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Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War (精装)
by Nathaniel Philbrick
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American history |
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AllReviews |
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The Washington Post (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-31 00:00>
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 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) transatlantic 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 worshiping 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 goodhearted 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. |
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Will (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-31 00:00>
We Americans know little of our own history, and that's a shame. The early history of this country is a feast for the curious, a fascinating story of hardship, survival, faith, foolishness, compassion and cruelty.
Philbrick's Mayflower is a pretty addition to the current crop of superbly written historical narratives about the early history of European America. Before I picked up his book, I knew almost nothing about the Pilgrims and Puritans, nor did I care. The tedius high school and college studies foisted on us in the literature and history of early New England were enough to turn anyone away from the subject. Philbrick, however, changed all that for me. His lively style and intimate familiarity with - and love of - the history of the region immediately won me over. And, the portraits he draws of individuals whose names we all know, Miles Standish, Governor Bradford, and others are startling, if not deep.
For example, Captain Standish, we learn, was so short his rapier had to be reduced by five inches so it wouldn't scrape the ground. The good Pilgrims called him "Captain Shrimp," but never to his face. His temper and boldness were famous; he could respond murderously if sufficiently pushed. In one memorable incident, he lured a pair of Indians to dinner who had threatened him the day before. Both Indians were much bigger than the Captain. As one took his seat, Standish snatched the Indian's knife, which hung on a cord round his neck, and stabbed him to death. Standish's compatriots finished the other. Violent and brutal was life in the Old East.
If there is a constant thread to this history, as Philbrick tells it, it is violence and death. The first winter left only 50 pilgrims alive from the original 102 who traveled on the Mayflower. The ship itself wintered over with the Pilgrims and half its crew died. Nor were the Indians spared. By the time of the Pilgrims' landing, disease had already nearly annihilated the local Native Americans. Some 80 percent of the indigenous population of Plymouth and its environs were dead of one European-induced plague or another. Whole villages had been abandoned. With no one left to bury the dead, corpses were left to rot where they fell. Bleached bones littered the ground.
The Pilgrims were firm in their faith, but even they could be tempted. As starvation treatened and harsh conditions persisted, ethics became situational, even from the very beginning. The good Pilgrims prayed when they landed, but shortly afterward they stole a cache of seed corn from the Indians and apparently never paid for it, nor did they apologize. They were forgiven, however, and befriended by natives. The famous story we learn as children of the Indians showing the Pilgrims how to plant corn, using fish as fertilizer, turns out to be true.
While violence occurred, there was also charity. Massasoit, sachem (chief) of the plague-decimated Pokanoket tribe, was to prove not only friendly but vital to the Pilgrims. He sold them vast tracks of land, preserved the peace, and formed a strong personal bond with a prominent pilgrim, Edward Winslow. Word had come to Winslow that the sachem was dying (or dead). Winslow trudged the 15 miles to Massasoit's village to find the sachem deathly ill, probably with typhus. Winslow was no doctor (Lucky for Massasoit. Had Winslow been a doctor, the sachem might have never have survived the techniques and cures of 17th century medicine.), but he was kind enough to embrace the fallen Indian, scrape his mouth and tongue clear of the brown muck that typhus creates, and ladle English fruit preserves into him. Within hours, Massasoit began to recover. He begged Winslow to take the cure to the other sick members of his tribe. Winslow, loath to touch another under such conditions, it being "much offensive to me, not being accustomed with such poisonous savors," nevertheless did as the sachem asked. These acts of kindness endeared the English to Massasoit. The sachem even renamed his sons Alexander and Philip, English names to honor his allies.
While Massasoit lived, peace endured. A half century passed without the stain of bloodshed over Pilgrim-Indian disputes in territory that Massasoit ruled. History is a meandering stream, however, that often flows in unanticipated directions. While Massasoit and Winslow were friends and allies, their sons were not. Josiah Winslow, one of Edward's sons, became Governor of Plymouth. Philip, son of Massasoit, as sachem, became the nemesis of the colonists, the leader of a native war against the English that would be fought brutally by all parties, see the destruction of several English towns and villages, and eventually destroy the Pokanokets and other once friendly natives.
