This is a firsthand account of the founding of the Plymouth settlement in Massachusetts by the pilgrims who came over in the Mayflower. Reading (or rather, listening to the audiobook) it really brought home to me just how difficult it is to settle a new land, especially given the conditions back in the 1600's. Like any other ambitious group enterprise there was politics, intrigue, and all the ups and downs of getting along with one another, dealing with people's foibles, keeping the investors financing the enterprise interested, cultivating alliances with local Native American tribes, and so forth.
There are times when the book drags as Bradford will occasionally go into painstaking detail over things I wasn't too interested in, like exactly what was the cargo on a particular ship or what the terms of a particular agreement were, but this was written as a straightforward record of the settlement's founding, not a novel for readers' entertainment, so I won't quibble over that.
You'll have a new appreciation for what Thanksgiving is all about after reading this.
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