A Briefe Discription of New England and the Severall Townes Therein: Together with the Present Government Thereof

One of the earliest surviving eyewitness accounts of colonial New England, written in the 1660s by a man who was there at the founding. Samuel Maverick arrived in Massachusetts Bay in the 1620s and spent decades navigating the brutal politics of early settlement, the tensions between Puritans and more tolerant colonists, and the fraught negotiations with Indigenous peoples. This text is his survey of the region's towns, harbors, timber, and governance - written by someone who had skin in the game and enemies to match. Maverick was no impartial observer; he quarreled with the Massachusetts Bay Company, befriended Roger Williams, and recorded the grievances of those who chafed under Puritan rule. Reading him means hearing a 350-year-old voice describe a world being built and burned in real time. For anyone curious about how America actually started - not the myth, but the messy, violent, ambitious reality - this is a primary source that refuses to sanitize what it saw.