Accounts of the Pilgrims and 17th-century American colonies are often reductively rendered to satisfy Americans’ “obsessive need for a myth of national origins,” Nathaniel Philbrick contends in his vastly compelling popular history, “Mayflower: a Story of Courage, Community, and War.”
Philbrick reanimates the allure, the seasickness, the gore and the contradictions within a complicated chronicle of a national origin that some 19th-century writers tended to sentimentalize for a variety of reasons, including Westward expansion, the Civil War, and the rediscovery and full publication of William Bradford’s “Of Plymouth Plantation.”
Philbrick writes: “With the outbreak of the Civil War … the public need for a restorative myth of national origins became even more ardent, and in 1863 Abraham Lincoln established the holiday of Thanksgiving – a cathartic celebration of nationhood that would have baffled and probably appalled the godly Puritans.”
In the American popular imagination, he says, the country begins with the Pilgrims and immediately proceeds to the American Revolution.
In lively prose, Philbrick’s researched reckoning reframes the Separatists’ move to Leiden, Holland, financial contracts backing the venture to America, the voyage in 1620, the Mayflower Compact, the Plymouth Colony, the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the events leading to the bloody King Philip’s War in 1675.
Philbrick vividly describes the Mayflower voyage, which lasted more than two months, and a 1957 re-enactment of the crossing.
The Mayflower held 102 passengers, only about half of them Pilgrims; Bradford called the others “Strangers.” All, writes Philbrick, endured “physical and psychological punishment” within the decks, “compounded by the terrifying lack of information they possessed concerning their ultimate destination.”
Unfurling the myths that eclipse the Plymouth Plantation – an “armed fortress where each male communicant worshipped with a gun at his side” – Philbrick includes the traditional cast of characters: Bradford, John Robinson, Massasoit, Squanto, Miles Standish, Edward Winslow, John Winthrop, Thomas Morton of Merrymount (aka the “Lord of Misrule”) and Mary Rowlandson.
Yet he unifies his account with an exaltation of the carpenter-turned-military-captain Benjamin Church as an “archetypal American,” a frontiersman and a “roughneck intermediary between civilization and savagery.”
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