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Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War
by Nathaniel Philbrick
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Synopses & Reviews From the bestselling author of In the Heart of the Sea — winner of the National Book Award — the startling story of the Plymouth Colony.
From the perilous ocean crossing to the shared bounty of the first Thanksgiving, the Pilgrim settlement of New England has become enshrined as our most sacred national myth. Yet, as bestselling author Nathaniel Philbrick reveals in his spellbinding new book, the true story of the Pilgrims is much more than the well-known tale of piety and sacrifice; it is a fifty-five-year epic that is at once tragic, heroic, exhilarating, and profound.
The Mayflower's religious refugees arrived in Plymouth Harbor during a period of crisis for Native Americans as disease spread by European fishermen devastated their populations. Initially the two groups — the Wampanoags, under the charismatic and calculating chief Massasoit, and the Pilgrims, whose pugnacious military officer Miles Standish was barely five feet tall — maintained a fragile working relationship. But within decades, New England would erupt into King Philip's War, a savagely bloody conflict that nearly wiped out English colonists and natives alike and forever altered the face of the fledgling colonies and the country that would grow from them.
With towering figures like William Bradford and the distinctly American hero Benjamin Church at the center of his narrative, Philbrick has fashioned a fresh and compelling portrait of the dawn of American history — a history dominated right from the start by issues of race, violence, and religion.
Review: "Few periods in American history are as clouded in mythology and romantic fantasy as the Pilgrim settlement of New England. The Mayflower, Plymouth Rock, the first Thanksgiving, Miles Standish, John Alden and Priscilla ('Speak for yourself, John') Mullins — this is the stuff of legend, and we have thrilled to it for generations. Among many other things, it is what Nathaniel Philbrick calls 'a restorative ... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) myth of national origins,' one that encourages us in the conviction that we are a nation uniquely blessed by God and that we have reached a level of righteousness unattained by any other country. It is a comforting mythology, but it has little basis in fact. The voyage of the Mayflower was a painful and fatal (one crew member died) trans-Atlantic passage by people who knew nothing about the sea and had 'almost no relevant experience when it came to carving a settlement out of the American wilderness.' Wherever they first set foot on the American continent, it wasn't Plymouth, and it certainly wasn't Plymouth Rock. The first Thanksgiving (in 1621) was indeed attended by Indians as well as Pilgrims, but they didn't sit at the tidy table depicted in Victorian popular art; they 'stood, squatted, or sat on the ground as they clustered around outdoor fires, where the deer and birds turned on wooden spits and where pottages — stews into which varieties of meats and vegetables were thrown — simmered invitingly.' As for Priscilla Mullins, John Alden and Miles Standish, that tale is nothing more than a product of the imagination of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. These cherished myths, in other words, bear approximately as much resemblance to reality as does, say, the story of George Washington and the cherry tree. In 'Mayflower,' his study of the Pilgrim settlement, Philbrick dispatches them in a few paragraphs. It takes considerably longer, and requires vastly more detail, for him to get closer to the truth about relations between the Pilgrims and the Indians. Popular mythology tends to focus on Massasoit, the chief of the Pokanokets who allied his tribe with the English settlers, and Squanto, the English-speaking Indian who formed a close, mutually rewarding friendship with William Bradford, governor of Plymouth Plantation for three decades. Some of what that mythology tells us is indeed true, but as Philbrick is at pains to demonstrate, the full truth is vastly more complicated. Philbrick, who lives on Nantucket Island and has written often about the sea and those who sail it — he won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2000 for 'In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex' — specializes in popular history, a genre often sneered at by academic historians but treasured by readers, who welcome its emphasis on narrative and lucid prose. He is not as graceful a stylist as the genre's most celebrated living practitioner, David McCullough, but his work is entirely accessible and gives every evidence of being sound scholarship. He appears to bring no bias to his work except a desire to get as close to the truth as primary and secondary sources allow, in refreshing contrast to the many