The New England of King Philip's War was much different than that of 1620. A half-century of peace brought tens of thousands of Puritans and others from England. The natural fecundity of people who had 7 or 8 children also added to the population. Towns were everywhere. That first miserable winter, with Pilgrims hungry and shivering in shelters of mud and waddle, could never have foretold the New England of 1670. By 1670, the Massachusetts Bay colony had been founded, as were Connecticut, New Haven, the rogue religious sanctuary of Rhode Island and other settlements. By the time of King Philip's war, the colonies had even united under a loose confederation.
The good men and women of Plymouth, while devoted Christians, were hardly perfect. They eagerly hanged Quakers merely for being Quakers (at least for a time), and their prosecution of King Philip's war proceeded in a way that would grind against modern sensibilities. Heads were lopped off and posted on the town palisade. "Traitors" - at least those accused and convicted of treason - were hanged, drawn and quartered. These things were brutal but we should not feel especially superior. In modern times we've foresworn hand-to-hand killing for antiseptic measures that can kill tens of thousands from the air. We coolly dismiss such slaughter as "collateral damage," but it is slaughter nevertheless, and on a scale that might have horrified the people of 1670.
One would not normally describe a book of history as a "page turner," but this one certainly was. I devoured it in a few days. Oh, and if you're interested in the myths that have so obscured our knowledge of the Pilgrims, Philbrick's Afterward, called "Conscience" explains the origins and debunks many of the things we've been taught. None of this detracts from the Pilgrims, however, who emerge as tough, brave, resourceful and industrious. Their passion for religion eludes me, but their accomplishments are astounding. The book is gem. Put a copy in your library.
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Nathan Edwards (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-31 00:00>
Philbrick certainly does it again with Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War. It may be hard to believe that anything written by anyone could be as compelling as Philbrick's "In the Heart of the Sea", but prepare yourself to be amazed with what Mayflower has to offer. The greatest thing about this work is that almost everyone in America is at least familiar with the story that this incredible author masterfully expounds. Mayflower successfully fills in any gaps in the American holiday story.
Starting from the very beginning with nothing more than a thought of escape from religious hardships, Philbrick follows our celebrated pilgrims all the way through the end of King Philip's War, and then some. Mayflower successfully leaves the reader well satisfied that they have been made privy to any information available today regarding the Plymouth Colony, its creation, and its impact on early life in the new world. One only has to take a glance at the bibliography to realize just how much thoughtful research went into this incredible account. What may be more fascinating is the fact that Philbrick compiles this mountain of research into a well written an extremely readable timeline that spans decade after decade.
Get your eye-drops handy because you will not want to blink; this page turner will have you from cover to cover before you realize it and you will, most certainly, not feel cheated out of even the most minute of details. I would and will recommend "Mayflower" to anyone who can read, because to not take advantage of this enthralling work of literature might be a crime committed against one's own self. By the end of this book you will know the true story behind one of the most widely celebrated traditions in America, as well as what happened next.
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Gene Twilley (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-31 00:00>
I think Mayflower is named as it is because few words seem to invoke the American spirit as much as the name of the Pilgrims' ship. Nathaniel Philbrick gives us a glimpse of the first few generations of the English colonies and [I think] challenges the notions we may hold regarding who the Pilgrims were, why they were here, and what their relationships were like.
Philbrick's style was very readable and enjoyable [which may be do to the fact that I was very interested in the subject matter]. I think that the words he's written are indicative of a man who has given much thought and study to the subject.
What's most striking is the amount of detail the author gives in describing the Native Americans, their culture, and their relationship with the English. What he's done for me is to take a group of people [in this case, many groups of people] and to place a face, customs, dreams, and hopes along with them. In addition, he communicates why they became enemies so quickly and how a fragile relationship between nations can become so quickly broken.
