Jack Kelly writer
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MAYFLOWER
(AmericanHeritage.com, August 14, 2006)
The 102 passengers of the Mayflower caught their first sight
of the New World on November 9, 1620. By one report, they
were “not a little joyful.” Little wonder. After delays that had
pushed their arrival into late autumn, they had spent the past
nine weeks crowded into a dank, airless space 75 feet long
and barely five feet high, with cold salt water dripping down
their necks through the deck above. They were off course
and low on provisions.
Nathaniel Philbrick tells their story with verve and sympathy in
his new book, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community,
and War (Viking, $29.95). This important account of the first
permanent settlement in New England unfolds a rousing tale
of adventure even as it prompts us to rethink America’s early
history.
Philbrick marshals figures familiar from school pageants and
forces us to look at them with new eyes. Here comes the
short and violent-tempered warrior Miles Standish; there’s
the 21-year-old cooper John Alden; there the noble and
calculating Massasoit, his painted face glistening with bear
grease. They have come together to share the famous feast.
That historic thanksgiving celebration, which followed a winter
that left half the original contingent dead, was not the
decorous affair of our cultural iconography. There were twice
as many Pokanokets as Pilgrims in attendance, deer as well
as wild turkey were roasted, and all the participants ate with
their hands. But the tradition of friendship between
Englishmen and Indians was accurate, a tribute to adept
diplomacy on both sides.
It was a hopeful time for all. To the Pilgrims, “these were
human beings, much like themselves,” Philbrick writes. “Quick
of apprehension, ripe witted, just,” was how the Pilgrim leader
Edward Winslow described the natives.
The Indians had been through a rough time themselves. Only
a few years earlier, Native Americans had densely populated
the New England coast. A plague had broken out in 1616,
decimating many of the tribes and turning villages into ghost
towns. “Their skulls and bones were found in many places
lying still above the ground,” wrote William Bradford, both
leader and chronicler of the Plymouth Colony. “A very sad
spectacle to behold.” The devastation had shaken the
balance of power among the various tribes. With his people
hit hard, Massasoit was anxious to make an alliance with the
newcomers.
Thus began half a century of fragile peace during which each
side learned to adapt to the ways of the other. The Indians
enthusiastically embraced the marvelous technology that the
English offered, particularly the musket. The Pilgrims learned
lessons in agriculture and survival from the Indians, adopting
corn as a staple food. The newcomers formed a semblance
of the godly community they had envisioned, spiritually
focused but religiously intolerant.
The situation began to unravel when, during the unrest that
surrounded the English Civil War of the 1640s, thousands of
Puritans followed the Pilgrims to American shores. The
human ecology of the region began to feel the strain.
By the 1650s the Mayflower generation was dying off. Josiah
Winslow, Edward’s son, became governor of Plymouth in
1673. Metacom, Massasoit’s son, inherited the role of
Pakanoket sachem. He had taken the name Philip, and
colonists derisively referred to him as King Philip. Enmity
grew on both sides. The English wanted to acquire land; the
Indians wanted to end English encroachment.
The second half of Philbrick’s book describes the conflict,
known as King Philip’s War, that began in 1675. From a
minor scrimmage it grew to engulf most of New England.
Winslow rejected the more benign views of his father’s
generation and waged a campaign of genocide against all
Indians, including those who had helped the English on their
arrival in the harsh New World. “Praying” Indians, who had
converted to Christianity, were rounded up and imprisoned.
Winslow initiated the practice of selling captives into slavery,
and more than a thousand Indians were shipped to Spain
and the West Indies during the war. “The children of the
Pilgrims,” Philbrick notes, “had very short memories.”
“By immediately assuming the conflict was a racial rather
than a political struggle,” the author writes, “the English were,
in effect, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.” The two years of
hostilities devastated the region. The average per capita
income in New England would not return to its prewar level
for a century. The war also established a tone of racial
animosity that would dominate relations between whites and
Indians for generations.
Philbrick relates both the noble and the tragic chapters of
this tale with generosity toward both sides. He enriches the
texture of his narrative with illuminating, often surprising
details. The Mayflower, he tells us, made only one additional
trip after returning to England; its captain soon died and the
ship was sold for scrap. We learn that once the second-
generation Pilgrims abandoned their wattle-and-daub cabins
for large clapboard houses, 75 acres had to be deforested
each year to supply a small village with firewood. He notes
that one of the wonders that accompanied the first
Thanksgiving was the sight of New England foliage in full
color, an astounding sight to English eyes.
Philbrick not only tells the Pilgrims’ story from a fresh
perspective, he makes it resonate with the America of 2006:
—Early settlers had to choose between building a fort and
augmenting dangerously inadequate food supplies. “The
question of how much of a society’s resources should be
dedicated to security,” he notes, “persists to this day.”
—The colonists found that abandoning communal agriculture
and allowing families to farm for themselves significantly
increased productivity. “The change in attitude was stunning.
. . . The Pilgrims had stumbled on the power of capitalism.”
—In a single generation, the Pilgrims saw some of their
traditional values fall to the wayside as the younger crowd
became more enamored of real estate than religion.
The book ends on a note of regret that the spirit of the first
Thanksgiving vanished so quickly. “There are two possible
responses to a world suddenly gripped by terror and
contention,” Philbrick writes. One is to assume a posture of
arrogance, fear, and violence; the other to learn from your
enemy and “try to bring him around to your way of thinking.
First and foremost, treat him like a human being.”
Both responses were apparent during the seventeenth-
century encounters between Indians and English. Today the
choice still confronts the citizens of the New World, 35 million
of whom are descended from those wretched, determined,
joy-filled passengers who stepped off the Mayflower one day
in 1620.
