By James Daugherty
The Pilgrims' voyage and first winter at Plymouth, drawn from William Bradford's own journal by a 1950 author who took its providence as plain fact.
It opens in England around 1600, with a boy named William Bradford deciding he should get to choose his own church, a choice that could get a person hanged at the time. His congregation flees to Holland, can't earn a living there, and stakes everything on a single ship. The crossing runs sixty-six days: a main beam cracks in mid-ocean and gets propped with a heavy iron screw someone had packed for a printing press, and a passenger swept overboard is hauled back by a trailing rope. They reach the wrong stretch of coast in November, with no food and winter already on them. That first winter kills half the colony. Then spring comes, and a man walks out of the woods speaking English. Daugherty wrote all of it in 1950 from Bradford's journal, and it moves fast because he was sure this was the best story America had to tell.
The Landmark books were built to make American history read like adventure, and this is one that pulled it off. Daugherty had Bradford's journal and he used it, so the details are specific and strange and clearly not invented: the screw and the cracked beam, the beer running short, the exact foods they didn't have. Nothing is generic. If your child has only ever met the Pilgrims as construction-paper hats, the real thing, cold and hungry and half of them dead by March, comes as a genuine shock, and that shock is what makes it stick. Daugherty drew his own illustrations too, and he was good at it.