I remember hearing a dramatization of the Pilgrims’ voyage to what became Plymouth Colony and their first year there. I had known about most of the events dramatized in the recording, notably the major Atlantic storms they had to traverse which cracked the main beam, which event almost caused the entire enterprise to be abandoned in favor of a return to England.
However, there was one event which I had not known: the suicide of Dorothy Bradford, William Bradford’s young wife. The dramatization posited that she greatly missed he 3-year-old son which the couple had left in England pending a future voyage once the colony had been better prepared to receive the child. That longing developed into a discouragement which compelled her to jump into the icy bay.
The drama treated this event with great sensitivity; however, that did not diminish my wonder as to why I had never heard this before.
As the years went by, I learned that although Dorothy Bradford did indeed die in 1620, there is no contemporary evidence that she died by her own hand. William Bradford, self-effacing as ever, merely lists her death as one of the many that first year. The great New England clergyman, Cotton Mather, 80 years later, wrote a history of Plymouth Colony in which he notes that William Bradford’s wife, Dorothy, died by accident, falling overboard and drowning in the harbor in December, 1620.
Mather’s account makes much sense given that the weather had turned bitterly cold that December and we know many on the Mayflower suffered from scurvy, malnutrition, and overall weakness, all of which would exacerbate the danger of the icy decks on which a passenger walked and slipped into the freezing cold bay waters.
Imagine my surprise when I later learned that the suicide narrative originated from a mid-19th Century work of fiction published in Harper’s.
We await for a talented biographer or, if primary documents are not available, a sympathetic novelist to develop a true-to-life story of Dorothy Bradford: her marriage at 16 to 23-year-old William Bradford; her entrusting her 3-year-old to family in England; her suffering from scurvy and malnutrition; her seeing the Massachusetts shore and bidding her husband farewell as he went ashore with a scouting party to seek a decent site for the colony; and her accident on an icy deck which resulted in her death by drowning.
Such a biographer or novelist might also weave his or her work in such a manner as to demonstrate that a short life devoted to God, husband, and son can also serve to propel great things which she never saw in her life on earth, but will understand One Day.
Her and William’s son, John Bradford, arrived in Plymouth in 1640, twenty years after his mother’s death.