The span of time covered is a portion of the planning prior to the Mayflower departing Leiden with Plymoth's first English settlers to the end of King Philip's War. Again, what the author does so well is to describe the motives, the flaws, and the redeemable characteristics of most all who were involved. I think Philbrick does as well as anyone is able to avoid an "us" against "them" mentality and to lay out a somewhat transparent viewing of the colonists, the native allies, and the native enemies.
There are few qualms that I have with the book, but one of them has to do with the fact that Philbrick sometimes falls prey to the very thing he's set to fight - that is creating a mythology of the history of the Pilgrims. One of the most glaring occurrences of this is the discussion he gives regarding the death of Dorothy Bradford [William Bradford's wife]. He first gives notice that there are no historical documents that give any indication of how she died and then spends quite a few paragraphs speculating that she may have committed suicide. Still, this was the most glaring occurrence and the others did not make for such a difficult read.
Philbrick has created a scholarly and thoughtful work of the peace and war of our nation's early history [saying this with the understanding that our government, language, and customs were affected more by the English than any other European nation colonizing the "New World"]. I don't think you will learn much about the religious history and content of the Pilgrims, but you learn a great deal about their relationship with Native Americans during the time of early English colonization. Definitely worth your time! |
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A. Wheeler (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-31 00:00>
Who would have thought that everything we were taught about Thanksgiving and the Pilgrims would be so intolerably glossy? From Thanksgiving dinner to the harmony in which the Pilgrims and Natives lived, the American myth machine has distorted. On one hand, I found this book upsetting. Is nothing sacred? Does every Santa Claus, Tooth Fairy, and Easter Bunny have to be killed in the name of reality? On the other hand, we, as Americans, must know the truth about the founding of our great country.
To many like me, who wonder why we live in such a conservative country, we need to look no further than the Pilgrims. As Philbrick succinctly catalogues, the Pilgrims were religious zealots, hell-bent on establishing a pure and strict (fundamentalist) colony. Those of other faiths need not apply. Combine this Christian fundamentalism with a militant faction of colonists and the brutal conditions of living in a completely foreign ecosystem and it is not surprising that conflict with the Natives exploded into a wider war. The Pilgrims were also courageous and determined, as were the Natives.
Philbrick presents the good and bad of both the Pilgrims and the Natives. He spares neither side from the truth, and the result is that his book is highly credible and fair. We would serve our children well to require them to read this book.
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William Fuller (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-31 00:00>
We love our national myths, don't we? Is there an American today whose elementary school experience failed to include the idyllic picture of black-and-white-robed Pilgrims, peaked black hats primly perched on the men's heads, sitting at a long table carefully covered with a white linen tablecloth, brimming with the Thanksgiving feast, and with a few loin-clothed Indians in the background to give the whole scene the proper local color? National unity apparently requires that the people of a country share certain common beliefs and memories, and "the first Thanksgiving" is certainly one of ours. There are undoubtedly sound psychological principles to explain these national myths, which include landing at Plymouth Rock and George Washington's never telling a lie, chopping down a cherry tree, and tossing a coin across the Delaware River, as well as Benjamin Franklin's famous kite-flying experiment. Holding these near-sacred scenes in our collective minds certainly does no harm-so long as we recognize them as myth and are astute enough to understand as well the real history of such purported events.
Philbrick's book MAYFLOWER gives us a crystal clear look at the real history and the actual events surrounding the arrival of the Pilgrims, and somewhat later the Puritans, Protestant extremists as they were, in the New World. It was an arrival marked by death, depression, suicide, and murder. The idea of a new colony founded and governed solely upon religious principles died even before the first Pilgrim waded ashore through icy water to a mud flat (Plymouth Rock not being in the vicinity); in addition to the Separatists, i.e., Pilgrims separated from the Church of England, the Mayflower carried quite a few others, the Strangers, who were not of the same persuasion and whose presence demanded a civil, not a religious, compact if any sort of governmental control and order were to be maintained. Even the act of marriage, frequently described as "holy" matrimony, was to be from the very beginning a civil affair in America. After all, the Bible makes no mention of clergy performing marriages, and the Pilgrim interpretation remains today in the licensing of marriages by the state, not by the church.
