SOURCE: “Of Plymouth Plantation as a Mercantile Epic,” in Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 3, 1972, pp. 231-42.

[In the essay below, Griffith examines the oppositions between economic and spiritual concerns and between the individual and the community in Bradford's History, characterizing the work as a “mercantile epic” in which the tragic conflicts are presented in economic and commerical terms.]

The era of New Criticism may have exhausted itself in its rapt insistence on treating the literary work as an autonomous artistic construct whose deepest significance is divorced from such externalities as history, psychology, or sociology. But there remain some formidable and valuable works which seem never to have benefited from the New Critical truths and which suffer a certain kind of neglect because their literariness is not fully recognized. William Bradford's great history Of Plymouth Plantation is one such work. In a casual way, it has long been acknowledged as a classic of early American writing; almost a hundred years ago Moses Coit Tyler pronounced it “an orderly, lucid, and most instructive book,” and placed it “at the head of American historical literature.”¹ Excerpts from it appear in virtually all anthologies professing to survey American literature. And yet, like Tyler, commentators up unto the present day have persisted in largely ignoring the book for what it, in itself, is, and in using it instead to document various theses about other things—matters of historical fact, Bradford's personal character, the Separatist or Puritan worldview. To be sure, the book has its valid uses in these regards. But it is also a commanding work of literary art, an act of the imagination as well as the memory, and as such deserves appreciation.

Bearing in mind the obvious technical qualifications that might be made, we can say that Of Plymouth Plantation is a mercantile epic, in the same broad sense that Malory's Morte Darthur is a chivalric epic and the books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy a religious one. It is epic in its subject; “it is about men, it is historically true, and it is tragic,” as C. S. Lewis once wrote of what he calls the Primary Epic.² As Bradford himself rightly claims, it deals with “great and honourable actions” as well as the “great difficulties” which obstruct them;³ God and the devil figure in its story, and good and evil men. Further, it is epic in its manner: decorous, capacious, a bit ponderous, possessing that firmness and impersonality, that stylistic “vast exercise of the will” and ordering sanity which E. M. W. Tillyard has ascribed to the epic poet.⁴ In Bradford this “exercise of the will” manifests itself not in literary fireworks but in the famous “plain style, with singular regard unto the simple truth in all things” (p. 3) which gives his work a solid normality, a “communal or choric quality” expressing “the feelings of a large group of people living in or near his own time” that Tillyard rightly associates with the epic spirit.⁵

It is mercantile in that Bradford employs much of the thought and vocabulary of primitive mercantile economics to tell his heroic tale. Perhaps the best epigraph one could give Of Plymouth Plantation as a whole is Bradford's own redaction of Proverbs 24:34: “they saw the grim and grisly face of poverty coming upon them like an armed man, with whom they must buckle and encounter, and from whom they could not fly. But they were armed with faith and patience against him and all his encounters; and though they were sometimes foiled, yet by God's assistance they prevailed and got the victory” (p. 16). The enemy is poverty, and Bradford's history is primarily the story of how the Pilgrims triumph by obtaining economic sufficiency—a story of material acquisition, albeit for “good and honourable ends” (p. 27). From the moment Bradford completes his introductory chapter on the English Reformation and his announcement of the Scrooby congregation's decision to leave Great Britain, the single clearest overriding theme of his narrative becomes the matter of procuring the economic wherewithal to carry out that decision. Personality, ecclesiastic affairs, travel report, all become subsidiary to the study of economic necessity.⁶ “Being thus constrained to leave their native soil and country, their lands and livings, and all their friends and familiar acquaintance, it was much; and thought marvelous by many. But to go into a country they knew not but by hearsay, where they must learn a new language and get their livings they knew not how, it being a dear place and subject to the miseries of war, it was by many thought an adventure almost desperate” (p. 11). The material cost of independent survival is their greatest hardship from the time they leave England: the difficulty of earning a living in economically depressed Holland; of financing shipping and provisions for the voyage to America; of getting corn and fish enough to eat in the new country; of establishing trade in fur and other commodities with the Indians and then with their English compeers sufficient to sustain themselves and pay their debts; of establishing “profitable” dealings with the Dutch at New Amsterdam and the English at Massachusetts Bay; and the endless difficulties of protecting themselves financially against their own renegades Isaac Allerton, Thomas Weston, and James Sherley.

