, that is, of a complicated, difficult, inconclusive business enterprise carried out over a period of many years. Its intrinsic interest is in the details and intrigues of that business and its effects on the community in which it was transacted. John Griffith, one of only a few critics to pay close attention to Bradford's preoccupation with commerce, believes that this preoccupation affects the style of the book in a more general way: “Bradford's work distills a great part of human affairs into a kind of semi-explicit bookkeeping, in which assets are weighed against liabilities with an eye primarily toward the total balance” (235). Griffith wants to absorb Bradford's economic concerns into another type of providentialist reading, involving a quasi-Weberian triumph of godly capitalism. More conservatively if also more subtly, Kenneth Hovey perceives in the “mundane and practical character” of the Second Book a demonstration of the notion that, “[i]n a world devoid of miracles, God can still be seen in the success of weak means” (64, 61). But to describe Bradford as yet another apologist for either a “hard” or a “soft” Protestant work ethic is to neglect the characteristic uneasiness of the Second Book's organization and tone. The Second Book does manage to provide moments of reflection on the ways of Providence; however, these moments cannot be extrapolated to form a satisfactory providentialist reading of the whole. Bradford seems quite aware that the providentialist perspective is not well-suited to the material at hand; the most obvious evidence for this is his presentation of this material in annalistic form, convenient for marking the exigencies and discontinuities of worldly time but not for observing the serene progression of “cosmic” time towards the Apocalypse.⁵ Accounts of the vagaries of commercial activity rarely make for rewarding reading as evidence of God working out His plan in human history; hence the conclusion that the Second Book is both disappointed and disappointing. But this may only indicate the disappointment of readers at encountering the inapplicability of a favored thesis.

I will instead propose that the main problem confronting Bradford, and consequently Bradford's readers, in the Second Book of Of Plymouth Plantation is one which is endemic to the writing of secular history in a colonial setting, and could be considered a problem of modern history in general. This is the problem of describing what might be called “corporate life,” accounting for a collective entity and for the passage of that entity through time, as well as through an unfamiliar landscape in which the boundaries and interior relations of particular kinds of European communal life have to be defined anew in the face of unusual pressures from both without and within. Bradford as historian must adjudicate between an account that emphasizes the entity, the body politic of the Plymouth colony (a body with an implied interior life which can be represented metonymically through the lives of its individual members), and an account that emphasizes the outward activity of the entity, which extends beyond the entity itself and takes on a life of its own, though often in a much less “personal” and easily accessible sense. It is the character of this other “life,” and Bradford's response to it, that I will try to explore in the discussion that follows. First, though, I want to consider in more detail the conventional understanding of the First Book as a benchmark of providentialist historiography.

PROVIDENTIALISM AND HISTORICAL FORM IN THE FIRST BOOK

The problem of describing Plymouth's corporate life appears not to weigh very heavily on Bradford in the First Book, which is more unified and uniform, and certainly more self-assured, in its presentation of a community gathering itself together “into a church estate, in the fellowship of the gospel, to walk in all His ways made known, or to be made known unto them, according to their best endeavours, whatsoever it should cost them, the Lord assisting them. And that it cost them something this ensuing history will declare” (Bradford 9; unless otherwise noted, page numbers for Of Plymouth Plantation are taken from the 1952 edition annotated by Samuel Eliot Morison). As this last sentence suggests, the evidence of narrative design is fairly obvious in the First Book. Bradford orders his material not only chronologically but teleologically, into chapters that are organized topically as well as in terms of sequences of events, and he indicates in numerous ways that his history is plotted and moving toward a particular outcome. He alludes to his “intendment” (8) and to his (sometimes unsuccessful) efforts to manage and prune his ample material: “it is not my purpose to treat of the several passages that befell this people whilst they thus lived in the Low Countries (which might worthily require a large treatise of itself), but to make way to show the beginning of this plantation, which is that I aim at” (19). He also offers a general rationale for his procedures: “I have been the larger in these things, and so shall crave leave in some like passages following (though in other things I shall labour to be more contract) that their children may see with what difficulties their fathers wrestled in going through these things in their first beginnings. … As also that some use may be made hereof in after times by others in such like weighty employments” (46). In making this claim for the utility—both retrospective and prospective—of his history, Bradford assumes that his material forms a whole, bounded if not altogether complete, and that it is capable of taking a lasting shape. The Second Book, of course, can be understood as belying these very assumptions.

Yet the qualitative shift from one part of the history to the other is not quite as thoroughgoing as the evidence of designedness in the First Book and the lack of such evidence in the Second would seem to indicate. Bradford's method in the First Book appears to fit the providential model well in the sense that the “good form” and clear emplotment of the history reflects the form of God's plan for the Pilgrims; there is an implied ratio between logical narrative and inevitable cosmic progression. On the other hand, good form (as Hayden White has often argued⁶) is a common feature of secular history as well, and can be matched with other kinds of progression besides the providential. Even the historical accounts in the Bible, surely the authoritative text for Bradford on matters of narrative as on most other matters, often lack a strong providentialist impulse. There could hardly be a starker tonal contrast in the Old Testament than between the relentless triumphalism of the Book of Joshua and the murky account of interethnic politics in the Book of Judges, though these two books together describe a continuous period in the history of Canaan.⁷ And the chronological long-marches of the books of Kings and Chronicles do not reveal much sense of an overarching divine plan when read outside of a broader scriptural context. This is to say that Bradford as a writer of providential history is not bound by an ironclad definition of “the providential historian.” There are sections in the First Book, for instance in the description of the practical preparations for the journey to New England in chapters 5-7, that are as mundane as any similar material in the Second Book. In these sections the providentialist rhetoric largely disappears, though it may surface occasionally in the letters from John Robinson and other writers that Bradford interpolates as part of the history.

Where such rhetoric reaches its highest pitch in the First Book is, strikingly enough, in those parts of the narrative in which the Pilgrims are not transacting any business. Typically, these parts involve embarking upon, being on board, or disembarking from a ship. When the community is literally at sea, its status as an economic entity is temporarily suspended until it reaches land once again. The fact of the community's isolation from its external relations, along with the sense of peril normally associated with ocean voyages in this period, provides Bradford with a kind of generic cue to intensify the theological and typological content of his account. This occurs in the description of the “fearful storm” that the first group of emigrants encountered on the way to Holland:

But when man's hope and help wholly failed, the Lord's power and mercy appeared in their recovery. … When the water ran into their mouths and ears and the mariners cried out, “We sink, we sink!” they cried (if not with miraculous, yet with a great height or degree of divine faith), ‘Yet Lord Thou canst save! Yet Lord Thou canst save!’ with such other expressions as I will forbear. Upon which the ship did not only recover, but shortly after the violence of the storm began to abate, and the Lord filled their afflicted minds with such comforts as everyone cannot understand, and in the end brought them to their desired haven …

(13)

The familiar elements of providentialism are here: the reflection on the mystery of grace, the elevation of faith above works, the celebration of the efficacy of prayer, and the suggestion of a typological link with a scriptural event, in this case Christ's calming the wind and water while crossing the Sea of Galilee with the apostles, as recounted in all three of the synoptic Gospels.⁸ But this is all in the context of a radical containment which is also—paradoxically, given the circumstances—a form of stasis: the Pilgrim community functions here as a simple and cohesive body, open to the ways of providence (or at least to those of providentialist interpretation), because on a foreign vessel in the middle of a difficult passage it can be very little else.