During their first Christmas in America, what were the Pilgrims doing to observe the "birth of the Christ"? Since the day did not fall on the Sabbath, the Pilgrims were about their normal labors, for, again, the Bible makes no reference to Christmas so the Pilgrims did not observe it, although the Anglicans among them insisted on having the day off for revelry, which the Separatist governor abruptly curtailed. Praying was okay but forget the revelry.
Such facts as these come forth with fascinating detail in Philbrick's writing, but more revealing yet are the Pilgrims' rocky relationships with the Native Americans of New England, several of whom already spoke some English through previous encounters with fishermen and explorers. While we may have been brought up by elementary school teachers who taught (and probably believed) that the Pilgrims were God-fearing Christians, somehow we missed the facts that, on occasion, our forefathers saw fit to launch unprovoked, "preemptive" strikes against the Indians, did not hesitate to slit the throats of Indian leaders while they sat at table enticed by food offered by their "hosts," and well earned their Indian name of "cutthroat."
Much of Philbrick's historical account of the1620's through the 1670's is devoted to King Phillip's War, a name I recalled from public school days but the significance of which had thoroughly escaped me. It was a war that, probably like many wars, did not need to happen. Ironically, Phillip was the son of Massasoit, the Pokanoket leader, or sachem, whose allegiance with the Pilgrims may have saved the colony from starvation in its first year. One incident during this brief but deadly war is particularly disturbing. There is a short story, "Farewell to Manzanar" by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, that details the unprovoked incarceration of loyal American citizens of Japanese extraction during World War II simply because they looked like the enemy. It seems as though this sort of fear-based condemnation of one's neighbors has a long precedent in this country, for similar actions took place during King Phillip's War in 1675 and 1676. A goodly number of New England's native inhabitants had embraced the English god and had even created their own settlements where they were communally named the Praying Indians. Firm supporters of the English they may have been, but neither their allegiance nor their religion could save them from exile and imprisonment during the war, all because they looked like the enemy.
There's at least one more American myth that needs mentioning, that the Pilgrims' invasion of the new World was somehow connected to the idea of "religious freedom." The only religious freedom that these people were concerned with was their own. Here's an extract from Philbrick's book: "... John Lyford, a minister sent over by the Merchant Adventurers, was cast out of the settlement for secretly meeting with disgruntled settlers who wished to worship as they had back in England. One of Lyford's supporters, John Oldham, was forced to run through a gauntlet of musket-wielding Pilgrims who beat him with the butt ends of their weapons."
The truth, it seems, is often more shocking than the laundered myths to which we expose our school children. I suspect that everything in Philbrick's book has been published before in various books and manuscripts, but never have I found a source that ties it all together as Philbrick does. His writing is as fascinating and captivating as any novel, and the historical accuracy of it enhances its appeal. Reading MAYFLOWER is the most painless way imaginable to learn real 17rh century American history. I wholeheartedly recommend the book to every history teacher and to every public school graduate who would like to balance American myth with American reality.
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John McCabe (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-31 00:00>
Like a fast-paced thriller, Nathaniel Philbrick tells the engrossing story of the Mayflower's voyage from Holland to Cape Cod, and the years that followed. Filled with misery, danger, and terror, much of his book is devoted to the first year that the English Pilgrims spent in inhospitable Plymouth. With treachery on both sides, the Pilgrim's interactions with Native Americans are captured with realism. His accounts of day-by-day history are extracted from letters written by those who were there. The result is a historical book that reads like a good fiction page-turner.
Imagine landing on a foreign shore with little food and no one there to meet you - and with no supermarket, pharmacy or LL Bean to turn to. Cold, wet, and frightened, the spirits of the weak, which accounted for almost half, gave up the ghost and died in the first year. Those who survived were reinforced by others who arrived from England. Together, the growing horde of settlers swindled or purchased land from the Indians at cheap prices. They pushed the Native Americans westward until the Indians fought back in what is known as the War of King Philip.