Bradford's narrative is not highly structured; but insofar as it has a fundamental pattern, it is that of the American success story. Like another American classic of the genre, Franklin's Autobiography, it begins by dramatizing the wretchedness of its heroes so the contrast with their later prosperity will be apparent. In a widely reprinted passage which Perry Miller has called “the masterpiece of all Puritan eloquence,”⁷ Bradford describes the utter privation in which the Puritans find themselves upon landing at Cape Cod. “But here I cannot but stay and make a pause, and stand half amazed at this poor people's present condition. … Being thus passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before in their preparation …, 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. … Let it also be considered what weak hopes of supply and succour they left behind them, that might bear up their minds in this sad condition and trials they were under … how the case stood between them and the merchants at their coming away hath already been declared” (pp. 61-62). The steps the Pilgrims take to raise themselves from this bleak beginning are many and various; the most continuous index Bradford gives of their progress is his discussion of what he calls “that long and tedious business between the partners here and them in England” (p. 322), the debt to their investors to which he returns in almost every chapter. It seems not too much to say that the real structural climax of Bradford's story is the moment when the colony finally stands cleared of that debt. Bradford copies into his text the letter from James Sherley, one of the investors, which declares the debt paid. In its high-style legalese it is entirely appropriate, rhetorically, to such a portentous moment:

Now know all men by these presents that I, the said James Sherley, in performance of the said compromise and agreement have remissed, released, and quit-claimed and do by these presents remiss, release and for me, mine heirs, executors and administrators, and for every of us for ever quit-claim unto the said William Bradford, Edward Winslow, Thomas Prence, Myles Standish, William Brewster, John Alden and John Howland and every of them, their and every of their heirs, executors, and administrators, all and all manner of actions, suits, debts, accounts, reckonings, commissions, bonds, bills, specialties, judgments, executions, claims, challenges, differences and demands whatsoever. …

(pp. 416-17)

His abiding concern for paying the colony's debts is the most extensive and conspicuous example of Bradford's economic preoccupation, but it is by no means the only one. The essential quality in Bradford's prose which most clearly marks it as mercantile is the way in which the value of things tends to be expressed as commodity-value—value very like that usually measured in money. Money as such plays a small part in Bradford's story, because the Pilgrims have so little of it. But there is a kind of money-mentality at work throughout the narrative all the same. As Bradford says, “They began now highly to prize corn as more precious than silver, and those that had some to spare began to trade one with another for small things, by the quart, pottle, and peck, etc.; for money they had none, and if any had, corn was preferred before it” (pp. 144-45). The most disparate items—food, furs, livestock, land, trading rights, and so forth—tend in Bradford's treatment to be grouped generically under terms like “goods,” “provisions,” “store,” “stock,” “estate.” In the midst of starvation, the judgment of a food's worth can be referred to an abstract standard of “just price”: “The master of this ship had some two hogsheads of pease to sell, but seeing their [the colonists'] wants, held them at £9 sterling a hogshead, and under £8 he would not take, and yet would have beaver at an under rate. But they told him they had lived so long without, and would do still, rather than give so unreasonably” (p. 127). Even when monetary terms are not used, one has the sense of an accountant's hand at work; Bradford's language 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: “the Governor and his assistant … took an exact account of all their provisions in store and proportioned the same to the number of persons, and found that it would not hold out above six months at half allowance, and hardly that; and they could not well give less this winter time till fish came in again. So they were presently put to half allowance, one as well as another, which began to be hard, but they bore it patiently under hope of supply” (p. 96). This tendency to render dramatic meaning in quantitative terms is a pervasive one in Bradford. In the report of the first winter at Plymouth, “the starving time” when disease and exposure threaten to exterminate the colony, Bradford's primary rhetorical device for evoking the horror of it is mathematical: “in two or three months' time half of their company died, especially in January and February, being the depth of winter, and wanting houses and other comforts; being infected with the scurvy and other diseases which this long voyage and their inaccommodate condition had brought upon them. So as there died some times two or three of a day in the foresaid time, that of 100 and odd persons, scarce fifty remained” (p. 77). Even here Bradford gives the impression that the enemy is the abstract “grim and grisly … poverty,” an “armed man” who slays by privation (the lack of “houses and other comforts”). It is remarkable how readily the obstacles the Pilgrims faced can be translated into such vaguely economic terms: the Indians, for instance, are spoken of in half a dozen passages as military foes, but more consistently they figure in Bradford's story as customers or economic rivals. The first Indian Bradford introduces individually is Samoset, a friendly Algonquin who “became profitable to them in acquainting them with many things concerning the state of the country in the east parts where he lived, which was afterwards profitable unto them” (p. 79); and his concern for getting and keeping a fair and profitable share of the fur trade with the Indians is a more frequent subject than the threatened wars with them.

