Chief of the Pilgrims

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William Brewster was an important official who helped organize passage aboard the Mayflower, an English ship which took a group of migrating families to Massachusetts. This biography begins long before the Mayflower's famous voyage of 1620. We are treated to a deep examination of politics and religion in Elizabethan England, which shaped the actions which Brewster later took. His education in Cambridge, and early experience in the ambassadorial and diplomatic service, would prove invaluable to his later efforts in promoting the establishment of the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts. Much of the groundwork took place in Holland, where Brewster worked as a teacher, meeting a number of likeminded Puritans who aspired to a new life in North America. As we learn in this text, organizing and financing this trans-Atlantic journey was a complex and arduous task. As the most formally qualified and experienced passenger, Brewster was instrumental to readying the Mayflower ship and the families who joined the voyage. After some ten weeks at sea the colonists arrived in Plymouth, yet many soon perished amid a harsh winter. Several years on, Brewster lost two of his daughters to an outbreak of smallpox, while he himself survived and endured as the elder of Plymouth, dying in 1644 at about 76 years of age.