New-Englands Plantation: With the Sea Journal and Other Writings

This is the original sales pitch for America. Before tourism boards and travel influencers, there was Francis Higginson, a Puritan minister who arrived in Massachusetts in 1629 and immediately fell in love with the place. New-Englands Plantation is his love letter to a new world, written to convince his fellow Englishmen that God had prepared this land for them. Higginson writes with the breathless enthusiasm of a man who cannot believe his good fortune: the soil is rich, the air is sweet, the fish practically jump into your boat. He catalogs everything: the climate, the wildlife, the Indigenous peoples, the political situation. It's part travelogue, part brochure, part religious testimony. Four centuries later, it reads as both a fascinating historical document and a window into the dreams that drove colonization. Higginson was selling something, and he believed in it completely.