76 pages • 2 hours read
William BradfordOf Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1651A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaBook 2, Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 2
Book 2, Chapter 7 Summary
Standish returns from England in April 1625 with news that Cushman and Robinson have died, along with King James I and a Dutch prince: "Thus these two great princes and the colonists' old pastor left this world about the same time: Death makes no difference" (113).He also brings letters from the congregation in Leyden, which increasingly despairs of ever being able to make the journey to America.
All of this news is disturbing to the Pilgrims, but while at their lowest, God steps in to help them. The settlers had lost most of their fishing boats in various accidents, so they are now able to concentrate solely on farming and trading. In particular, they are often able to buy goods that they later trade at a profit, which helps them pay off their debts and even buy some new supplies, such as clothing. Eventually, other groups begin to copy the Pilgrims' practices, driving down the price the local tribes are willing to pay for corn.
That same year, the settlers at Plymouth send another representative to England—Mr. Allerton—to come to a final agreement with the investors and to raise additional money. In addition, they convince a carpenter living in the settlement to try to build a pinnace to replace some of the trading vessels they have lost. His efforts are successful, and the Pilgrims go on to use the ship he built for seven years.
Book 2, Chapter 8 Summary
Allerton returns from England in 1827, having reached an agreement to buy out the investors for £1800 pounds (in £200 installments): this transfers ownership of the colony's trade to a handful of Pilgrims—Allerton, Standish, and Bradford included. The Pilgrims then decide to split land and livestock proportionally among all households based on a headcount.
Meanwhile, a ship traveling to Virginia is wrecked near Cape Cod. The survivors soon encounter a group of Native Americans, who offer to help them find or communicate with the Pilgrims at Plymouth. The survivors agree and send a request to Bradford, asking for supplies to repair their ship. In response, Bradford personally visits them, bringing not only the materials they need but also goods to trade with the tribe. The survivors have barely gotten underway, however, when their ship runs aground again, at which point they ask for and receive permission to settle temporarily in Plymouth. The Pilgrims eventually expel some of the "undesirable" settlers—a man, for instance, who had gotten his maid pregnant—but profit from selling supplies to the group.
The Pilgrims continue to expand their trade by building another boat and sending Allerton back to England with instructions both to finalize the agreement with the investors, and to buy more land if possible: "For the settlers at Piscataqua and other places to the eastward of them, and also the fishing ships, competed with them for the trade of the Indians…. […][The Pilgrims] thought it essential to prevent this, and at least to preserve free trade for themselves in localities which they themselves first discovered and developed" (121). In addition, he is instructed to present an offer to a handful of English businessmen who may wish to join Allerton, Bradford, Standish, etc. as co-owners of the colony's trade.
Around this time, Dutch colonists in New Amsterdam reach out to the Pilgrims and, reminding them of the historically friendly relations between the English and Dutch, ask if they would be willing to trade. The Pilgrims agree to trade for beaver and otter, and the two colonies maintain close economic ties for many years
Book 2, Chapter 9 Summary
While in England, Allerton is able to finalize the agreement with the investors, confirming that the Pilgrims will pay off their debt over the next six years and drafting a contract appointing one of their new English partners—James Sherley—as the Pilgrims' legal representative back in Europe. Sherley himself sends this contract to the Pilgrims for confirmation, along with a letter explaining that the Pilgrims' recent economic success has convinced their remaining backers to furnish them with additional supplies, despite the settlers' outstanding debts. When Allerton returns to Plymouth, he brings a patent for additional land, along with word that more members of the Leyden congregation will likely be able to come to America the following year. Bradford, however, hints that Allerton will ultimately betray the Pilgrims' trust.
In the meantime, the Pilgrims continue to build their trading network, erecting a trading house on the new land in Kennebec and furnishing the Dutch with tobacco in exchange for goods like linen, sugar, and—most importantly—wampum, or decorative beads. The wampum in turn opens up further trade with the local tribes, though not without consequences:
The natives of these parts and in Massachusetts hitherto had none or very little of this wampum…. […] But after it grew to be valuable here, the local Indians took to it too, and learned how to make it, gathering the shells from the shores…. […] It makes the tribes hereabouts rich and powerful and proud, and provides them with arms and powder and shot, through the depravity of some unworthy persons (128).
As an example of these "unworthy persons" (128), Bradford describes a rebellion that takes place in a settlement established by a man named Captain Wollaston. The leader of the uprising, Morton, "be[comes] lord of misrule" (129), and the colonists "[fall] to utter licentiousness" (129)—they drink, take Native American women as mistresses, and dance around a maypole. To fund these revelries, they sell arms to the local tribes, and colonists from several different settlements eventually band together to confront Morton. After initial attempts to reason with Morton fail, Captain Standish goes and arrests him by force. He is subsequently sent back to England but escapes punishment and returns to America the following year. Bradford uses this story to lament that the English government has not cracked down on the Native Americans who have killed European settlers.
The chapter concludes with a handful of other events that took place in 1628, including the arrival and quick departure of a minister the Pilgrims discover to be "crazed in the brain" (132). More significantly, the Pilgrims again send Allerton over to England despite the fact that he had previously taken advantage of his position to bring back goods to trade privately, for his own profit: "But love thinks no evil, nor is suspicious; so they took his fair words for excuse, and decided to send him again to England this year, considering how well he had done formerly and how well he stood with their friends there" (132).
Book 2, Chapters 7-9 Analysis
With Weston now more or less out of the picture, Allerton emerges as a new "villain" (130). Unlike Weston, however, Allerton is a Pilgrim himself, and a respected member of the community. The fact that he repeatedly ignores instructions in order to pursue his own profit reveals some of the social and philosophical tensions within Plymouth. Allerton's decision to set up his own line of business might seem like the kind of industriousness the Pilgrims exhibit, but it undermines his legitimacy as a representative of the group as a whole and challenges the stability of a society that values cooperation and uniformity. His actions also threaten to cut into Plymouth's profits by opening up a new source of competition; "free-trade" (121) for the Pilgrims does not mean freedom for everyone to trade, but rather the ability for the Pilgrims to trade freely in the areas they develop.
Competition or not, Plymouth is clearly becoming a major economic power in the region by this point. In this section, the Pilgrims not only strike up a trading relationship with the Dutch, but trade so extensively with the local Native American tribes that they actually create a demand for goods that the tribes had previously done without—most notably, wampum and guns. The Pilgrims are not pleased with the demand for the latter, which is an early indication that their view of the Native Americans goes beyond simple xenophobia to approach something like modern imperialism. By the 1600s, Europe had been trading with other regions of the world for centuries, and while they might view other peoples with suspicion, the trade itself took place on mostly even footing. Now, however, European traders have a clear technological advantage over everyone else, and the Pilgrims at least do not intend to give that advantage up. Although the tribes mentioned in Of Plymouth Plantation do manage to get hold of guns and ammunition, this gap in technology would eventually enable European colonists to "trade"(129) on wildly unequal terms, taking whatever resources they wanted and offering very little in exchange.
On a more positive note, Bradford's reaction to the deaths of early 1625 make it clear that the Pilgrims had a hand in establishing democracy and egalitarianism as ideals in American culture. Because they are concerned primarily with an individual's spiritual state, the Pilgrims are relatively unconcerned with differences of status and rank; Bradford depicts royalty, for instance, as a kind of worldly convention that eventually falls away with death. Arguably, the Pilgrims' actions do not always reflect this belief in the spiritual equality of all humans, but the belief itself was a fairly revolutionary one at a time when absolute monarchy and extreme social stratification were commonplace in Western societies.
