The Pilgrim Chronicles: An Eyewitness History of the Pilgrims and the Founding of
Plymouth Colony offers a complete story of the Pilgrims and their journey, the origins of their Thanksgiving feast, and tells of a search for peace, faith, and a new home.
The extracts below are taken from "Of Plymouth Plantation 1620-1647'' by William Bradford, who was five times governor of
Plymouth Colony, and who chronicled the lives, triumphs and tragedies of early New England.
The holiday began in 1621 when the founders of the
Plymouth colony gave thanks for a bountiful harvest and shared a meal with Native Americans in present-day Massachusetts.
And so, with the aid of an egg-shaped, government-built time machine named Steve (amusingly voiced by George Takei), Reggie and Jake zip back to 1621, just as
Plymouth Colony settlers are preparing to round up all the turkeys in the area in preparation for the Harvest Feast.
In the quotation, Washington referred to the "pilgrims" of the
Plymouth colony but the Plymouth colonists weren't called "pilgrims" until 30 years after Washington's death.
The Pilgrim Fathers - the group that would go on to sail aboard the Mayflower and found the
Plymouth colony in Massachusetts, where you'll find the more famous Boston - tried first to go to Holland in 1607, with their ship set to set off from the Lincolnshire port.
The brief 1621 treaty between
Plymouth Colony and Massasoit, a Wampanoag Sachem, included a non-reciprocal requirement that the Wampanoag turn over any Indian who "did any hurt" to an Englishman that "they might punish him." (17) Plymouth was not alone in making these demands.
They certainly did not credit George Parsons Lathrop, Hawthorne's son-in-law, who in 1876 wrote, "I may here transcribe, as a further authority, which Hawthorne may or may not have seen, one of the laws of
Plymouth Colony, enacted in 1658." (7)
In 1620 the Pilgrim Fathers set sail for the New World from Plymouth, establishing
Plymouth Colony - the second English colony in what is now the US.
This paper analyzes probate inventories from
Plymouth Colony in New England, dating from 1628-1687.
The final third of the book focuses on
Plymouth Colony and New England.
Immediately in the first chapter, Allen uses Boston's Old
Plymouth Colony Club as a microcosm for the birth of what would eventually become a movement that spread throughout British North America.
He then crosses the Atlantic and discusses the long-term impact of the separatist
Plymouth colony on religious and civic governance in Massachusetts, before returning to England and considering the influence of this Atlantic republican tradition on mid-17th-century English religious and political upheavals.
In keeping with its religious viewpoint, the
Plymouth Colony prescribed the death penalty for adulterers, homosexuals and witches, whipping for those who denied the scriptures and fines for anyone harboring a Quaker.
The County of Plymouth, Massachusetts, was established on June 2, 1685, by the General Court of
Plymouth Colony. The patch of its sheriff's department shows the Mayflower at rest after landing its passengers on Plymouth Rock in 1620.