academic historians who — consciously or not — have permitted political and cultural bias to color their interpretations of the past. Because Philbrick is in search of the more factually complex and morally ambiguous truth behind essentially self-serving popular mythology, it is important to emphasize that he is not out to denigrate that mythology or those who embrace it. He celebrates the courage, resourcefulness and determination of many of the settlers, most notably Bradford and the remarkable warrior Benjamin Church; he acknowledges and describes in detail the many ways in which Pilgrims and Indians cooperated, in some cases to their mutual advantage; he pays particular tribute to Mary Rowlandson, the settler who was kidnapped by Indians and endured much hardship and privation but ultimately helped broker peace between Indians and Puritans. He knows, though, that the story of the Pilgrims can't be reduced to doughty Englishmen and women in modest homespun and smiling Indians proffering peace pipes. Like the settlement of the West, the settlement of New England was hard, bloody and violent. If Indians made horrendous attacks on settlers — many of those whom they killed were women and children — the Pilgrims more than responded in kind. Many of the Pilgrims were pious folk, Puritans who crossed the ocean in hopes of worshipping as they wished — they 'believed it was necessary to venture back to the absolute beginning of Christianity, before the church had been corrupted by centuries of laxity and abuse, to locate divine truth' — but like the settlers of Israel three centuries later, they were ready to fight when necessary, and they fought with zeal. Encouraged by Longfellow and other mythologizers, we have tended to think of the Pilgrims as earnest, uncomplicated and rather innocent, motivated solely by religious faith and good-hearted in their dealings with New England's native population. There is a measure of truth to this, in that some settlers wanted to treat the Indians fairly and tried hard to live peacefully beside them, but they were also fiercely determined to gain a foothold in this new land and did not hesitate to act violently in order to gain one. The famous Mayflower Compact that they wrote and signed during the Atlantic crossing did contain a few of the seeds from which the United States and its democratic system eventually sprang, but the settlers were not especially democratic themselves. They disliked and suppressed dissent, enslaved Indians and shipped them off to brutal conditions in the West Indies and clung with such stubborn rigidity to their belief that they alone understood God's will that they were incapable of comprehending the Indians' very different culture. The early years of Plymouth Plantation were exceedingly difficult but comparatively peaceful so far as relations with the many Indian tribes were concerned. Gradually, though, as English settlers moved ever deeper into New England and as Indians grasped the full extent of the threat to their established way of life, the settlers grew more belligerent, and the Indians grew more hostile. Indian raids on isolated settlements became more frequent and more brutal. The burning of Springfield in 1675, in what is now known as Massachusetts (after a tribe that was especially unfriendly to the Puritans), seems to have been the turning point. One prominent settler said it proved that all Indians were 'the children of the devil, full of all subtlety and malice,' a sentiment that many others came to share. The ultimate result was an oddly forgotten chapter in American history: King Philip's War. Taking its name after the son of Massasoit who became chief of the Pokanokets, this dreadful little war started not long after the raid on Springfield and lasted for about two years, with gruesome consequences for everyone involved. Plymouth Colony lost eight percent of its male population — by comparison, 'during the forty-five months of World War II, the United States lost just under 1 percent of its adult male population' — but these losses 'appear almost inconsequential when compared to those of the Indians.' The total Indian population before the war was about 20,000; by war's end, 'at least 2,000 had been killed in battle or died of their injuries; 3,000 had died of sickness and starvation, 1,000 had been shipped out of the country as slaves, while an estimated 2,000 eventually fled to either the Iroquois to the west or the Abenakis to the north. Overall, the Native American population of southern New England had sustained a loss of somewhere between 60 and 80 percent.' It was a costly and entirely unnecessary war, brought about by Philip's vanity, Puritan stubbornness and a pervasive atmosphere of mistrust and misunderstanding. After the war finally ended, it quickly vanished from the public consciousness except in the places where it was fought: 'Thanksgiving and its reassuring image of Indian-English cooperation became the predominant myth of the Pilgrims. ... In the American popular imagination, the nation's history began with the Pilgrims and then leapfrogged more than 150 years to Lexington and Concord and the Revolution.' All of which is very much in the American grain. We like our history sanitized and theme-parked and self-congratulatory, not bloody and angry and unflattering. But if 'Mayflower' achieves the wide readership it deserves, perhaps a few Americans will be moved to reconsider all that. Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardleyj(at)washpost.com." Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)Review: "A judicious, fascinating work of revisionist history. Mayflower is a surprise-filled account of what are supposed to be some of the best-known events in this country's past but are instead an occasion for collective amnesia." Janet Maslin, New York Times Review: "Readers who pick it up to learn more about the Mayflower and its passengers will find themselves pulled into a much bigger and ultimately more meaningful story." Boston Globe Review: "We like our history sanitized and theme-parked and self-congratulatory, not bloody and angry and unflattering. But if Mayflower achieves the wide readership it deserves, perhaps a few Americans will be moved to reconsider all that." Washington Post Review: "Philbrick's tightly focused account of this critical time in the beginning of the United States confirms that its origins are tinged with blood, darkness, ignorance and betrayal with shafts of light here and there." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Review: "Philbrick triumphs in Mayflower because he combines it with empathy to challenge...myths about America's beginnings." Los Angeles Times Review: "[A] part of American history almost unknown...one can go through 12 years of public school...without ever hearing of Massasoit, the Pokasset tribe or King Philip's War." Seattle Times Review: "Philbrick delivers a masterly told story that will appeal to lay readers and history buffs alike." Library Journal Review: "In Philbrick's graceful retelling of a story many think they already know, the virtues and vices of each culture are given their due....A remarkably sensitive account." Kirkus Reviews Review: "A sterling synthesis of sources, Philbrick's epic seems poised to become a critical and commercial hit." Booklist Synopsis: Nathaniel Philbrick became an internationally renowned author with his National Book Award &winning In the Heart of the Sea, hailed as "spellbinding" by Time magazine. In Mayflower, Philbrick casts his spell once again, giving us a fresh and extraordinarily vivid account of our most sacred national myth: the voyage of the Mayflower and the settlement of Plymouth Colony. From the Mayflower's arduous Atlantic crossing to the eruption of King Philip's War between colonists and natives decades later, Philbrick reveals in this electrifying history of the Pilgrims a fifty-five-year epic, at once tragic and heroic, that still resonates with us today. About the Author Nathaniel Philbrick is the author of the acclaimed international bestseller In the Heart of the Sea and Sea of Glory: The Epic South Seas Expedition,1838 &1842. Table of Contents Contents List of Maps xi Preface: The Two Voyages xiii Part I Discovery one They Knew They Were Pilgrims 3 two Dangerous Shoals and Roaring Breakers 35 three Into the Void 48 four Beaten with Their Own Rod 56 five The Heart of Winter 78 six In a Dark and Dismal Swamp 93 seven Thanksgiving 104 Part II Accommodation eight The Wall 123 nine A Ruffling Course 140 Part III Community ten One Small Candle 161 eleven The Ancient Mother 183 twelve The Trial 198 Part IV War thirteen Kindling the Flame 229 fourteen The God of Armies 259 fifteen In a Strange Way 284 sixteen The Better Side of the Hedge 311 epilogue Conscience 345 Acknowledgments 359 Notes 363 Bibliography 415 Index 445 Picture Credits 462 List of Maps Tracks of the Speedwell and the Mayflower, JulyNovember 1620 14 Track of the Mayflower off Cape Cod, November 911, 1620 4445 Tracks of the Three Exploring Expeditions, November 15December 12, 1620 6263 Plymouth Harbor 82 New England, 16251674 16667 Mount Hope Region, JuneJuly 1675 232 Southern New England and New Yorkduring King Philips War, 16751676 26869
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780670037605
- Subtitle:
- A Story of Courage, Community, and War
- Author:
- Philbrick, Nathaniel
- Publisher:
- Viking Books
- Subject:
- History
- Subject:
- Indians of north america
- Subject:
- United States - Colonial Period
- Subject:
- Pilgrims (New Plymouth Colony)
- Subject:
- United States - General
- Subject:
- Massachusetts History New Plymouth, 1620-
- Copyright:
- 2006
- Publication Date:
- May 2006
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Grade Level:
- General/trade
- Language:
- English
- Illustrations:
- Y
- Pages:
- 480
- Dimensions:
- 942x672x155 158
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