Developing critical thinking

The extracts from William Bradford and Dee Brown both describe the life of the early English settlers in America.

How are the two accounts similar? How do they differ?

Consider how the text describes:

- the colonists' view of the Native Americans;

- the Native Americans' view of the colonists;

- the land as its resources.

Even though the extracts from William Bradford and Dee Brown are both about the same topic (that is the life of the first English colonists in North America), they have many differences between each other.

Firstly, they have been composed in two completely different historical periods: the text by W. Bradford covers a time from 1650 to 1651, while the one by D. Brown is part of a book that was published more than three hundreds years later, in 1971. That means that, while the first text tells about facts that have been directly lived by the writer, the second one is the result of an historical research, based on both European and Indian documents.

You also have to take into account that William Bradford was one of the Pilgrim Fathers who sailed to America in 1620 on the Mayflower and, being the text part of his journal, he describes the life of the first European settlers from the point of view of the Puritans.

Indeed, in his passage the reader might notice how the Puritans' prejudices based on their strong ethical beliefs make them consider the natives as “savage barbarians” and “wild men”, people who are unhelpful and not welcoming. Moreover, the contrast between the barbarians' wilderness and the civil world is underlined by the frequent use of absolute negations that, at the beginning of the extract, are referred to a series of things that belong to the civil world the pilgrims didn't find in America (“no friends to welcome them nor inns to entertain or refresh their weather beaten bodies; no houses or much less towns to repair to, to seek for succour”).

As a consequence of that, the reader of William Bradford's text might imagine the New World as a wild and desolate place, full of unfriendly, unhelpful and savage people who live in a land that, unlike the civil world, has no inns, no town and no houses.

Furthermore, the weather conditions the first English settlers had to face during the first period of their lives in the New World helps the writer to create a negative atmosphere that highlights the pilgrims' solitude in a desolate and wild land.

Indeed, the pilgrims who sailed on the Mayflower in 1620 arrived in Massachusetts in November and, according to William Bradford's testament, had to get through a “sharp and violent” winter with “cruel and nerce storms” completely on their own, being the natives “readier to fill their sides of arrows than otherwise” (lines 6-7).

On the contrary, the extract by Dee Brown describes the Indians as “friendly natives” (line 2) that saved the lives of most of the pilgrims and helped them to get through their first winter in North America.

Indeed, it is told that they helped the first colonists as they were “helpless children”, “showed them where and how to catch fish” and “shared corn with them from the tribal stores”. In addition, when spring came the natives gave the pilgrims some seed corn and showed them “how to plant and cultivate it”.

As regards the part of American land given to the colonists by the Indians, 12000 acres of Pemaquid land became property of the pilgrims when Samoset (an Indian who knew some English and acted as an interpreter) agreed to go through a ceremony of transferring the land to please the white men: the natives believed that the land came from the Great Spirit and belonged to no men and that's why they found the colonists' wishes very strange.

The extract ends with a quite tragic and sad image of the Indians, who are pushed back into the wilderness by the new English settlements, that, after a few years, became bigger and bigger and even more crowded than before.

To sum up, the reader might notice how the situation described changes according to the point of view of the writer and the date of composition of the text: while in the first extract there is a contrast between the friendly people from the civil world and the savage Native Americans, in the second one the English colonists' behaviour after being helped by the Indians makes them ungrateful and self-serving.

In conclusion, from the analysis of these two extracts you can understand the importance of taking into account the contest in which the text has been written and the point of view that might have influenced the writer's description of the facts told.

So, to have an overall view of a topic described by historical documents or researches it would be better to take into account more sources, in order to get information from more points of view and not to be influenced by a single writer's opinion.