Mayflower is an interesting historical story of the colonization of northeastern United States. It is an easy reading five star book which recommended itself as a great story and good history.
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D. Maury (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-31 00:00>
Historian Philbrick's well-researched, well-written account retells the story of the Pilgrims sailing the Mayflower, starting in England, proceeding to Holland, and eventually arriving in today's Massachusetts for what I can only imagine to be the flu and cold season from hell. There's already an English colony in Virginia, a Dutch colony in New Amsterdam, but this is the first English settlement in what would be called the New England area, though it's hardly virgin soil. The land has been colonized and farmed by Native Americans, who have recently suffered a devasting loss of population due to disease, brought by European Traders. Despite this population loss, the Pilgrim settlement is vastly outnumbered and appears to be granted a gracious reprieve from massacre during its first years. Philbrick continues with the story we never learned or celebrated in grade school. 55 years after settling in Plymouth, the British settlers precarious truce with the Native American population collapses, and King Philip's War, a major conflict with ugly episodes follows. The British settlers seem to be on the losing side until they adopt the native population's military style and things turn around for them.
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Clifford Stanford (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-31 00:00>
Perhaps a mis-titled book, Mayflower is partly the story of a religious community seeking utopia in the New World, but mostly how their descendants engaged in a perhaps inevitable and bloody clash of cultures, highlighted by King Phillip's War. It is the latter story that has the most impact, and perhaps Philbrick intentionally used the Mayflower title and the Pilgrim's story to draw in the reader to his intended focus on the generation that followed. In the end, while I felt a bit fooled, I was grateful and enlightened.
There are numerous English heroes of deserved fame, like Miles Standish and William Bradford of the Mayflower Pilgrims, or Benjamin Church who led the English in the later wars with the Natives. But there are also many ambiguous figures driven by base motives of revenge, fame, wealth, and power as well. Further, Philbrick does an admirable job of presenting both the heroes and devils of the Native Americans who engaged the English. The Native figures like Massasoit and his son "King" Phillip struggled just as the English did with whether to assimilate with, separate from, or to annihilate the other.
Philbrick's descriptions of engagements between the English and the Natives range from raging battle scenes to intimate conversations within an Indian wigwam. Each of the stories are told with sufficiently vivid detail without losing the larger context. Philbrick balances his narrative in this manner to keep the reader stimulated with imagery and storyline without putting at risk the larger picture of engagement between cultures.
Mayflower does not so much seek to explode myths about the early Pilgrims, but to put their stories in the context of what came next. Mayflower offers 21st Century educated readers a fresh glimpse of a period in early American history that is often overshadowed by myths and later colonial-era events. Highly recommended.
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Thomas Magee (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-31 00:00>
This book is excellent. It has to be the most comprehensive book on the Pilgrams ever written in recent history. This guy goes beyond the initial romantic conceptions surrounding Thanksgiving. His story goes about 50 years beyond the first settlers touched down at Plymouth. He does go into detail about the harshness the first settlers had to endure. The author also gives respect to the religious convections of those first settlers. Nowadays a lot of people want to explain that away in the name of political correctness. He goes beyond that to discuss other motivations like economics, which drives us all then as it does now.
The story doesn't end with the first Thanksgiving. This was around 150 years before the Patriots at Lexington and Concord. The author dives into the story of King Phillips war of 1675-1676. I would dare to say maybe there is only a handfull of books on that subject. It is almost a forgotten period of time in American History. The war read almost like something from today. Isolated towns suffer from terrorists or Indians attacking. A story which would be repeated often over the next 300 years.
This war was very bloody. In the war of WWII the US suffered a casualty rate of 1% of the male populuation. In the civil war that rate was between 4 and 5 percent. In the King Phillips war the English rate was 8%. The Indian casualty rate was between 60-80 percent. I am afraid the tale of King Phillips war told in the book is the tale of clashing cultures and overwhelming economic forces. That tale is just as revelant then as now. It definitely has lessons for us today, but I am afraid we don't have the stomach to take it.
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