A sure sign of villainy in Bradford's account is interference with the Pilgrims' economic prospects. Thomas Weston, one of the colony's original backers, and Isaac Allerton, who signed the Mayflower Compact, both repeatedly send out expeditions “on their particular,” i.e., for their own private advantage rather than for the profit of the colony, and Bradford underscores their treachery. One of Plymouth's few real encounters with violence occurs when Moses Talbot and a stranger named Hocking from another plantation are both killed in a dispute over trade on the Kennebec River (pp. 262-64); shortly before that, the Pilgrims nearly come to warfare with the Dutch over the same interest on the Connecticut (pp. 258-60). Friends of the rascally John Oldham and Rev. John Lyford, dissidents who try to stir up rebellion among the Plymouth colonists, consummate their villainy when they set out a ship “on fishing on their own account, and getting the start of the ships that came to the Plantation, they took away their stage and other necessary provisions that they had made for fishing at Cape Ann the year before, at their great charge” (p. 170). Even Massachusetts Bay, in some things the Pilgrims' allies, does “little better than thrust [them] out” of a trading post on the Connecticut (p. 259). Such instances of sharp dealing could be multiplied at some length; taken together they suggest that Thou shalt not steal is a most significant commandment in Bradford's New England, and the one most heinously violated.

Bradford is explicit in his advocacy of private property. He describes how, during the colony's first two years when it practices communism, production is low. So in 1623 the colonists resolve “that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves. … This had very good success,” says Bradford, “for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use” (p. 120).

Ian Watt has written convincingly of Robinson Crusoe as a mythicization of economic man;⁸ and from what I have maintained so far I may seem on the point of saying the same for Of Plymouth Plantation. But there are major differences in both theme and treatment between Crusoe and Bradford's narrative, even if both do show their mercantile roots. The dominant image of Crusoe is utter isolation, but the dominant image of Plymouth Plantation is godly community. Both Defoe's individual and Bradford's congregation are to a great degree economic entities; but Defoe's tale is of a man hurling himself willingly into that “social atomization which homo economicus brings in his train,”⁹ whereas Bradford's is of the struggle to resist that precise same tendency. Bradford knows well the dangers of self-interest; his very defense of private ownership, just cited, concludes on the note that it is a necessary evil, condoned by God “seeing all men have this corruption [of self-love] in them” (p. 121). He records, too, his own example of “social atomization”: he writes of the coming of the populous Massachusetts Bay Company, “by which means corn and cattle rose to a great price, by which many were much enriched and commodities grew plentiful. And yet in other regards this benefit turned to their hurt, and this accession of strength to their weakness. For now as their stocks increased and the increase vendible, there was no longer any holding them together,” as they moved out from Plymouth in search of larger farms (p. 253).

