<span>William Bradford (1590-1657) was a founder and longtime governor of the Plymouth Colony settlement. Born in England, he migrated with the Separatist congregation to the Netherlands as a teenager. Bradford was among the passengers on the Mayflower’s trans-Atlantic journey, and he signed the Mayflower Compact upon arriving in Massachusetts in 1620. As Plymouth Colony governor for more than thirty years, Bradford helped draft its legal code and facilitated a community centered on private subsistence agriculture and religious tolerance. Around 1630, he began to compile his two-volume “Of Plymouth Plantation,” one of the most important early chronicles of the settlement of New England.</span>
English Puritan William Bradford, who escaping religious persecution moved first to the Netherlands and later on to what originally was <em>"The Plymouth Colony"</em> in America around 1620 and afterward a coastal town at the south of Boston, Massachusetts; as a founder of the colony, he wrote a journal over several years <em>(Of Plymouth Plantation)</em> narrating the Pilgrims' experiences through the early years of the colony.