Similar moments occur in Bradford's account of the voyage to Cape Cod in chapter 9. There is the cautionary tale of the “very profane” and “haughty” sailor who paid dearly for mocking his land-loving passengers on the outward journey. “But it pleased God … to smite this young man with a grievous disease, of which he died in a desperate manner … and it was an astonishment to all his fellows for they noted it to be the just hand of God upon him” (Morison 58). More significantly there is the description of the arrival itself, where Bradford draws direct analogies to Paul's shipwreck on Malta in Acts 27 and Moses's vision of Canaan in Deuteronomy 3, and goes so far as to substitute ocean-going “Englishmen” for Jacob's offspring in his paraphrase of two verses from Deuteronomy 26 (61, 62, 63). This entire passage has been treated as an early interpretation of the American landscape and an illustration of English preconceptions about that landscape as “wilderness” (see Laurence). What I want to stress here, however, is that the typological density of the passage is closely aligned with the complete absence of a social milieu: “they had now no friends to welcome them nor inns to entertain or refresh their weatherbeaten bodies; no houses or much less towns to repair to, to seek for succour … which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to the heavens) they could have little solace or content in respect of any outward objects” (61-62). The critical emphasis in this description has tended to fall on the “weatherbeaten face” and “wild and savage hue” of the country (62), but the lack of satisfactory “outward objects” is just as crucially the absence of friends, inns, houses, towns—in other words, of the normal grounds for the transactions of daily life as the Pilgrims had known it in England and Holland. The very last words of the First Book point to the establishment of such grounds, “the first house for common use to receive them and their goods” (72).

These observations lead me to propose that the First Book can best be treated as a case of “loose providentialism,” as against a roughly contemporary Puritan history like Edward Johnson's Wonder-Working Providence of Sions Saviour in New England (published 1653), where providentialist patterning is consistently, indeed monotonously, apparent (see Jameson). Bradford's providentialist rhetoric is suited to occasions, particularly to originating events and periods of transition—to situations of genesis and exodus, as it were. As the Pilgrims settle into a way of life in what is now often termed a “contact zone,” a world more like that portrayed in the book of Judges, these situations become fewer and fewer. Bradford neglects providentialist historiography in the Second Book not because of the perceived collapse of “the Pilgrim ideal” but because the generic appropriateness of providentialism to the material at hand is significantly diminished. This would imply as well that, early or late, Of Plymouth Plantation is not as tightly wedded to the forms of providential history as it is often thought to be.

Then what kind of history is Bradford trying to write? The answer is fairly simple, at least initially: Bradford wants to write the genealogical history of a people from its first origins. Examples of such history, often dynastic in content and patriotic in theme, are manifold in the late medieval and early modern periods, drawing on both Greco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian influences and ranging along various points between the strictly providential and the strictly secular. Bradford might have had at least a passing acquaintance with the nationalistic chronicle histories of Edward Hall, Raphael Holinshed, and John Stow, all of which fall more toward the secular end (see Levy 167-201). Such histories are structured by births, deaths, and inheritances, but the matter within the frame is chiefly occupied with the deeds of individuals, deeds which are inseparable from the identities of the persons who enact them and which are conceived as having a moral centrality, suffusing the history with whatever values the historian intends to promulgate. The very ancient notion of history as a narrative of particular deeds—generally res gestae, the deeds of monarchs, generals, or other types of “great men” (see Ferguson 3-27)—lends itself well to histories constructed upon simple, linear movement in a clearly defined direction: to accounts of long journeys to specific places of refuge or settlement, of the rise or decline of noble houses, of missions of conversion, of single-minded military campaigns such as the Crusades.⁹ This kind of movement appears to be characteristic of both universal history and chronicle, the two medieval models for historiography that Emory Elliott, in his survey of Puritan writing in New England in the first volume of the recent Cambridge History of American Literature, identifies as primary influences on Bradford's practice. Universal history, following Augustine's De Civitate Dei, may reveal a “larger pattern of God's plan in the recorded events,” and chronicle may be “a straightforward account of narrative details” (215), but neither requires complicated narrative strategies. In Elliott's view the Second Book tells a familiar Old Testament story about “the deaths of the first-generation patriarchs, the spread of sin, and the weakening of the church” (216) while still functioning in more mundane terms as “a practical man's sober accounting of the trials, pressures, and even fractures the colony had experienced” (216-17).

As far as Bradford's “intendment” goes, Of Plymouth Plantation is not especially distinctive and could sit easily with Elliott's description of its debts to both universal and chronicle history. What renders the book unusual is that, forced by the sheer pressure of the “matter” with which Bradford has to work, it moves rather rapidly outside of these traditional sorts of historiography. Bradford's history is distinguished from its putative models by its awareness of—and its willingness to consider, if sometimes quite reluctantly—the possibility that events are not unilaterally determined but have multiple causes, causes which cannot be accounted for satisfactorily by a recording of res gestae under either divine or temporal authority. In other words, Bradford in Of Plymouth Plantation is effectively moving beyond an understanding of history as a record of mere deeds (whether or not he considers those deeds to involve God's will and its manifestations) toward an understanding of history as an examination of a set of relations, many of which do not register in genealogical terms—or, for that matter, in the terms of “a straightforward account of narrative details.” The project of the Pilgrims, while it could be categorized after a fashion as a journey, a mission, a campaign, or even as the emergence (or decay) of a “family,” resists being simplified into any one of these things alone, and one of the most salient categories, that of the business venture, rarely finds a place in the histories of Bradford's era. Bradford is caught between the divergent requirements for writing genealogical history and what is now termed economic history, at a time when the requirements for the latter are largely invisible compared to the former.¹⁰ Working from a fairly restricted palette of scriptural, classical, and ecclesiastical models for the task he has set himself, he wants to write a history of a community of like-minded believers which is at the same time, and just as significantly, the history of a joint-stock company embarked on a colonial business venture. Yet Bradford's conception of the colonial polity—where the emphasis is on self-containment and the significant actions of the body's members—is at historiographical cross purposes with his incipient understanding of the colonial business venture, where individuals' actions lose their particularity as they are fanned out onto the intricate web of commerce, and where the Pilgrims come into ambiguous contact with the other sorts of communities that fall within this same web. The microcosm of Plymouth Plantation cannot be stretched to fit smoothly over the macrocosm of the New England colonial economy. The hesitations, inconsistencies, and longueurs of the Second Book suggest Bradford's difficulty in superimposing one over the other. As a way of approaching this difficulty, I would like to offer “macrocosmic” readings of material from the Second Book concerning what I take to be two of its representative figures, Thomas Morton and Isaac Allerton.

