I Enjoyed This Book Until . . . | Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War

Detailed and well written | Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War | Nathaniel Philbrick

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	• Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War Nathaniel Philbrick Penguin (Non-Classics), 2007 - 480 pages average customer review:based on 274 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

a savage history

Fascinating first half that makes for highly recommended reading. I felt educated and filled with wonderment how the english settlers facing danger and diesese at every turn, relied on their faith and perservered to allow later generations to prosper in New England and beyond. The second half of this book outlined the wars with Indians and was hard for this reader to handle. I think it makes me believe that war is always a condition of man. Especially when higher spirtual ideas are set aside. Even the Indians were in war with other Indians before the english got here. It seems to me, so much bloodshed could have been avoided if cooler heads were left to govern. Something that's so relevant today. Very eye opening and very sad to a large degree.

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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.)

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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.

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A Well Researched, Superbly Written Book

In this well researched, superbly well written book, Nathaniel Philbrick who wrote the brilliant In The Heart Of The Sea, tells us about the Pilgrims, where they came from, why they came here, how they landed at Plymouth in December 1620, how they managed to survive etc; and then he goes on to tell in more historical detail than I needed about King Philip's War (1675-6) when the ground of New England ran red with the blood of colonists and Indians. But there was more to this story than history for me because it is a case study in habitat change and culture clash, so when I get through with the history part we'll talk about that.

First, about the story itself. You know it: The Pilgrims were a dedicated group of religious believers who broke away from the Church of England (too lax) and , called Separatists, emigrated to Holland where they had lived for a year or so in Leiden before 102 of them (the original Pilgrims) left the port of Delfshaven in two ships - Speedwell and Mayflower - for America. But it didn't work at first. Speedwell was too small and rotten. Mayflower, 100 feet long, was a typical merchant vessel of the time and seems to me to have been a pretty good sailer, everything considered. They were forced to leave Speedwell in Plymouth and on September 6, 1620 Mayflower sailed from Plymouth with 102 men, women and children crowded into her `tween deck - five fee high and maybe 100 feet long. Sixty-five days later after a stormy voyage but with all of her exhausted passengers still alive they sighted the coast of Cape Cod. But before any man put a foot ashore he signed the Mayflower Compact whereby they were bound "together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation" and agreed to "enact...such just and equal laws...from time to time...as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony, unto which (we) promise all due submission and obedience."

They had sailed for the mouth of the Hudson. But fate, storm and wind had taken them 300 miles north to a sandy spit which promised no refuge from wind or storm nor soil for sustenance, so after exploring for several weeks they settled on Plymouth harbor and came ashore to stay in the second week of December. They were starving, cold, complete strangers on an inhospitable and unknown shore in the dead of winter three thousand miles from home, completely on their own and 500 miles from the nearest English settlement. Yet nothing affected or diluted the faith they had that God would seem them safely through.

No, they were not simpletons nor impractical zealots. They had a military leader (Miles Standish), guns, food and seed and they were not afraid to use any of them. They were there to establish a colony and stay the course, but it almost didn't work. They lost 50 out of 102 people to starvation and disease before spring; and had it not been for Massssoit, the leader of the local Indian tribe (Pokanoke) the colony might not have survived; but he gave them the support needed to see them through that first year; and when they really had a feast with the Indians that November (1621) it was truly a Thanksgiving, although it was not until the 1860s or so that it was so regarded and when our Thanksgiving legend began.

(An aside: They not the first to explore the coast. Cod fishermen from Spain, Portugal and France had been off the coast for years and some had come ashore for brief periods - bringing with them the diseases (measles, typhus etc.) which had decimated the Indians to the point where large portions of the coast were unpopulated. Then there were the earlier explorers, too. These people were not a good advance party for the Pilgrims!)

Next, about the rest of it: The rest, as they say, is history. The next year others joined them. Then Englishmen settled in what is now Boston, an area which had a much better and more natural harbor than Plymouth. In ten years the area contained maybe ten thousand settlers, my great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather William Phelps being one of them. Twenty one thousand people came shore between 1632 and 1642; and by the time of King Phillips War (1675) all of New England could be termed "settled" in the sense that settlers were within walking distance of each other along he navigable rivers and their tributary valleys throughout most of the area.

The expansion came at a cost, at an environmental and human cost. The Indians were pushed out of their hunting grounds and out of their ancestral homelands, subjugated by treaty and force and disease. The forests were felled. One village of 200 homes used 75 acres of woodland per year for fuel. Beaches and tidelands were denuded of shellfish. The beaver were trapped out, game destroyed willy-nilly. This was a textbook example of environmental change, but Philbrick doesn't really hit on it.

Then came war. Philip, the grandson of Massassoit, went to war and in one year there were terrible casualties through the colony. The colonies lost 8 percent of the adult male population killed. (In WWII it was 1 percent, in the Civil War it was between 4 and 5 percent.) But the Indians suffered more. Nobody knows the numbers but war and its consequent atrocities of pillage, burning, forced marches and massacres killed thousands upon thousands of men, women and children. It was a war to the death. Settlers vs. the Indians; and the settlers won - big time!

Philbrick has done a good job. I got tired or reading about the war against the various tribes, how the tribes collaborated or didn't etc. etc. and, frankly, King Philip's War bored me a bit. But it was on the whole a great book.
February 2008

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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.

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