The overall central idea is how Bradford and the Pilgrims survived the twenty-year journey in the history of Plymouth Plantation by trust and faith in God’s will. This was shown in the chronicles of finding the colony, the First Thanksgiving, and the colony’s encounters with Native Americans. His purpose of recounting and writing the events he experienced firsthand is for the children to “see with what difficulties their fathers wrestled in going through these things in their first beginnings, and how God brought them along notwithstanding all their weaknesses and infirmities,” a passage he noted at the end of chapter six.