OUTSIDERS: THOMAS MORTON, THE DUTCH, AND FRONTIER TRADE

The famous account of Morton's escapades in the annals for 1628 is generally read in terms of its contrasts with Morton's competing account of the same set of events in New English Canaan.¹¹ But the Morton episode appears as part of a larger narrative in which Bradford seeks to explain a significant shift in the social and economic relations—particularly in the trade relations—prevailing in New England in the 1630s and 1640s. The crisis that requires an explanation involves, very literally, the empowerment of the natives of Massachusetts by way of commerce with the colonists—an economic and, more troublesome still, a technological empowerment:

Hitherto the Indians of these parts had no pieces nor other arms but their bows and arrows, nor of many years after; neither durst they scarce handle a gun, so much were they afraid of them. And the very sight of one (though out of kilter) was a terror unto them. But those Indians to the east parts, which had commerce with the French, got pieces of them, and they in the end made a common trade of it.

(204)

The rhetorical progression of the gun from a frightening symbol—a totem, as it were—representing the colonists' territorial power to a functional tool among the natives appears here to originate in “commerce with the French” and “common trade.” But “common trade,” as Bradford is well aware, is not a closed system. The trade in firearms has other, more abstract causes, causes which, in the broad outlines of Bradford's account, implicate the Dutch from the south as well as the French from the “east.” For in 1627 the Dutch introduced the manufacture and trade of wampum to the English and thence to the tribes of Massachusetts and northern New England, “and strange it was to see the great alteration it made in a few years among the Indians.”¹² Shell money, which had once had only limited use among the Narragansetts and Pequots, “grew thus to be a commodity in these parts” and “hath now continued … about this 20 years, and … may prove a drug in time” (203). Bradford falls readily here into the language of trade, employing a colloquial expression for slow-moving merchandise which remains a part of the merchant's lexicon to this day.

Among the stock the Dutch traded in 1627 to interested parties in New England was not only wampum itself but an education in its uses: “Neither did the English of this Plantation or any other in the land, till now that they had knowledge of it from the Dutch, so much as know what it was, much less that it was a commodity of that worth and value” (203). There is an implicit distinction in the passage between the utility of a particular commodity, a utility which Bradford treats as more or less a priori, and the knowledge which actually allows individuals and groups to make use of that commodity within the sphere of trade. Knowledge, in other words, becomes one valuable commodity among others. And in this passage Bradford introduces another party to the commerce in wampum: the English, who become the beneficiaries of Dutch expertise in this market, enabling them to enter the market themselves.

Here I need to digress for an interval to address Pilgrim attitudes toward the Dutch, since these attitudes figure significantly in Bradford's understanding of the Morton episode and help to determine the symbolic function of that episode within Bradford's history. While French traders from Canada could easily enough be categorized as direct political, economic, and even theological competitors with the English, the Dutch occupied a much more ambiguous position at the boundaries of the Pilgrims' community life, having traded many things (knowledge included) with Bradford's compatriots over a long period. Amsterdam and Leyden had provided the earliest havens for the Scrooby expatriates, who came over to the Netherlands on the prospect, as Bradford says, of “freedom of religion for all men” (10). This freedom nonetheless had its threatening aspects. The unusually open character of the Dutch market (relative at least to its counterparts elsewhere in Europe) made for a distinctly polyglot environment in the Low Countries. Amsterdam housed an assortment of political, religious, and economic immigrants from many different places, including a significant number of Jews. Leyden, as home to one of the most prestigious—and liberal—universities in Europe, had a diverse population, with students coming from as far away as Russia (Dexter 413-14, 497). An anonymous English satirist of the 1660s linked Dutch prosperity to this peculiar diversity: “They countenance only Calvinism, but for Trades sake they Tolerate all others, except the Papists; which is the reason why the treasure and stock of most Nations is transported thither, where there is full Liberty of Conscience: you may be what the Devil you will there, so you be but peaceable” (qtd. in Dexter 419).¹³ Bradford vividly describes the disorienting effect of Dutch cultural life on the Pilgrim settlers: “they heard a strange and uncouth language, and beheld the different manners and customs of the people, with their strange fashions and attires; all so far differing from that of their plain country villages (wherein they were bred and had so long lived) as it seemed they were come into a new world” (16). The explicit contrast here is between the exotic pluralism of the Netherlands and the communal stability of “plain country villages,” villages which Bradford renders as both centers of origin and emblems of continuity for the Pilgrims, “wherein they were bred and had so long lived.”

One of the subtle historical ironies of the Pilgrims' arrival in the other “new world” across the Atlantic is that the milieu which prompted their departure from Europe soon reappeared in a recognizably similar form in North America. New Netherland was an unsuccessful and relatively short-lived colonial experiment,¹⁴ yet its influence reached northward and certainly touched the Plymouth settlers, for from an early point New Netherland displayed a diversity not unlike what the Pilgrims would have remembered in Amsterdam and Leyden. Twenty years after the colony was first settled, the Jesuit Isaac Jogues (perhaps exaggerating) noted that eighteen languages were spoken there (Kammen 37).¹⁵ The linguistic mélange had its religious counterpart. In 1655 the conservative Dutch Reformed minister Johannes Megapolensis complained that “we have here Papists, Mennonites and Lutherans among the Dutch; also many Puritans or Independents, and many Atheists and various other servants of Baal among the English under this Government, who conceal themselves under the name of Christians.” He went on to inveigh against Jews, some of whom had already settled in New Netherland (by way of Brazil!) the previous year (Kammen 61-62; quotation on 61). The colony also contained more than a few freed slaves, thanks to the absence there of racially discriminatory laws, as well as the West India Company's unusually lax regulation of the slave trade (Kammen 58-60).

