From Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbreck:

They spent Monday exploring what was to become their new home. They sounded the harbor and found it suitable for ships the size of the Mayflower. They ventured on land, but nowhere in either Of Plymouth Plantation or Mourt's Relation, the book Bradford and Winslow wrote after their first year in America, is there any mention of a Pilgrim stepping on a rock. Like Cape Cod to the southeast, the shore of Plymouth Bay is nondescript and sandy. But at the foot of a high hill, just to the north of a brook, was a rock that must have been impossible to miss. More than twice as big as the mangled chunk of stone that is revered today as Plymouth Rock, this two-hundred-ton granite boulder loomed above the low shoreline like a recumbent elephant. But did the Pilgrims use it as a landing place?

At half tide and above, a small boat could have sailed right up alongside the rock. For these explorers, who were suffering from chills and coughs after several weeks of wading up and down the frigid flats of Cape Cod, the ease of access offered by the rock must have been difficult to resist. But if they did use it as their first stepping-stone onto the banks of Plymouth Harbor, Bradford never made note of the historic event. That would be left to subsequent generations of mythmakers.

They marched across the shores of Plymouth "and found divers cornfields and little running brooks, a place (as they supposed) fit for situation." Best of all, despite the signs of cultivation, they found no evidence of any recent Indian settlements. The next day they boarded the shallop and sailed for the Mayflower with the good news.

It had been a long month of exploration. Later, when looking back on their trek across the wastes of Cape Cod, Bradford could not help but see their wintry walkabout in biblical terms. New World Israelites, they had, with God's help, finally found their Canaan. But back then, in the late afternoon of Tuesday, December 12, as the shallop approached the Mayflower, Bradford and his compatriots had little reason to believe they had found the Promised Land.

Plymouth Harbor was commodious, but much of it was so shallow that a ship the size of the Mayflower, which drew twelve feet, must anchor more than a mile from shore. The harbor was also without a navigable river to provide access to the country's interior. It was true that there were no Native settlements nearby, but that didn't mean they would be immune to attack. The Indians in the region had already surprised them once; it would probably happen again. Worst of all, they were approaching what Bradford called "the heart of winter," and many of them were sick; indeed, some were on the verge of death.

And then that evening, Bradford received what would have been, for many men, the final blow. He learned that five days before, Dorothy May Bradford, his wife of seven years and the mother of his three-year-old son, John, had slipped over the side of the Mayflower and drowned.

Bradford never wrote about the circumstances of his wife's death. Much later in the century, the Puritan historian Cotton Mather recorded that Dorothy Bradford had accidentally fallen overboard and "was drowned in the harbor." That she fell from a moored ship has caused some to wonder whether she committed suicide.

Dorothy certainly had ample reason to despair: She had not seen her son in more than four months; her husband had left the day before on his third dangerous trip away from her in as many weeks. On the same day the shallop had departed, seven-year-old Jasper More, one of the four children placed on the Mayflower by their cuckolded father, I died in the care of the Brewster family. Two other More children would die in the months ahead. For Dorothy, whose own young son was on the other side of the Atlantic, the plight of these and the other children may have been especially difficult to witness.

We think of the Pilgrims as resilient adventurers upheld by unwavering religious faith, but they were also human beings in the midst of I what was, and continues to be, one of the most difficult emotional challenges a person can face: immigration and exile. Less than a year later, another group of English settlers arrived at Provincetown Harbor and were so overwhelmed by this "naked and barren place" that they convinced themselves that the Pilgrims must all be dead. In fear of being forsaken by the ship's captain, the panicked settlers began to strip the sails from the yards "lest the ship should get away and leave them." If Dorothy experienced just a portion of the terror and sense of abandonment that gripped these settlers, she may have felt that suicide was her only choice.

Even if his wife's death had been unintentional, Bradford believed that God controlled what happened on earth. As a consequence, every occurrence meant something. John Howland had been rescued in the midst of a gale at sea, but Dorothy, his "dearest consort," had drowned in the placid waters of Provincetown Harbor.

The only clue Bradford left us about his own feelings is in a poem he wrote toward the end of his life.

Faint not, poor soul, in God still trust,

Fear not the things thou suffer must;

For, whom he loves he doth chastise,

And then all tears wipes from their eyes.