# # #
(AmericanHeritage.com, August 14, 2006)
The 102 passengers of the Mayflower caught their first sight
of the New World on November 9, 1620. By one report, they
were “not a little joyful.” Little wonder. After delays that had
pushed their arrival into late autumn, they had spent the past
nine weeks crowded into a dank, airless space 75 feet long
and barely five feet high, with cold salt water dripping down
their necks through the deck above. They were off course
and low on provisions.
Nathaniel Philbrick tells their story with verve and sympathy in
his new book, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community,
and War (Viking, $29.95). This important account of the first
permanent settlement in New England unfolds a rousing tale
of adventure even as it prompts us to rethink America’s early
history.
Philbrick marshals figures familiar from school pageants and
forces us to look at them with new eyes. Here comes the
short and violent-tempered warrior Miles Standish; there’s
the 21-year-old cooper John Alden; there the noble and
calculating Massasoit, his painted face glistening with bear
grease. They have come together to share the famous feast.
That historic thanksgiving celebration, which followed a winter
that left half the original contingent dead, was not the
decorous affair of our cultural iconography. There were twice
as many Pokanokets as Pilgrims in attendance, deer as well
as wild turkey were roasted, and all the participants ate with
their hands. But the tradition of friendship between
Englishmen and Indians was accurate, a tribute to adept
diplomacy on both sides.
It was a hopeful time for all. To the Pilgrims, “these were
human beings, much like themselves,” Philbrick writes. “Quick
of apprehension, ripe witted, just,” was how the Pilgrim leader
Edward Winslow described the natives.
The Indians had been through a rough time themselves. Only
a few years earlier, Native Americans had densely populated
the New England coast. A plague had broken out in 1616,
decimating many of the tribes and turning villages into ghost
towns. “Their skulls and bones were found in many places
lying still above the ground,” wrote William Bradford, both
leader and chronicler of the Plymouth Colony. “A very sad
spectacle to behold.” The devastation had shaken the
balance of power among the various tribes. With his people
hit hard, Massasoit was anxious to make an alliance with the
newcomers.
Thus began half a century of fragile peace during which each
side learned to adapt to the ways of the other. The Indians
enthusiastically embraced the marvelous technology that the
English offered, particularly the musket. The Pilgrims learned
lessons in agriculture and survival from the Indians, adopting
corn as a staple food. The newcomers formed a semblance
of the godly community they had envisioned, spiritually
focused but religiously intolerant.
The situation began to unravel when, during the unrest that
surrounded the English Civil War of the 1640s, thousands of
Puritans followed the Pilgrims to American shores. The
human ecology of the region began to feel the strain.
By the 1650s the Mayflower generation was dying off. Josiah
Winslow, Edward’s son, became governor of Plymouth in
1673. Metacom, Massasoit’s son, inherited the role of
Pakanoket sachem. He had taken the name Philip, and
colonists derisively referred to him as King Philip. Enmity
grew on both sides. The English wanted to acquire land; the
Indians wanted to end English encroachment.
The second half of Philbrick’s book describes the conflict,
known as King Philip’s War, that began in 1675. From a
minor scrimmage it grew to engulf most of New England.
Winslow rejected the more benign views of his father’s
generation and waged a campaign of genocide against all
Indians, including those who had helped the English on their
arrival in the harsh New World. “Praying” Indians, who had
converted to Christianity, were rounded up and imprisoned.
Winslow initiated the practice of selling captives into slavery,
and more than a thousand Indians were shipped to Spain
and the West Indies during the war. “The children of the
Pilgrims,” Philbrick notes, “had very short memories.”
“By immediately assuming the conflict was a racial rather
than a political struggle,” the author writes, “the English were,
in effect, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.” The two years of
hostilities devastated the region. The average per capita
income in New England would not return to its prewar level
for a century. The war also established a tone of racial
animosity that would dominate relations between whites and
Indians for generations.
Philbrick relates both the noble and the tragic chapters of
this tale with generosity toward both sides. He enriches the
texture of his narrative with illuminating, often surprising
details. The Mayflower, he tells us, made only one additional
trip after returning to England; its captain soon died and the
ship was sold for scrap. We learn that once the second-
generation Pilgrims abandoned their wattle-and-daub cabins
for large clapboard houses, 75 acres had to be deforested
each year to supply a small village with firewood. He notes
that one of the wonders that accompanied the first
Thanksgiving was the sight of New England foliage in full
color, an astounding sight to English eyes.
Philbrick not only tells the Pilgrims’ story from a fresh
perspective, he makes it resonate with the America of 2006:
—Early settlers had to choose between building a fort and
augmenting dangerously inadequate food supplies. “The
question of how much of a society’s resources should be
dedicated to security,” he notes, “persists to this day.”
—The colonists found that abandoning communal agriculture
and allowing families to farm for themselves significantly
increased productivity. “The change in attitude was stunning.
. . . The Pilgrims had stumbled on the power of capitalism.”
—In a single generation, the Pilgrims saw some of their
traditional values fall to the wayside as the younger crowd
became more enamored of real estate than religion.
The book ends on a note of regret that the spirit of the first
Thanksgiving vanished so quickly. “There are two possible
responses to a world suddenly gripped by terror and
contention,” Philbrick writes. One is to assume a posture of
arrogance, fear, and violence; the other to learn from your
enemy and “try to bring him around to your way of thinking.
First and foremost, treat him like a human being.”
Both responses were apparent during the seventeenth-
century encounters between Indians and English. Today the
choice still confronts the citizens of the New World, 35 million
of whom are descended from those wretched, determined,
joy-filled passengers who stepped off the Mayflower one day
in 1620.
# # #