Challenges Of Puritan Life

People in our current time generation like to complain about how difficult life is without a simple item. One might say that in 2017 people cannot live without their cellphones and or internet. But life was never that simple. In the time of the Puritans arriving to America, they did not have internet or cell phones to help them. In fact, they struggled at the beginning of their arrival. The greatest challenges the Puritans had to face were the lack of medical supplies for illness, shelter, and food. During the voyage to the New World, the Puritans encountered multiple illnesses. This becomes challenging when there is no medical attention and not even the sailors would help them. In Of Plymouth Plantation, William Bradford states that during the voyage the sailors would only pity them and make fun of them, “He would always be condemning the poor people in their sickness and

Although they were tired from the voyage, they had to immediately begin building homes. In his book, Of Plymouth Plantation, William Bradford mentions that they arrived to an area where there was no place for them to unwind after their voyage, “... they had now no friends to welcome them nor inns to entertain or refresh their weather-beaten bodies; no houses or much less towns to repair to, to seek for succor” (holt 123). They did not have friends to salute them and the natives in that area were inhospitable.
There was very little food during winter. Most Puritans would starve due to food shortages. According to Mary Rowlandson’s book A Narrative of the Captivity, they did not even have a crumb of food, “It man be easily judged what a poor feeble condition we were in, there being not the least crumb of refreshing that came within either of our months from Wednesday night to Saturday night, except only a little cold water” (holt 37). It was not just the Puritans who were hungering, but so did the Native