Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War

From an early age, I have been fascinated with American history. It has been exceedingly difficult for me, therefore, to understand why history seems to be the worst taught subject in primary-secondary schools. Social studies tend to have the poorest passing rates of the core subjects in standardized exams. Some scientific and lesser surveys find college students and many teachers unable to identify the most significant events in this nation's life. Little wonder, then that manipulative politicians so easily mislead the public into viewing current events using artificial facts and fallacious cause-effects.

Nathaniel Philbrick's new history on the colony established by the Mayflower survivors is an excellent example of how history should be presented. I believe the problems with the teaching of history are the phony legends and the mindless emphasis on dates/names that students are force fed. Less important are the why's, what-ifs and consequences for the choices made by people and governments. Those are the questions that this Mayflower book seeks to address.

While I may have read much about American history, I was totally unfamiliar with characters such as Benjamin Church and the Indian leader, Massasoit. Also new to me was the depth, cause and destruction of King Philip's war between the settlers and Native Americans.

Church's story was particularly fascinating since he sounds so much like a character from a John Ford-John Wayne western movie. Church was the original "Hondo" who sought to know the natives and enlist their aid instead of destroying them. But, he fought with a strategic and spirited manner that won him numerous victories and respect from the colonists and Indians. It is too bad that so often true life characters seem harder to believe existed than their fictional counterparts.

I wonder if we stopped teaching social studies as a means to pass a standardized test and more as a means to develop critical thinking skills, then students would have more of an appetite for the subject and hungry students would demand more on their plate than rote memorization. This would, though, mean losing our elementary need for legends of chopped cherry trees, sainted ancestors, and guiltless aboriginals. I think it is worth the effort.

Nathaniel Philbrick's exhaustive history of the first 57 years of the Plymouth colony and its relationship with the Indians. (Happily, throughout the book, Philbrick makes life easier for the the reader by disdaining politically correct terms like "Native Americans.") In its turn, Philbrick's history can also be exhausting. It is so filled with detail, much of it just slightly - and thus irritatingly - extraneous, that at times reading it is something of a battle. But the journey is worth it.

Philbrick takes no sides. He does not lionize the Indians; he doesn't demonize the colonists. The result, hopefully, is something near the truth. A history of a half-century which saw the original colonists essentially being saved by the Indians, who had their own political reasons for doing so, to a headstreong, ambitious Indian chief starting an unnecessary war, but a war that was welcomed by the land hungry colonists.

As Philbrick puts it, " . . . by choosing to pursue economic prosperity at the expense of the Indians, the English put at risk everything their mothers and fathers had striven so heroically to create."

In all, it's an interesting story, one which is regretably not taught accurately in our schools. The Pilgrims are not necessarily the prim and proper prigs they are painted as and the Indians are far from the noble beings exploited by cruel colonists. A tad wordy, in my opinion, but overall an excellent addition to the American library.

Jerry

Nathaniel Philbrick's remarkable "Mayflower" is everything you'd hope a history book to be: illuminating, lively, and authoritative. This was simply a terrific read, a fascinating glimpse into the events and people serving as the first bricks in our nation's foundation.

Beyond the fairytale images of "The First Thanksgiving", most basic American history skips from the Mayflower's 1620 landing in Plymouth the American Revolution, glossing over the rich and brawling century-and-a-half spanning these two events. Philbrick zeroes in on the first half-century, stripping away the myth and homily typically associated with the Pilgrims and laying bare a fascinating tale of courage and deceit, of trusts forged and broken, of politics, religion, brutality, and war. All the familiar figures are there - William Bradford, Miles Standish, Pokanoket Indian chief Massoit, Squanto, and Edward Winslow, but Philbrick focuses on less celebrated figures like Benjamin Church and Massoit's son Phillip, who while hardy household names today leave behind legacies that helped shape what would become a century later the United States of America.

