The Pilgrim Story: Being Largely a Compilation from the Documents of Governor Bradford and Governor Winslow, Severally and in Collaboration; Together with a List of Mayflower Passengers.

They fled England to escape execution for their faith. They endured twelve years in foreign Holland, watching their children forget their native tongue. Then, in 1620, they boarded a ship not built for the Atlantic crossing and sailed toward an unknown shore. This is their story in their own words. William Franklin Atwood has assembled the actual journals and accounts of Governors William Bradford and Edward Winslow, the two men who led the Plymouth Colony, into a seamless narrative that carries readers from the secret meetings in Scrooby, England, through the harrowing Mayflower voyage, to that first brutal winter when half the colony died. The result is something more powerful than any textbook account: raw testimony from people who survived the improbable, written in grief and wonder, documenting how a band of religious outcasts built a new world from nothing. Here are the awkward first encounters with Native Americans, the prayers that turned the tide, the impossible choices that meant life or death for everyone. This edition endures because it strips away the mythology and returns to the primary sources, the actual words of people who were there. For anyone curious about the real story behind America's founding, Atwood's compilation remains essential reading.