Given their tolerance for the plural and the polyglot in their social affairs, the Dutch in their renewed proximity presented the Pilgrims with complexities which may have been familiar from past experience but remained difficult to untangle.¹⁶ From Bradford's point of view there were excellent reasons for keeping the Dutch at arm's length, in spite of any felt obligations to the Pilgrims' former “hosts.” New Netherland might offer to the Pilgrims (just as the “old” Netherlands had) the potential, at least, for participation in a productive mercantile network; at the same time it offered near at hand an antithetical, if in some ways tantalizing, model of what a colonial community could be: an economic body, paradoxically disembodied, active but nebulous and contradictory, full of life but always verging on chaos—“a Babel of Confusion,” as Johannes Megalopolensis believed it was becoming (qtd. in Kammen 37).¹⁷ Such a body was perceived, at least, to have a dangerous talent for assimilating and dissolving within itself the identity of other bodies, including the identity of the plain country village of like-minded believers which Bradford at one level imagined Plymouth Colony to be.¹⁸

The Tower of Babel is the last monument that Bradford would want erected in the environs of Massachusetts Bay, yet the Second Book often suggests that such a tower is already built up to a point that invites divine intervention—that New England is on the verge of a violent cosmopolitanism based on trade, in which various “speakers” struggle (and usually fail) to rise above the hubbub in order to establish a lingua franca (or a common currency) for the entire region. The wampum trade itself offers a compact illustration of the emerging state of affairs: the primary consequence of the development of this market is that, Bradford says, “it makes the Indians of these parts rich and powerful and also proud thereby, and fills them with pieces, powder and shot, which no laws can restrain” (204). The sentence is built upon a nice parallelism between “rich”/“powerful”/“proud” and “pieces”/“powder”/“shot” (with the parallelism reinforced by a partial rhyme in the middle terms), which allows Bradford to suggest a close relationship between the trade in wampum and the trade in guns. Bradford also implies here the working-out of a clear causal sequence, but one which moves in an interesting direction: wampum makes one wealthy, wealth makes one powerful, power makes one proud, and pride makes one enter into further commerce. The lack of “restraint” here relates not to the Indians but to the “pieces, powder, and shot,” and by extension to the trade in those goods, a trade enabled by “the baseness of sundry unworthy persons, both English, Dutch and French” (204). This cause is also a consequence: trade, whether in wampum or guns, dissolves the distinctions between these national groups into a general category of “baseness,” a category which seems to involve class as much as it does moral standards. The vanguard of baseness as far as the English are concerned is represented for Bradford by the ever-suspect fishermen, participants in a commercial enterprise in which the markers of class and national origin had not been observed with much rigor for many years.

The discussion then turns to Morton, and the reader's initial impression may be that Bradford, having addressed the emergence of the Dutch as trading partners in New England, has now moved on to other matters of concern in the year 1628. But there is no actual break in the historical narrative; Bradford continues to trace the issue of the native trade in guns back to what he views as its source. The section on Morton begins retrospectively: “About some three or four years before this time …” (204). There is nothing very portentous about Morton's arrival in the country in the company of one Captain Wollaston (whom Bradford describes rather cryptically as “a man of pretty parts”). Other than having pretensions to being a colonial projector in his own right, with “some small adventure of his own or other men's amongst them,” Morton's main distinction is his character as an untouchable, so to speak, unable to maintain the perquisites of class: he “had little respect among them [i.e., his fellow planters], and was slighted by the meanest servants” (204). What enables Morton to begin to cut a figure in New England is a decision based, again, on commercial interests; Wollaston and company, “not finding things to answer their expectations nor profit to arise as they looked for” (204-05) decamp for Virginia, where Wollaston finds a better trade—this time in human labor. He markets his servants “at good rates, selling their time to other men” (205). Morton gains his opportunity among those of Wollaston's group who remain behind, under the apparently ineffectual stewardship of Lieutenant Fitcher.

The critical emphasis at this point tends to fall on Morton, the “Lord of Misrule” with his “School of Atheism” (205), as either a carnivalesque or a demonic figure, depending on one's point of view. All the drinking, dancing, and frisking that goes on at Mount Dagon, however, should not obscure the fact that Bradford presents Morton as a businessman, whose first saleable commodity, other than “strong drink and other junkets,” happens to be the “good counsel” he says he can provide to Wollaston's men (205). The counsel, as Bradford imagines Morton offering it, is in effect a proposal to form a corporation: “I, having a part in the Plantation, will receive you as my partners and consociates; so you may be free from service, and we will converse, plant, trade, and live together as equals and support and protect one another” (205). This is less the prospect of Utopia than of a joint-stock company which does not limit its subscription to the upper classes. The democratic thrust of the agreement, a kind of parody of the Mayflower Compact,¹⁹ is particularly vexing to Bradford, who remarks later that settlers in the vicinity “saw that they should keep no servants, for Morton would entertain any, how vile soever, and all the scum of the country or any discontents would flock to him from all places, if this nest were not broken” (208). Mount Wollaston becomes Merrymount, with all its attendant amusements, only after Morton and his new partners “had got some goods into their hands, and got much by trading with the Indians” (205). One of Bradford's chief complaints against Morton is that this trade leads to scandalously lavish expenditure on the wrong sort of commodities: “both wine and strong waters in great excess (and, as some reported) £10 worth in a morning” (205). To avoid running his operation into the red, Morton makes a momentous—in Bradford's view, a catastrophic—business decision: “Now to maintain this riotous prodigality and profuse excess, Morton, thinking himself lawless, and hearing what gain the French and fishermen made by trading of pieces, powder and shot to the Indians, he as the head of this consortship began the practice of the same in these parts” (206).

Bradford is careful to state that Morton's decision, made in his role “as the head of this consortship,” represents, so to speak, a corporate goal. Yet Morton contributes a very individual sort of initiative to the new trade: once again knowledge surfaces as among the most valuable of commodities. “And first he taught … [the Indians] how to use … [the guns], to charge and discharge, and what proportion of powder to give the piece, according to the size or bigness of the same; and what shot to use for fowl and what for deer” (206). The natives subsequently become part of Morton's corporation as well: “having thus instructed them, he employed some of them to hunt and fowl for him, so as they became far more active in that employment than any of the English” (207). As in the case of those other formerly innocent knowers, Adam and Eve, the natives' eyes are opened: “when they saw the execution that a piece would do, and the benefit that might come by the same, they became mad (as it were) after them and would not stick to give any price they could attain for them; accounting their bows and arrows but baubles in comparison of them” (207). Bradford's narrative proceeds by way of reversals: as the once nondescript Morton becomes a figure to be reckoned with, so the natives come to view their once formidable weapons as “baubles”—a word, interestingly enough, used quite often by seventeenth-century colonists to describe the kinds of items they liked to trade with the Indians.

