----- Original Message ---- From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> "The thing that sets Plymouth apart is the records that were kept by Bradford." Umm, as someone whose family could claim membership in the Jamestown Society as well as the Mayflower Society I have to take issue with this. Bradford's history is surely part of the equation, though John Smith did some writing too. The fact is, the story of Jamestown just ain't pretty. It was a commercial venture and the colonists were a highly stratified society with initially no women and then not many. The colonists were there to exploit the country, not find a new home, and soon they were living in horrifying squalor, eating dogs, cats, rats and then their own dead with one man killing his wife and cutting her up to stock his pantry. Starving men were executed for stealing morsels of food, the laws make Draco look like a pussycat, the history is of one extraordinary catastrophe after another. I mean it just doesn't make the grade as the foundation of the national mythos. Not that we might not be better off thinking about it. Just sayin'