Of the hundred or so persons who landed with the Mayflower, November 11, 1620, at Plymouth, William Bradford tells us that more than half died in the first two or three months, “especially in January and February, being the depth of winter and wanting houses and other comforts.” The natural environment, as Michael Wigglesworth described it in 1662, was a “Devil's den”:

The Bible represents wilderness as otherness – the desert into which Moses and the Israelites wandered, where Christ struggled with Satan, where prophets such as Elijah and John the Baptist fled, and from which voices arose presaging grave events. Bradford and the Pilgrims, John Winthrop and those who migrated to New England during the latter part of the seventeenth century, the fur traders, and after them the hunters, the soldiers, the homesteaders, the empire builders – all learned what we would learn if we visited, even for a short while, an uncivilized place: that nature – and nature meant the wilderness for those people – is