This is a story ripe with opportunity for politically correct revisionism, but the author walks a balanced line, alternately praising and condemning the deeds and players of both the English and the Native Americans. We learn, for example, that near-starvation in the first two years had as much to do with the Pilgrim's failed experiment in socialism as it did with harsh winters and poor soil. This led Bradford to adopt a policy allowing each family to grow and hunt not for the "commonwealth", but for themselves. Thanks to Bradford's newly discovered spirit of capitalism, the colony is soon producing a surplus of food. There may be a perverse humor in the irony of contemporary images of God-fearing Pilgrims in tall hats and buckled shoes when matched with the reality of a people who would draw and quarter their enemies and display their heads on pikes. But this is no less naive than euphemistic views of New England's "peaceful and noble Indians", who in fact warred with rival tribes for centuries before the arrival of the Europeans, and showed no lack of talent or imagination for treachery, torture, and manipulation.

In short, "Mayflower" is that rare historical chronicle that reads with the all intrigue and energy of well-written novel, and important expose of an overlooked period of our history with lessons as relevant today as they were three centuries ago. Well done, Mr. Philbrick.

At 480 pages, Nathaniel Philbrick's Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War is in many ways a complete history of the Plymouth Colony. What a read though, and the pages flew by.....Mayflower is well written. Philbrick does a masterful job at breathing life into characters who have, over time, almost become larger than life. As a child who was familiar with the Plymouth story, Chief Massasoit, William Bradford, and Miles Standish seemed hero like; characters who were super human. Philbrick does a great job of making them human, and believable.

Philbrick also manages to clearly tell the most often misunderstood part of the story, that of the Wampanoag tribes precarious situation when the settlers arrived. There was a first thanksgiving, and for over half a century the two cultures lived in peace. Then the world for both peoples exploded with a huge loss of life on both sides as the result. This sickening failure is held center stage in Mayflower. Philbricks wonderful descriptions of the early countryside is as realistic as anything else. I suspect that historians may find fault here and there throughout the novel, but for this reader, Mayflower is a terrific story about early America and the loss of so much promise.

I put down In the Heart of the Sea to quickly read Mayflower. As with other readers I am now a hooked fan of Mr. Philbrick and cannot wait for the next book. I predict Mayflower will be a run-a-way literary and commercial success.

This history of the Plymouth Colony is a fascinating work. It is clear from the narrative and his notes at the end of the book that Nathaniel Philbrick took the time to perform careful and thorough research of every available European and Native American source, and walked the ground to see for himself where many of the events he narrates occurred.

"Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War" is a refreshing re-examination of the well-trodden ground of the Separatists' history as a schismatic Calvanist sect in England and Holland, and the establishment of their colony in the New World. The author then carries the narrative into less familiar territory as he explores the complex and ever-evolving relationship between the colonists and their Indian neighbors up through the aftermath of King Philip's War in the 1670's - which, if you consider the percentages of native and colonial population impacted, was the bloodiest war ever fought on American soil.

The story is told with a fresh set of eyes. These people had their own unique flaws and strengths, and - despite Victorian interpretations to the contrary - didn't walk on water: Sometimes with faith, inspiration, and courage; sometimes with (to modern eyes) stunningly bad judgement, incompetence, and bigotry; they made it to the shores of Plymouth Bay and established a colony that was able to survive and even thrive. In being willing to learn-from and co-exist-with their Indian neighbors, they formed the seed for a new country: a land no longer dominated by Native Americans, but also creating a culture that was not purely European either.

This book is ultimately a tragedy: what really makes it an outstanding piece of writing is that Philbrick brings to life how, for all the promise and success the colony had due to its willingness to accept the natives (in some ways) and learn from them, there were fundamental currents and societal conflicts that were never overcome. These eventually led to war, where the children of Massasoit's people and the Pilgrims clashed in an incredibly bloody, genocidal conflict that ultimately destroyed both groups' strength and pre-emininence in the region: almost entirely wiping-out the Wampanoag people, and reducing the Plymouth colony to a shadow of its former self, from which it never fully recovered.

In the end, this book uniquely illustrates and celebrates how very human the Mayflower colonists, their Indian neighbors, and their descendants, were. It is a well written and well researched text: very readable, very informative, doesn't shy away from unpleasant facts, and works hard at providing a balanced narrative encompassing both the English colonists' and Native inhabitants' points of view.

Anyone seeking to learn about the rich texture and complexities of life in Massachusetts in the 1600's, and the impact that these colonists and their neighbors still have on us today, is well advised to read this book.