William Bradford

William Bradford was an English Separatist who travelled on the Mayflower in 1620 and became one of the principal leaders of Plymouth Colony. He served repeatedly as governor and helped guide the settlement through its early years of disease, food shortages, political uncertainty and changing relations with neighbouring Indigenous peoples.

Bradford also wrote Of Plymouth Plantation, the major surviving narrative of the community’s migration from England to the Netherlands and then to New England. His account records the colony’s government, religious ideals and internal disputes, while also providing essential—though distinctly colonial—evidence for encounters and alliances with the Wampanoag and other Native communities.

In Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower, William Bradford and Myles Standish confront hunger, disease and political uncertainty, while the settlement’s survival depends on an alliance with the Wampanoag sachem Massasoit and the mediation of Tisquantum. Nathaniel Philbrick’s The Mayflower Papers includes selections from William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation; Bradford and Edward Winslow’s Mourt’s Relation; Winslow’s Good News from New England; Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan; Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative; and Benjamin Church’s account of King Philip’s War. Further fictional perspectives on William Bradford can be found in Jeanne Blanchet’s Rite of Passage.