Book Review: Mayflower, Nathaniel Philbrick
The Tale of the Pilgrims and Indians as They Really Were
Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War, ISBN 978-0670037605, is 480 pages packed with an intensive history of the Mayflower and its inhabitants. Published by Viking Adult in 2006, it's a groundbreaking source of extensive research that shatters many of the myths about the Mayflower.
Shattering Mayflower Myths
The story of the colonization of New England is far from the gentle tale told to elementary school students. It's full of death, starvation, disease and war. Very few people in Nathaniel Philbrick's accounting of the Plymouth settlement emerge as heroes. The Indians, English settlers and French explorers all show their aggressive side. Each group kills and each group takes prisoners. All are to blame for the ensuing war that kills far too many on each side.
Squanto
In the version of events that is so familiar to Americans, the Pilgrims were frightened but determined to settle Plymouth. They met kind Indians who taught them how to grow corn and ate with them at a three-day harvest feast. With Squanto as their guide and translator, the English settlers were able to forge a bond with the Indians.
What isn't often told is that most of the Plymouth settlers were dead before the first harvest. Starvation and disease took a horrific toll on the population and many Indians saw the settlement as easy prey. Their friend Squanto actually betrayed the Pilgrims, according to Nathaniel Philbrick, and was murdered by Indians soon after.
The Descent Into War
The Indians did teach the Pilgrims their secrets for growing corn, but the myth of the peaceful Indians helping the settlers was just that. The Pilgrims, often seen as a moral bunch who wanted nothing more than peace was just as hard-hit with their own mythology. The Pilgrims began their settlement at Plymouth by raiding the Indians' corn stores and even digging up their dead out of curiosity.
Various Indian tribes were in the area at the time, and each found a way to try to seize the power they believed that the English possessed. A settlement near Plymouth was preyed upon by Indians who mocked the starving settlers and even took food out of their hands when they were too weak to fight. According to the book, both sides displayed territorial aggression and both were to blame for the eventual skirmishes and war.
King Philip's War
King Philip's War is a war that is mostly forgotten by history, but it is perhaps the one that had the biggest impact on the colonies and the emerging nation. The English colonies united against the Indians and fought a war that raged for two years, taking a huge toll on both sides. With populations decimated, crops and buildings destroyed and money gone, it was decades before each side could recover. Per capita, it was the bloodiest war ever fought in America.
When it was over the Indian populations that had once ruled the land were virtually gone from the area and the idea of peace with the natives was gone for the settlers. America would never be the same for either party.
Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War is eye opening in many ways, among them the chance to see the English colonies in America as they were rather than as a part of the popular stories so often told about them.
