Governor Bradford s Letter Book is so little known it has been decided to reprint it in this magazine and make it accessible to all. Unforttinately the fragment of the original manuscript rescued by Mr. Clarke cannot now be found, and the text printed in the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Volume III (1794), pages 27 to 76 inclusive, has been followed. From the first volume of the Proceedings of the same society we also reprint in full the account of the receipt of the manuscript, and notes regarding it. P roceedings, Vol. I, pp. 51, 52 At a meeting of the Historical Society, on Tuesday, the thirtieth day of July, 1793, at Winthrop sor Governor s Island The following donations were received: For the Library: Fragment of a MS. Letter-book of Governor Bradford, of Plymouth, from 1624 to 1630, found in a grocers shop in Halifax, Nova Scotia. From James Clarke, Esq., of Halifax. This fragment of Governor Bradford s Letter-book was printed in Vol. III. of the Collections, making fifty pages. It appears from a note at the beginning of the printed text that the MS. of the part preserved began with page 339, the preceding pages wanting, and covered the years 1624 1630. This shows that what was recovered was but a small part of what was lost; while it is probable that the collection originally contained also letters of a later date than 1630. Governor Bradford s History dosed with the year 1646, and the letters which he had preserved to illustrate that part of the narrative, from 1630 to its conclusion, may have been included in his Letter-book, as well as those used in the earlier portion. The fragment recovered may have been one volume of a series continuously paged. The fortunate recovery of Governor Bradford s History, some sixty years after Mr. James Clarke rescued this fragment from a grocers shop in Halifax, happily supplies to a certain e(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)
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