Mayflower

of Christian fellowship they would aspire to for the rest of their lives.
    William Bradford soon emerged as one of the leading members of the congregation. When he turned twenty-one in 1611, he sold the property he had inherited in Austerfield and used the proceeds to purchase a small house. A fustian, or corduroy worker, Bradford became a citizen of Leiden in 1612 in recognition of his high standing in the community. In 1613, he married Dorothy May, and four years later they had a son, John. But Bradford’s life in Leiden was not without its setbacks. At one point, some poor business decisions resulted in the loss of a significant portion of his inheritance. In typical Puritan fashion, he interpreted this as a “correction bestowed by God…for certain decays of internal piety.”
    From the beginning, the Pilgrims exhibited all the strengths and weaknesses of a group held together by “a most strict and sacred bond.” When circumstances turned against them, they demonstrated remarkable courage and resilience; indeed, adversity seemed to intensify their clannish commitment to one another. Once established in Leiden, they acquired a renewed sense of purpose—despite, or because of, the hardships of exile.
    Leiden was a thriving city of forty thousand, but it was also a commercial center that required its inhabitants to work at a pace that must have come as a shock to farmers from Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire. A life of husbandry involved periods of intense labor, but its seasonal rhythms left long stretches of relative inactivity. In Leiden, on the other hand, men, women, and even children were expected to work from dawn to dusk, six days a week, with a bell sounding in the tower of the yarn market to announce when work was to begin and end. As the years of ceaseless labor began to mount and their children began to lose touch with their English ancestry, the Pilgrims decided it was time to start over again.
    The members of Robinson’s congregation knew each other wonderfully well, but when it came to the outside world they could sometimes run into trouble. They were too focused on their own inner lives to appreciate the subtleties of character that might have alerted them to the true motives of those who did not share in their beliefs. Time and time again during their preparations to sail for America, the Pilgrims demonstrated an extraordinary talent for getting duped.
    It began badly when William Brewster ran afoul of the English government. In Leiden, he had established a printing press, which he ran with the help of the twenty-three-year-old Edward Winslow. In 1618 Brewster and Winslow published a religious tract critical of the English king and his bishops. James ordered Brewster’s arrest, and when the king’s agents in Holland came to seize the Pilgrim elder, Brewster was forced into hiding just as preparations to depart for America entered the most critical phase.
    Brewster was the only Pilgrim with political and diplomatic experience. As a young man, he had served as an assistant to Queen Elizabeth’s secretary of state, William Davison. Brewster’s budding diplomatic career had been cut short when the queen had used Davison as her scapegoat for the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. With his mentor in prison, Brewster had been forced to return home to Scrooby, where he had taken over his father’s position as postmaster.
    In addition to having once been familiar with the highest levels of political power, Brewster possessed an unusually empathetic nature. “He was tenderhearted and compassionate of such as were in misery,” Bradford wrote, “but especially of such as had been of good estate and rank and were fallen unto want and poverty.” More than anyone else, with the possible exception of Pastor Robinson, Elder Brewster was the person upon whom the congregation depended for guidance and support. But as they wrestled with the myriad details of planning a voyage to America, Brewster was, at least for now, lost to them.
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    By the beginning of the seventeenth century, it had become apparent that the colonization of North America was essential to England’s future prosperity. France, Holland, and especially Spain had already taken advantage of the seemingly limitless resources of the New World. But the British government lacked the financial wherewithal to fund a broad-based colonization effort of its own. Seeing it as an opportunity to