Now one might say that knowledge is the devil's stock in trade, and Bradford goes some distance to portray Morton as the original sinner in this particular ordeal: “here I may take occasion to bewail the mischief that this wicked man began in these parts, and which since, base covetousness prevailing in men that should know better [my emphasis], has now at length got the upper hand and made this thing common, notwithstanding any laws to the contrary” (207). There is a conspicuous effort here to attribute the responsibility for a large-scale crisis to one individual, and the reader is aware that the narrative possesses a certain allegorical force here. Yet there are aspects of the Bradford's account that forestall its interpretation as a New England version of the third chapter of Genesis with Morton figuring as the serpent in a New World Eden, and these relate to the commercial character of Morton's activity. Here it may be necessary to distinguish in a rough-and-ready way between Bradford as a storyteller and Bradford as an explicator.²⁰ Both roles are proper to his activity as a historian, indeed they overlap, but they also reflect rather different generic requirements. As a storyteller Bradford aims for a simplicity of effect and employs limited means to achieve that effect: a small cast of characters, a linear plot, an obvious goal to be reached. The “story” of Thomas Morton is one of a wicked man, a tempter, who disrupts the prevailing order of the community and is suitably punished by the forces of good, represented by Captain Standish. But this story is in turn embedded in an explication of a complex phenomenon which resists being broken down and reassembled with the familiar tools of the storyteller. Bradford's account of the arming of the natives moves on multiple planes, and the relations between those planes are not always clear. A consequence of this is that the account takes on the quality that A. P. Rossiter, in several of his great lectures on Shakespeare, called “two-eyedness” (62; see also 51, 292). The reader perceives an oscillation between the perspective of the story, where Morton is unquestionably the primary source of the problem, and the perspective of the explication, where Morton is merely an agent in a lengthy causal chain that neither begins nor ends with him. Rather than attempt further, by way of explanation, to sort out Morton's actual responsibility for a disturbing state of affairs, Bradford concludes the account by reverting to storytelling, with the comical episode of the siege of Merrymount and Morton's blustering defense and (nearly) bloodless defeat. Bradford then bids farewell to the entire matter: “I have been too long about so unworthy a person, and bad a cause” (210).

Yet the shadow of this “bad cause” extends beyond the shadow cast by the “unworthy person” and involves actors who do not fit readily into the story, about whom Bradford speaks with difficulty. These actors are shadowy presences in the Bradford's commentary on the current state of the arms trade in New England:

in a time of war or danger, as experience hath manifested, … when lead hath been scarce and men for their own defense would gladly have given a groat a pound … yet hath it been bought up and sent to other places and sold to such as trade it with the Indians at 12d the pound. And it is like they give 3s or 4s the pound, for they will have it at any rate. And these things have been done in the same times when some of their neighbours and friends are daily killed by the Indians, or are in danger thereof and live but at the Indians' mercy. Yea some, as they have acquainted them with all other things, have told them how gunpowder is made, and all the materials in it, and they are to be had in their own land; and I am confident, could they attain to make saltpeter, they would teach them to make powder.

(207)

The passage presents the reader with a thicket of passive constructions and ungrounded pronouns. The lead for shot “hath … been bought up and sent … and sold”; “these things have been done.” The culprits are “such” and “some.” Neither buyers, senders, sellers, nor traders assume a specific identity, though Bradford implies that the activity is seriatim and involves more than a few hands. The use of “they” and “their” is ambiguous throughout; in the last sentence it seems to apply alternately to “some,” to materials for gunpowder, and to the Indians (or possibly back to “some” again). The meaning of “them,” however, is straightforward; it always refers to the Indians, who are, after all, the ones at the receiving end. This referential trauma in Bradford's prose occurs because commerce, and the participation in commerce, has collapsed the boundary between the Pilgrim community at Plymouth and “such as trade … with the Indians.” The passage erases distinctions between one community and another, suggesting the inescapably porous character of trading relations in New England. Here as elsewhere, knowledge is a significant commodity: before the natives can produce gunpowder of their own, “some” must “teach” them. A difficult question bubbles to the surface of this strangely anonymous melting pot: who knows? Bradford evokes a cloud of witnesses but is not prepared to single out any one of them. While Morton may be presented as a literal scapegoat, one whose expulsion has a corrective or cathartic effect on the community at large, the account raises the prospect of agents other than Morton moving about on the periphery of Merrymount, perhaps even in the heart of Plymouth itself.

INSIDERS: ISAAC ALLERTON AND PLYMOUTH'S DEBTS

As a piece of historical reconstruction, the Morton episode reveals a conceptual discomfort that appears in many other places in the Second Book, most noticeably in Bradford's lengthy efforts to make sense of Isaac Allerton's behavior as agent for the colony in England. It should be said that Bradford is under no illusions about Allerton, making him the butt of much proverbial and scriptural wisdom about the dangers of seeking after riches at the hazard of one's soul (see, for instance, 239). In many ways Allerton, even more than Morton, emerges as the archvillain of the history, disastrously compromising the colony's finances while stubbornly pursuing “his own particular” and “private benefit” (211). Bradford recalls that it was in fact Allerton who “for base gain” brought Morton back to the colony from England after the first expulsion, using him “as a scribe” until he was forced “to pack him away,” largely due to Morton's propensity for trading guns with the natives (216).²¹ This is only one of many sorts of malfeasance on Allerton's part which preoccupy Bradford throughout the annals from 1628 to 1633. Yet Bradford also shows a deep and initially puzzling reluctance to condemn Allerton absolutely, despite the extensive (and extensively recorded) damage he does to the plantation's interests: “though private gain I do persuade myself was some cause to lead Mr. Allerton aside in these beginnings; yet I think or at least charity carries me to hope, that he intended to deal faithfully with them [i.e., the Pilgrims] in the main” (218). This is a severely qualified form of excuse, but it does suggest the nature of the problem: while Morton can be readily demonized, Allerton cannot. As the commentators to the Massachusetts Historical Society edition tactfully note, “Bradford has on the whole dealt kindly with one who seems to have been unsuccessful in all his ventures” (Bradford, History 1: 451n.).

