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with the Puritanical beliefs that all people are depraved, that only God elects those who will be saved, that His grace flows freely to the chosen few, and other such maxims ofCalvinist philosophy that would have been meaningful, even comforting, to a boy who had been thrown into a world of unrelenting hardship.
    While other children his age played quarterstaff and barleybreak, typicalvillage sports of the period, young Bradford took Clyfton’s preaching to heart and pursued intense Bible study. A boy with stern will and a spiritual zeal, he was jailed at seventeen with the rest ofthe Saints for trying to escape England for more religiously tolerant Holland. They emigrated successfully the following year. The Dutch tolerated Separatism, as they did other forms of aberrant behavior—drunkenness, promiscuity, festivals, free speech, and various notions of liberal government that rankled the authoritarian Saints. To be sure, as Bradford insisted, it was “not out of any newfangledness, or other such like giddie humor” that the congregation struck out for North America; it was “for sundrie weightie & solid reasons,” particularly the “great licentiousness of the [Dutch] youth” and “manifold temptations of the place.” Just as Eurailers flocked to Amsterdam for coffeehouses and sex tourism, so too were young Separatists hooked by Holland’s “evill examples into extravagante & dangerous courses”—chief among which, in Bradford’s words, was their desire to pull their “neks” from their parents’ “raines.” Never mind that Bradford himself had been a willful child.
    All along the Saints had wanted to “separate”—from the Anglican Church, from England’s monarchy, from any pollutants and social deterrents that threatened to maculate their pious cloth, hence the nickname “Separatists.” Their decision to shun urban Renaissance comforts for “those vast & unpeopled” (Bradford’s word) wilds of North America must have called for a deeper appreciation of the anguish that had brought them closer to God.
    But separate they did. They endured their share of hardship on the crossing—from scurvy to seasickness to a narrowly avoided mutiny, but Bradford gets most exercised in his account of a “lustie” and “very profane younge” seaman whom it “plased God … to smite … with a grievous disease, of which he dyed in a desperate manner.” (He was unceremoniously buried at sea.) This death is the first of many cautionary tales that brighten the pages of Bradford’s
Historie
—and warn against the evils of having fun.
    The Separatists themselves, with few “sadd” exceptions, liked to follow the rules. They relocated from the
Mayflower
to a Wampanoag village (whose previous tenants had died of the plague), and there they founded a highly regulated community devoted to work and constant worship. That first punishing winter on savage Cape Cod, when halfof their number died, Bradford’s inner circle ofJohn Carver,William Brewster, andMyles Standish “spared no pains, night nor day” to care for each other in their hours of need—building fires, dressing meat, fetching wood, even scrubbing one another’s “lothsome clothes.” Meanwhile, a band of non-Separatist so-calledStrangers who “had been boone companions in drinking & joylity” turned on each other when hardship set in, isolating themselves and refusing to help. One of them denied Bradford “but a small cann of beere” and in this way secured his low place in the annals of American history.
    Such fun-loving, beere-cann-hoarding, fair-weather friends became a running joke for Bradford. They pitched their tents on sandy ground and looked like jerks beside the Separatists. His message was clear: a life built on frivolous pleasure, not work, spreads its infection to the surrounding community. It had best be yanked like a rotten tooth.
    One year after the
Mayflower
arrived, a smaller ship, the
Fortune,
plagued Plymouth