Bradford, Edward Winslow, and others contributed material to George Morton, who merged everything into a letter which he published as Mourt's Relation in London in 1622.[3] It was primarily a journal of the colonists' first years at Plymouth.
The Bradford journal records the events of the first 30 years of Plymouth Colony, as well as the reactions of the colonists to those events, and it is regarded by historians as the preeminent work of 17th century America. It is Bradford's simple yet vivid account that has made the Pilgrims what Samuel Eliot Morison called the "spiritual ancestors of all Americans".[4]
Bradford apparently never made an effort to publish the manuscript during his lifetime, but he did intend it to be preserved and read by others. He wrote at the end of chapter 6:
I have been the larger in these things, and so shall crave leave in some like passages following, (though in other things I shall labour to be more contract) that their children may see with what difficulties their fathers wrestled in going through these things in their first beginnings, and how God brought them along notwithstanding all their weaknesses and infirmities. As also that some use may be made hereof in after times by others in such like weighty employments; and herewith I will end this chapter.[5]