Some of the reasons for this forebearance require no great detective work. For instance, Bradford had close personal and administrative connections with Allerton that rarely emerge in the text.²² Allerton had also become the son-in-law of William Brewster, one of the most respected members of the colony (218). Both of these facts point to what probably weighs most heavily on Bradford's account of the man: Allerton, passenger on the Mayflower and signer of the Compact (see 441), is a member of the Pilgrim community in a way that Morton never could be. It is possible to see Bradford's ambivalence about Allerton resulting from conflict of interest, from the common tendency to “forgive one's own,” or even from an attempt to maintain a Christ-like tolerance of the individual sinner. But in terms of Bradford's effort to write history, the ambivalence appears to spring from his difficulty in placing Allerton appropriately in the narrative of Plymouth's fortunes. Allerton's situation in this regard is close to the reverse of Morton's. Where Morton becomes a personification of the dangerously porous boundary between the community and the outer world, Allerton is very much in medias res.²³ The majority of his transactions are not with Dutch, French, or native outsiders but with the colonists and their backers in England. He is, in other words, a significant representative of the Pilgrim community as a community. At the same time he is a source of confusion not only to Plymouth but to Bradford in his chosen role as historian of the colony. Noting Allerton's ultimate discharge as Plymouth's agent in the annal for 1630, Bradford continues, “But these businesses were not ended till many years after, nor well understood of a long time, but folded up in obscurity and kept in the clouds, to the great loss and vexation of the Plantation, who in the end were (for peace sake) forced to bear the unjust burden of them, to their almost undoing. As will appear if God give life to finish this history” (233-34).

This last sentence finds Bradford mindful of a story to be told, indeed to be completed. But what kind of story? Often the “accounting” in the annals concerning Allerton is less of res gestae than of monies disbursed, received, loaned, repaid, lost. The climax of this narrative, as it were, occurs in the annal for 1631 when Bradford turns to Allerton's actual accounts: “They were so large and intricate as they [the Plymouth examiners] could not well understand them, much less examine and correct them without a great deal of time and help and his own presence, which was now hard to get amongst them. And it was two or three years before they could bring them to any good pass, but never make them perfect” (241-42). This serves as a précis of the historiographical problem that Allerton presents: his narrative, like his accounts, can never be made “perfect,” can never be fully sorted out. Bradford does make gestures at bringing Allerton's history to closure along providential lines, showing how “God crossed him mightily” in his later ventures and how he was “called to account for these and other his gross miscarriages” by the Plymouth church: “He confessed his fault and promised better walking, and that he would wind himself out of these courses so soon as he could, etc” (244, 245). But Allerton—as Bradford's wry “etc.” implies—keeps surfacing as a nuisance and distraction for several more pages, until he abruptly fades away as an active participant in the history of Plymouth when Bradford says, near the beginning of the annal for 1633, “I leave these matters and come to other things” (256).

The Allerton material is likely to be vexing for the present-day reader, not only because Allerton himself is portrayed so colorlessly—Bradford manages to make Morton more vivid in a few pages than he does Allerton over the course of several annals—but because of the general abstractness of this part of the narrative, in which the two trading-cum-fishing ships that become the vehicles for many of Allerton's financial machinations, the inauspiciously named Friendship and White Angel, figure almost as prominently as “characters” as do regularly mentioned individuals like Allerton, Winslow, James Sherley, or Timothy Hatherley. This abstract quality makes better sense, however, if it is understood as reflecting Bradford's uncertainty about attributing responsibility for the extraordinarily messy crisis of indebtedness among the Pilgrims during the early 1630s. Allerton is, after all, mainly a functionary of the colony, following (albeit often in a very distorted form) the instructions of his colleagues at Plymouth and in London. In a telling passage from the annal for 1629, Bradford recounts Allerton's purchase on the colony's account of a large quantity of salt from a fishing station at a good price: “And shortly after he might have had £30 clear profit for it, without any more trouble about it.” But a group led by none other than Allerton's father-in-law Edward Winslow “stayed him from selling the salt” with the idea, apparently improvised on the spot, that they could contract at Bristol or elsewhere for a fishing ship that could also be laded with merchandise instead of the salt that they already had in hand. “And so they might have a full supply of goods without paying freight, and in due season, which might turn greatly to their advantage.” The only objection to this scheme came from Bradford himself, “who had no mind to it, seeing they had always lost by fishing”; but even he, “seeing their earnestness, … gave way” (221).

The responsibility for what Bradford obviously views as a harebrained scheme is fairly well-distributed here, even though Allerton, by buying the salt in the first place, is in some fashion the “cause.”²⁴ Allerton's deeds provide Bradford with a way of outlining dimensions of collective activity at Plymouth for which Bradford's historiographical vocabulary lends him no very precise descriptive terms and which cannot be subsumed under the metaphor of the community as a simple, self-contained body going about its individual “business.” It is not that Bradford elides the personal contribution of Allerton, or anyone else, to Plymouth's financial quandary. But what concerns him most, and what he struggles to illuminate, is the dynamic and overdetermined economic life of the colony, dense with multiple and competing interests as well as uncontrollable elements (weather, costs of shipping, seasonal variations in price, supply and demand, and so on) which Bradford generally neglects to assign to the workings of Providence. He can afford to be relatively light-handed in his treatment of Allerton because it is not the man himself but his accounts that matter in the history of Plymouth. His significance lies, for instance, in the £113 expended on the salt and the loss of £30 of easy profit, since the expense and profit belong to the community and help to form an index of its successes and failures.

Like Morton, Allerton is a character who invites “two-eyedness” across the divide between storytelling and explication, though the emphases fall rather differently in the Allerton sequences than they do in the Morton episode. Bradford seems aware throughout these sequences that explication (analysis, that is, of the complex conditions that lead to specific economic consequences for the colony) is the most important historical task before him, but up to a point he continues to rely on the old familiar tools of history understood as stories about the deeds of prominent men—up to a point. Bradford's reconstruction of events gradually moves away from such stories toward a stress on the data in the financial records of the colony, data that proves to be more useful in dealing with the historical problems raised by the Pilgrims' fiscal crisis in the early 1630s. At some level Bradford recognizes that the numbers tell the story.

A NEW HISTORY?

As I have suggested earlier in this essay, the experience of reading Of Plymouth Plantation becomes less troublesome if one thinks of Bradford as moving not so much away from one kind of history as toward another. The movement is tentative because this other kind of history is still so ill-defined in the seventeenth century, and is one that Bradford writes almost in spite of himself. The impulse is always present to transform Plymouth into a closed community, a simulacrum of John Robinson's primal flock, whose “outside relations” are mainly typological and turned toward the past. Yet Bradford remains mindful at the same time of the fact that the colony is an adventure, that its supporters in London are looking to the “books” with other ideas in mind, that the Pilgrims have competitors (Dutch, French, natives, Bay Colonists, fishermen), that the project is necessarily an open-ended one, faced toward a future where the years succeed one another in the normal way but never turn out to mean precisely the same thing. In other words, Bradford confronts as both an obstacle and an obligation what over the last three centuries has become a commonplace: the notion that human events have an economic context.

