author
Francis Higginson
1587–1630
An early Puritan minister who crossed the Atlantic with the Massachusetts Bay settlers, he left one of the best-known first-hand accounts of New England’s earliest colonial years. His writing captures both the hope and the hardship of building a new community in Salem.
1 Audiobook
New-Englands plantation : with the sea journal and other writings
by Francis Higginson
About the author
Educated at Jesus College, Cambridge, Francis Higginson became a minister in England before moving toward Puritan nonconformity. Pressure over his religious views eventually helped push him toward emigration.
In 1629 he sailed to New England with the Massachusetts Bay Company and became the first teacher of the church at Salem. He is especially remembered for his journal of the voyage and his 1630 pamphlet New-England's Plantation, which gave English readers an early description of the colony, its landscape, and daily life.
Higginson died in Salem in 1630, not long after his arrival, but his brief time in New England left a lasting written record of the colony’s beginnings. Because of that surviving account, he remains an important witness to the first phase of Puritan settlement in Massachusetts.