Bradford was among the travellers on the Mayflower's overseas excursion, and he marked the Mayflower Compact after showing up in Massachusetts in 1620. As Plymouth Colony lead representative for over thirty years, Bradford helped draft its lawful code and encouraged a network focused on private means agribusiness and strict resistance. Around 1630, he started to aggregate his two-volume "Of Plymouth Plantation," one of the most significant early annals of the settlement of New England.

Conceived of considerable yeomen in Yorkshire, England, Bradford communicated his free thinker strict sensibilities in his initial adolescents and joined the acclaimed Separatist church in Scrooby at seventeen years old. In 1609 he moved with the assembly, driven by John Robinson, to the Netherlands. For the following eleven years he and his kindred strict protesters lived in Leyden until their dread of digestion into Dutch culture provoked them to leave on the Mayflower for the journey to North America.

The Pilgrims showed up in what became Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1621 with countless non-Separatist pioneers. Before landing, the assemblage drew up the primary New World implicit understanding, the Mayflower Compact, which all the male pilgrims marked.