Is Bradford one of the first economic historians? To answer this question affirmatively may seem unduly bold, until one considers how few histories of the period are actually like Bradford's. Perhaps the closest thematic analogue is Richard Hakluyt the Younger's compendium The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation, first published in 1589, greatly expanded in the second edition of 1598-1600, and continued to massive proportions in the seventeenth century by Samuel Purchas under the title Purchas his Pilgrimes. Richard Helgerson has argued that the novelty of the Principall Navigations lies in Hakluyt's treatment of merchants as significant, even heroic, actors in English history and his placement of commerce at the center of English national life (Helgerson 163-91). Hakluyt's magnum opus is not, strictly speaking, a historical narrative; it is instead an anthology which contains narratives along with many other kinds of documents. It would also be difficult to say with certainty that Hakluyt's work influenced Bradford's project in any way. Even so, there is a connection to be drawn between Hakluyt and Bradford, for both the Principall Navigations and Of Plymouth Plantation form part of the descriptive literature of English colonial expansion at its beginnings. It may be that, as Helgerson has claimed in Hakluyt's case, the sheer necessity of commercial activity to the process of colonization forces economic concerns into prominence in Bradford's narrative in a way which might not otherwise occur if he were simply writing “domestic” history.

In any event, this sort of problem cannot be raised satisfactorily if Bradford's work is simply assigned to the circumscribed region of providentialist history. I have tried to suggest at different points in this essay that Of Plymouth Plantation's generic affiliations are fairly wide-ranging, and that they lead in unusual directions. This is not to say that Bradford means to be unusual. He seems to accept the role of a historian of economic contexts only grudgingly, because he recognizes how damaging such history is to his commemoration of the interior life of his community, and how distant he is from the hermetic self-assurance of, say, the author of the Book of Joshua or John Foxe in the Book of Martyrs. The “incompleteness” of the Second Book of Of Plymouth Plantation has less to do with Bradford's final gesture of resignation over the failure of the Pilgrim dream than with his recognition that the history he is attempting to write has no real ending, because it is no longer the history of a body that either clearly lives or clearly dies. The Second Book is a testimony to the difficulty of serving two masters—not only God and Mammon, but God and Clio.

Notes

1. This memorable sentence also provides the point of departure for Sargent's essay (390).

2. Howard (237-42) offers a pungent historical summary of the standard views on Bradford; Wenska, within a broadly providentialist reading filtered (dubiously) through Eriksonian psychology, makes the very sensible point that the two parts of the history were written at widely separated intervals and thus reflect different levels of Bradford's experience with the fortunes of the colony.

3. For a definition of providential history I look no farther than the one provided by Francis Bacon in book 2 of The Advancement of Learning (1605):

   History of Providence … containeth that excellent correspondence which is between God's revealed will and his secret will; which though it be so obscure as for the most part it is not legible to the natural man; no, nor many times to those that behold it from the tabernacle; yet at some times it pleaseth God, for our better establishment and the confuting of those which are as without God in the world, to write it in such text and capital letters that, as the prophet saith, ‘he that runneth by may read it’ …

   (Vickers 185)

4. Thanks to Peter Weed for this bon mot.

5. Jesper Rosenmeier notes as part of his largely providentialist interpretation of Bradford that “The annals are filled with extraordinary scenes from the history of Plymouth's salvation; but they do not stand as parts of a great and coherent whole, as actions in an evolving drama. The years are shining but isolated moments, beads of revelation that remain unstrung” (98).

6. “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact” (White 81-100) offers a nicely compressed presentation of White's ideas on this topic.

7. The concluding verse of Judges is as follows: “In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did that which was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25, KJV). I am grateful to Haskell Hinnant and an anonymous reader for reminding me of what I ought to have noticed in the first place.

8. Matt. 8:23-27; Mark 4:35-41; Luke 8:22-25.

9. These are, not surprisingly, also the central topoi of epic poetry. On the links between the epic genre and colonial activity, see Quint.

10. For example, Bacon in book 2 of The Advancement of Learning divides history into four categories, “Natural, Civil, Ecclesiastical, and Literary” (Vickers 175). There is no obvious place in this scheme for historical accounts of commercial activity. Bacon does create a subcategory under natural history called “History of Nature Wrought or Mechanical” which would include agriculture and manual arts as two of its subjects (Vickers 177), but he seems to have in mind nothing more abstract than a history of material technologies. The other possible niche for matters of business would be in one of the minor partitions under civil history, “Journals,” which consider “accidents of a meaner nature” (Vickers 183). That the historical dimension of commerce failed to impress itself on one of the greatest analytical minds of the era should help to indicate the extent of the problem faced by Bradford in writing Of Plymouth Plantation.

11. See, most recently, Cartelli.

12. Cronon uses this quotation from Bradford to illustrate the point that “wampum was part of the reorganization of Indian economic and political life in the wake of the epidemics: competition for its acquisition established new leaders, promoted dependence on European traders, and helped shift the tribute obligations which had previously existed among Indian villages” (97).

13. The original source for the quotation is The Dutch Drawn to the Life (London, 1664) 48. I have modernized the spelling in a single instance.

14. The colony lasted for forty years, from the arrival of the first civilians in 1624 until it was ceded to the Duke of York in 1664, and was underpopulated and undercapitalized during most of that period, largely due to the parsimony of the Dutch West India Company.

15. This proliferation of languages was the result of the West India Company's strategy of recruiting colonists from other parts of Europe, since Dutch citizens, enjoying considerable prosperity at home, were reluctant to immigrate to New Netherland. See Kammen 36-38.

16. The nature of the dynamic between the Pilgrims and the Dutch colonists is quietly suggested by an exchange of formal correspondence from 1627 which Bradford includes in his narrative. The first letter is addressed to Bradford from Isaack de Rasieres, secretary to the Council of New Netherland. De Rasieres, citing common interests (namely “our common enemy the Spaniards”) asks for an opportunity to trade with Plymouth: “if it so fall out that any good that come to our hands from our native country may be serviceable to you, we shall take ourselves bound to help and accommodate you therewith, either for beaver or any other wares or merchandise that you should be pleased to deal for.” If the Pilgrims do not wish to buy, perhaps they will be willing to sell “beaver or otter or such like commodities as may be useful to us” (Bradford 378, 379). In his reply Bradford cites the alliance of the English and Dutch against Spain as “sufficient to unite us together in love and good neighbourhood in all our dealings,” and expresses gratitude for “the good and courteous entreaty we have found in your country, having lived there many years with freedom and good content.” Bradford claims that De Rasieres's offer “is to us very acceptable, and we doubt not but in short time we may have profitable commerce and trade together.” He then goes on, however, to demur firmly, if politely: “But for this year we are fully supplied with all necessaries, both for clothing and other things. But hereafter it is like we shall deal with you if your rates be reasonable” (380). The notion of “good neighbourhood” here seems to involve maintaining a respectful distance from one's neighbors.

