Mourt's Relation

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The frontispiece of Mourt's Relation, published in London in 1622

The booklet Mourt's Relation (full title: A Relation or Journal of the Beginning and Proceedings of the English Plantation Settled at Plimoth in New England) was written between November 1620 and November 1621, and describes in detail what happened from the landing of the

Pilgrims on Cape Cod in Provincetown Harbor through their exploring and eventual settling of Plymouth Colony
.

Authors

Plimoth Patuxet in Plymouth, Massachusetts

It was written primarily by

George Morton, sometimes called George Mourt",[1]
which led to its title, Mourt's Relation.

Morton was an

Separatist who had moved to Leiden, Holland. He stayed behind when the first settlers left for Plymouth, Massachusetts,[2] but he continued to orchestrate business affairs in Europe and London for their cause—presumably arranging for the publication of and perhaps helping write Mourt's Relation.[3]
In 1623, Morton himself emigrated to the Plymouth Colony with his wife Juliana, the sister of Governor William Bradford's wife Alice. But George Morton didn't survive long in the New World; he died the following year in 1624.

George Morton's son

William Bradford who raised him after the death of his father, and the author of the influential early history of the Plymouth Colony "New England's Memorial."[4]

Legacy

A sixty-year long tradition at The Wall Street Journal is to reprint the section on the "first Thanksgiving" on the Wednesday before the holiday.[5]

The booklet was summarized by other publications without the now-familiar Thanksgiving story, but the original booklet appeared to be lost or forgotten by the eighteenth century. A copy was rediscovered in Philadelphia in 1820, with the first full reprinting in 1841. In a footnote, editor Alexander Young was the first person to identify the 1621 feast as "the first Thanksgiving."[6]

In 1921, a copy sold at auction for $3,800.[7]

Notes

  1. ^ Wilson, J. G.; Fiske, J., eds. (1900). "Morton, George" . Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. New York: D. Appleton.
  2. ^ The Carpenter Sisters of Leiden, Robert Jennings Heinsohn, Ph.D., sail1620.org Archived 2004-04-16 at the Wayback Machine
  3. ^ Nathaniel Morton and His Book, Mrs. Morris P. Ferris, The New York Times, August 13, 1898
  4. ^ New-England's Memorial, Nathaniel Morton, Secretary to the Court for the Jurisdiction of New-Plimouth, Congregational Board of Publications, Boston, 1855
  5. ^ The Wall Street Journal section on the "first Thanksgiving" https://currentpub.com/2021/11/24/the-wall-street-journal-will-run-its-traditional-thanksgiving-editorials/
  6. .
  7. ^ "Plymouth Colony Book Brings $3,800" (PDF). The New York Times. No. Vol. LXX, No. 23, 012. 25 January 1921. Retrieved 25 January 2021. {{cite news}}: |issue= has extra text (help)

References

External links