Bradford knows, too, and testifies to the abrasive predatory instincts released in the trader's world. In general, he pictures the Pilgrims as being more exploited than exploiters—the London merchants with whom they make their long series of deals bilk them of hundreds of pounds' worth of produce, the Acadian French rob them, the Massachusetts Bay people elbow them out of their Indian trade, and various lone adventurers take advantage of their hospitality. Admittedly, there are also clear instances of the Pilgrims' own acquisitiveness outrunning conscience—their stealing Indian trade from the Dutch, for example (pp. 259-60); and their operating on the naïve assumption that the Indians' raison d'être is to provide profits for Plymouth Plantation. Bradford records without apparent embarrassment this bit of “treachery” by the colony's enemies: “But now they [the colonists] began to be envied, and others went and filled the Indians with corn and beat down the price, giving them twice as much as they had done, and undertraded them in other commodities also” (p. 182). “Indeed,” as Roland Usher has remarked, “the ignorance of the Pilgrims about business seems almost incredible, and their carelessness would seem almost criminal, if it were not so entirely obvious that it proceeded from inexperience and from guileless faith.”¹⁰ Bradford and his band in Of Plymouth Plantation appear not as predators, but as innocents in a predatory world, anxious to protect themselves against the economically and spiritually baleful effects of the open market. The money values they deal in seem imposed by merchants backing them in England and competing with them in America.

Bradford strives heroically to keep economic concerns subsidiary to spiritual ones. In an age like our own, when one is likely to assume almost automatically that economic motives precede spiritual, his efforts may seem thinly disguised self-justification; but there is no disputing the fact that, for whatever reasons, Bradford tries to consider economic affairs sub specie aeternitatis and to discern the hand of God in the fluctuations of the market. “It pleased God in these times so to bless the country with such access and confluence of people into it, as it was thereby much enriched, and cattle of all kinds stood at a high rate for divers years together. Kine were sold at £20 and some at £25 apiece; yea, sometimes at £28; a cow calf usually at £10. A milch goat at £3 and some at £4, and female kids at 30s and often at 40s apiece. By which means the ancient planters which had any stock, began to grow in their estates” (pp. 301-02). In this, the Biblical story to which Bradford's history bears closest resemblance is not that of Moses and the Exodus, but Jacob and his search for material fortune. Bradford himself draws a comparison with Jacob:

When I think how sadly the Scripture speaks of the famine in Jacob's time, when he said to his sons, “Go buy us food, that we may live and not die,” (Genesis xlii.2 and xliii.1) that the famine was great or heavy in the land. And yet they had such great herds and store of cattle of sundry kinds, which, besides flesh, must needs produce other food as milk, butter, and cheese, etc. And yet it was counted a sore affliction. Theirs [the Pilgrims'] here must needs be very great, therefore, who not only wanted the staff of bread but all these things, and had no Egypt to go to.

(pp. 130-31)

In a more general way, Bradford's story and Jacob's are similar in that both strike a rather precarious balance between material and spiritual concerns. Like Bradford's colony, Jacob counts his livestock and watches out for the main chance. Jacob's God, too, reveals his favor in ways approximating cash value. Jacob, in fact, virtually makes this an article in his covenant with God: “If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, so that I come again to my father's house in peace, then the Lord shall be my God” (Genesis 28:20-21).

To any post-Reformation audience, both these stories run a considerable artistic risk, not to say a moral one: the risk of seeming materialistic. Bradford, at least, knows the hazard he faces, which proceeds from the delicate Puritan duty to make the best of the temporal world at the same time that he keeps his true aspirations fixed on the heavenly. Bradford claims he and his people can fulfill that duty: “They knew they were pilgrims, and looked not much upon those things, but lift up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest country, and quieted their spirits” (p. 47). He scolds the materialistic temper in the most traditional terms: “So uncertain are the mutable things of this unstable world. And yet men set their hearts upon them, though they daily see the vanity thereof” (p. 119). And if sometimes for pages at a time Bradford seems to lose sight of the holy purpose to which his worldly strivings are theoretically directed, in much of his prose he creates magnificently the spirit of the devoted but dispassionate toiler in the Lord's vineyards:

Having now no fishing business or other things to intend, but only their trading and planting, they set themselves to follow the same with the best industry they could. The Planters finding their corn (what they could spare from their necessities) to be a commodity (for they sold it at 6s a bushel) used great diligence in planting the same. And the Governor and such as were designed to manage the trade (for it was retained for the general good and none were to trade in particular) they followed it to the best advantage they could.

