Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1633 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. What makes Philbrick's book so fascinating and accessible—the way he turns the Pilgrim legend on its head and shakes out fresh insights from the crusty old mythology we all absorbed in grade school—is present in full force in this exceptional audio version. With more than 800 audiobooks to his credit, Guidall gives the term "veteran reader" a whole new meaning. Such leading figures as William Bradford, Benjamin Church and Miles Standish of the so-called Plymouth Colony (which was not even close to Plymouth or its now-famous rock) emerge from the pages of history as understandable if not always admirable figures, and Guidall's evocations of the sadly depleted (by European diseases) Wampanoag Indians and their chief, Massasoit, are equally believable. The bitter voyage of the Seaflower (a slave ship taking captive Wampanoags to be sold in the Caribbean after a disastrous war with Massasoit's son, Philip), which rounds out Philbrick's masterful account, is treated with energy, respect and a straightforwardness that only increases its power.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
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.

Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Mayflower rethinks the events and players that gave rise to a national mythology about Pilgrims living harmoniously with their Indian neighbors. Instead, Philbrick tells a story of ethnic cleansing, bloody wars, environmental ruin, and the deterioration of English-Indian relations. While he introduces familiar elements, Philbrick also recasts well-known characters like Miles Standish ("Captain Shrimp"), William Bradford, and Benjamin Church. Most critics agree that he provides a well-researched, unbiased revisionist history (though we should note that for years many people have been reading about the environmental devastation of New England, the bloody Indian-English wars, and the less-than-pious Pilgrims). If not as gripping as the National Book Award?winning In the Heart of the Sea (2000), particularly the second half, Mayflower nonetheless provides a harrowing account of survival and, despite its grim themes, a celebration of courage.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Hard to stay interested
To me the book concentrated much more on the various Indian tribes and not enough on the passengers of the Mayflower. If you are interested in the History of New England Indian tribes this book is for you.

Detailed and well written
Philbrick has done a wonderful job here of telling the story of Plymouth colony in such great detail, truly bringing to life these men (and some women) from nearly 400 years ago.

The book covers the planning stages of the Mayflower voyage and goes through King Philip's War. Most of the book focuses on the first year and the war, and the details and storytelling are amazing. And Philbrick does a great job of describing the erosion of the relationship between the colonists and the Indians, even as he goes through the years between 1622 and 1675 rather quickly.

The book is entitled "Mayflower," but the latter part of the book significantly broadens the scope, as it delves into details from throughout Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island. Most of that information is relevant to the story, but at times it seemed that, late in the book, Plymouth was just a part of the story instead of the focus.

That's just nitpicking what was certainly a fabulous book. I was truly amazed at how in-depth that story could be told and I believe it is a book that would appeal to more than just the history buff. Being from southeastern Massachusetts, I found it especially interesting to read about areas and towns I became familiar with while growing up.

I Enjoyed This Book Until . . .
I realized that a lot of what is written comprises of thick paraphrasing and prolific quoting from well-known as well as obscure primary texts. Philbrick just extracted the history from primary source material and dropped them into his own book. This book serves as a great primer, but reading the original accounts from people like Nathaniel Morton's New-England Memorial, Winthrop's Of Plimouth Plantation serves you one better with better results. Of Morton, here is a quote:

"Which he desired. And having a confection [preparation] of many comfortable conserves &c.: on the point of my knife, I gave him some; which I could scarce get through his teeth. When it was dissolved in his mouth, he swallowed the juice of it: whereat those that were about him, much rejoiced; saying, he had not swallowed anything in two days before.
Then I desired to see his mouth, which was exceedingly furred; and his tongue had swelled in such a manner, as it was not possible for him to eat such meat as they had, his passage [gullet] being stopped up. Then I washed his mouth, and scraped his tongue; and got abundance of corruption out of the same.
"After which, I gave him more of the confection; which he swallowed with more readiness. Then he desiring to drink; I dissolved some of it in water, and gave him thereof. Within half an hour, this wrought a great alteration in him, in the eyes of all that beheld him. Presently after, his sight began to come to him: which gave him and us good encouragement.
"In the mean time, I inquired, How he slept; and when he went to the stool?
"They said, he slept not in two days before; and had not had a stool in five.
"Then I gave him [of the confection in the water]; and told him of a mishap we had, by the way, in breaking a bottle of drink; which the Governor also sent him: saying, if he would send any of his men to Patuxet, I would send for more of the same; also for chickens to make him broth; and for other things which I knew were good for him: and would stay the return of the messenger, if he desired.
"This he took marvellously kindly; and appointed some, who were ready to go by two of the clock in the morning: against which time, I made ready a letter, declaring therein our good success, the state of his body &c.; desiring to send me such things as I sent for, and such physic as the Surgeon [Samuel Fuller] dursrt adminster to him.
He requested me that, the day following I would take my piece, and kill some fowl [geese, ducks &c.]; and make him some English pottage, such as he had eaten at Plymouth: which I promised.
After, his stomach [appetite] coming to him, I must needs make him some without fowl, before I went abroad. Which somewhat troubled me, being unaccustomed and unacquainted in such businesses; especially having nothing to make it comfortable [tasty]: my consort [Master JOHN HAMDEN] being as ignorant as myself. But it being, we must do somewhat; I caused a woman to bruise some corn, and take the flour from it: and we set the grut [groats], or broken corn, in a pipkin; for they have earthen pots of all sizes."]"

Since I cannot quote from Mayflower, just check out pages 144 through 150.

Kudos for Philbrick for bringing to light such great stories, but as researching goes, it is no more than scanning these well-known stories out of Google Books (which has digitized a vast majority of the sources used by Philbrick and made available to the public for free.)