Unsettling Transformations

Abstract

Much of the early material in William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, and particularly the crucial chapters between chapter 9 (the Mayflower’s 1620 sighting of and landing at Cape Cod) and chapter 28 (the Pequot War of 1637), defines the New World’s land and identity, and those people already inhabiting it, as explicitly alternative and opposed to both that which the Pilgrims have left behind and their own community and mission. These definitions are most famously found in the initial description of the New World in chapter 9:

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 succor. It is recorded in Scripture as a mercy to the Apostle and his shipwrecked company, that the barbarians showed them no small kindness in refreshing them, but these savage barbarians, when they met with them … were readier to fill their sides full of arrows than otherwise. And for the season it was winter, they that know the winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent, and subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search an unknown coast. Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men—and what multitudes there might be of them they knew not. (60–61)