(p. 181)

To say that in Bradford's handling material possessions become symbolic of spiritual grace would perhaps be an exaggeration, for the term “symbolic” implies a duality of significance, a vehicle-tenor construct which one does not really find in Bradford's descriptions. And yet all the same there is in his account a sense in which corn, say, represents both corn and more than corn—it represents as well survival and divine assistance and the success of the colony. I speak here not of a significance which is historically deducible, or to be inferred in Bradford's work because of “what we all know about the Puritans”; Bradford's words and sentences themselves subtly give to objects a more than material importance. He tells, for example, of a fire that breaks out near the colony's storehouse in the hard winter of 1623. “The house in which it began was right against their storehouse, which they had much ado to save, in which were their common store and all their provisions, the which, if it had been lost, the plantation had been overthrown. But through God's mercy it was saved by the great diligence of the people and the care of the Governor and some about him” (p. 136). Here Bradford does not picture a gang of people scrambling for their hoard; he reports an occasion which, for all the noise and frenzy we may assume attended it, has a kind of ceremonial or ritual value, in which the colony is allowed to survive “through God's mercy” and the protection of their supplies.

The notion that the Pilgrims were under God's special providence is of course a common one, both in Bradford's work and in other Puritan writings, and has been remarked on often enough. Yet however commonplace it may be, Bradford's special genius is to give that belief concrete literary substance; in his prose it becomes not just an opinion but a principle of perception. Wealth-getting in Bradford has ceremonial value because Bradford's literary manner gives it that value. He manages even to attach such a solemn significance, from time to time, to so barren a symbol as money. “So as they now had no more foreign debts but the abovesaid £400 and odd pounds, and the rest of the yearly purchase money. Some other debts they had in the country, but they were without any interest and they had wherewith to discharge them when they were due. To this pass the Lord had brought things for them” (p. 200).

One may doubt, if he wishes, the spiritual wisdom of seeking God's disposition in one's bank account; just as one may question Shakespeare's belief in kings or Chaucer's in astrology. But this does not alter the fact that, from a literary standpoint, such beliefs can be rhetorically powerful and dramatically real. Losing sight of the ceremonial value of wealth-getting in Bradford is like losing sight of the ceremonial value of chivalric carnage in Malory or hunting and fishing in Hemingway. Bradford, like Malory and Hemingway, is not a metaphoric writer; the events he tells about are not meant to stand figuratively for abstractable themes or concepts. Yet those events are imbued with a sense of deep meaning—call it religious or moral or philosophical—which makes them a kind of spontaneous metaphor for life's ultimate values. Of Plymouth Plantation is a literary-religious business ledger; metaphorically it envisions life as “business-like,” that is, both “concerned with matters of trade” and “serious and purposeful.” As an abstracted kernel of wisdom, this insight is perhaps both thread-bare and invidious. But as the organizing perception of Bradford's epic history, it is a source of real literary power.

Notes

1. A History of American Literature: 1607-1765 (1878; rpt. New York: Collier, 1962), p. 124.

2. A Preface to Paradise Lost (London: Oxford University Press, 1942), p. 13.

3. Of Plymouth Plantation, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York: Knopf, 1952), p. 27. All subsequent quotations from Of Plymouth Plantation are from this edition, with page numbers cited parenthetically in the text. Pagination is the same in the Modern Library reprint of the Morison edition.

4. The Epic Strain in the English Novel (London: Chatto & Windus, 1958), p. 16.

5. Ibid., p. 15.

6. Roland G. Usher offers an historical judgment on the Pilgrim adventure which might serve as well as a statement of Bradford's literary thesis: “the really significant achievement was not the emigration itself, but the economic success of the years 1621 to 1627.” The Pilgrims and Their History (New York: Macmillan, 1920), p. vii.

7. The Puritans, ed. Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson, rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), I, 89.

8. “Robinson Crusoe as a Myth,” Essays in Criticism, 1 (1951), 95-119.

9. Watt, p. 116.

10. Usher, p. 234.