In the Library
Of Plymouth Plantation
William Bradford, 1856
- Form
- Form Essay
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 11 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 36
- Length
- Length 151k words
£1.99
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and looked not much on those things, but lift up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest cuntrie, and quieted their spirits.
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- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
The reading guide, in the app
How to Read Of Plymouth Plantation
The old spelling looks like a locked door, and it opens the moment you read a sentence aloud and hear a plain, grave man telling you what happened to his friends.
You have probably met this book as a school extract, a paragraph about Pilgrims and turkeys with the spelling tidied away, and the full thing has a reputation for being a dusty Puritan chronicle in a language nobody speaks any more. The language is English, the same English as the King James Bible, and it is only the spelling that has drifted, because Bradford wrote before anyone agreed how words should be spelled and he set them down roughly as he said them. After twenty pages your eye stops noticing, and what is left is a clear, patient voice with a gift for the one sentence that makes you stop.
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Hawthorne returns to the same Puritan New England, but imagines it from the scaffold instead of the governor's chair, and finds the hard faith much colder there.
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About the book
"A hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men." That is the coast as William Bradford first saw it in November, with no friends to welcome the company and no inns to refresh their weather-beaten bodies. Half of them were dead by spring, and the handful still standing nursed and buried the rest. Bradford governed what was left for most of thirty years and kept the record in the same level voice whether he was setting down a harvest, the treaty with Massasoit, or the deaths, his own wife among them, drowned in the harbour that first December and given half a line. In old age he filled the manuscript's opening leaves with Hebrew exercises, wanting to read with his own eyes the holy tongue in which God and angels spoke to the patriarchs, while the plantation he had held together broke apart for better farmland up the coast. The record thins, then stops, and the last leaves of the manuscript are blank.