17. New Netherland, as many historians have noted, displays interesting parallels with the Virginia colony during its first fifty years. The Pilgrims' relations with the Virginians were marked by a similar sort of ambivalence. See, for instance, Bradford's account of the stranded Virginia-bound traveler Mr. Fells (Bradford 191-92). Concerns about the Virginia enterprise (most of them probably justified) surface early on in the Pilgrims' transactions; see Robert Cushman's letter of 8 May 1619 (Bradford 355-57).

18. The danger of dissolution, portrayed in the familiar terms of a “generation gap,” figures prominently in Bradford's account of “the Reasons and Causes of … [the Pilgrims'] Removal” to New England:

    But that which was more lamentable … was that many of their children … were drawn away by evil examples and dangerous courses, getting the reins off their necks and departing from their parents. Some became soldiers, others took upon them far voyages by sea, and others some worse courses tending to dissoluteness and the danger of their souls, to the great grief of their parents and dishonour of God. So that they saw their posterity would be in danger to degenerate and be corrupted.

    (Morison 25)

    Here personal “dissoluteness” and communal dissolution are readily conflated; Bradford locates the cause of this particular problem both in the general waywardness of youth and in the economic pressures of the Pilgrims' Dutch environment—pressures which forced the newest members of the body outward to fend for themselves.

19. “[We] … solemnly and mutually in the presence of God and one of another, Covenant and Combine ourselves together into a Civil Body Politic, for our better ordering and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid” (Bradford 76). Even so the founders of this new body politic acknowledge themselves as “loyal subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James” (Bradford 75). The representatives of Plymouth later threaten Morton with a “penalty” that will be “more than he could be could bear—His Majesty's displeasure” (Bradford 209).

20. With the very specific sense of someone who unfolds things, and, secondarily, develops or expands them—one who teases out the strands to render something upon a larger field. See the definition for “explicate” in the OED. Another appropriate notion here would be what the late William Walsh called “colligation.” Walsh applied this term, borrowed from the nineteenth-century Cambridge philosopher William Whewell, to a common mode of historical explanation:

    when asked to explain a particular event … [historians] will begin by tracing connections between that event and others with which it stands in inner relationship. … The underlying assumption here is that different historical events can be regarded as going together to constitute a single process, a whole of which they are all parts and in which they belong together in a specially intimate way. And the first aim of the historian, when he is asked to explain some event or other, is to see it as part of such a process, to locate it in its context by mentioning other events with which it is bound up.

    (24-25; see also 59-63)

    With its emphasis on relationships and the analysis of relationships, colligation as a “style” of historiography is thus not limited by the conventions of linear narrative; a “colligator” would not necessarily be a storyteller, at least not in any simple sense of telling a story.

21. Allerton and Morton appear to be linked to one another in Bradford's thinking: the detailed examination of Allerton's actions begins immediately after Bradford closes his discussion of the “battle” at Merrymount (210).

22. In the annal for 1621, Bradford describes (in the third person) his election as governor: “and [Bradford] being not recovered of his illness, in which he had been near the point of death, Isaac Allerton was chosen to be an assistant unto him who, by renewed election every year, continued sundry years together. Which I here note once for all” (86). In fact Bradford never again refers to Allerton as his assistant. He implies here that had he not been so ill he would never have needed an assistant at all; it was other members of the community who kept electing Allerton to the position.

    R. G. Usher in his article on Allerton in the Dictionary of American Biography calls him “third in importance during the first ten years at Plymouth” and notes that he was the only officer of the colony other than Bradford from 1621 to 1624. After his disgrace at Plymouth he eventually settled in New Haven, where he built up a trade on “his own particular” with New Netherland, Virginia, and English interests in the Caribbean.

23. The idea of Allerton being “in the middle” takes a sinister turn in Bradford's description of the controversy over whether Plymouth should cooperate with the London partners in supporting Edward Ashley's dubious fur-trading venture at Penobscot: “they [at Plymouth] considered that if they joined not in the business, they knew Mr. Allerton would be with them [i.e., the London partners] in it, and so would swim as it were between both to the prejudice of both, but of themselves [at Plymouth] especially” (Bradford 220).

24. Bradford continues the story in the annal for 1630: the ship in question—apparently the Friendship—encountered bad weather and returned to port, failing to reach New England that year (226-27).

Works Cited

Bradford, William. History of Plymouth Plantation. Massachusetts Historical Society edition. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton, 1912.

———. Of Plymouth Plantation 1620-1647 by William Bradford Sometime Governor Thereof. Notes and introduction by Samuel Eliot Morison. New York: Knopf, 1952.

Cartelli, Thomas. “Transplanting Disorder: The Construction of Misrule in Morton's New English Canaan and Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation.” English Literary Renaissance 27 (1997): 258-80.

Condon, Thomas J. New York Beginnings: The Commercial Origins of New Netherland. New York: New York Univ. Press, 1968.

Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983.

Daly, Robert. “William Bradford's Vision of History.” American Literature 44 (1973): 557-69.

Dexter, Henry Martin, and Morton Dexter. The England and Holland of the Pilgrims. 1906. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing, 1978.

Elliott, Emory. “New England Puritan Literature.” The Cambridge History of American Literature. Vol. 1. Ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Cyrus R. K. Patell. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994. 171-306.

Ferguson, Arthur B. Clio Unbound: Perception of the Social and Cultural Past in Renaissance England. Duke Monographs in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 2. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1979.

Franklin, Wayne. Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers: The Diligent Writers of Early America. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1979.

Griffith, John. Of Plymouth Plantation as a Mercantile Epic.” Arizona Quarterly 28 (1972): 231-42.

Helgerson, Richard. Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992.

Hovey, Kenneth Alan. “The Theology of History in Of Plymouth Plantation and Its Predecessors.” Early American Literature 10 (1975): 47-66.

Howard, Alan B. “Art and History in Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation.” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 28 (1971): 237-66.

Jameson, J. Franklin, ed. Johnson's Wonder-Working Providence 1628-1651. New York: Scribner, 1910.

Kammen, Michael. Colonial New York: A History. New York: Scribner, 1975.

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