Book 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.
From Publishers Weekly
In this remarkable effort, National Book Award–winner Philbrick
In the Heart of the Sea examines the history of Plymouth Colony.
In the early 17th century, a small group of devout English
Christians fled their villages to escape persecution, going first
to Holland, then making the now infamous 10-week voyage to the New
World. Rather than arriving in the summer months as planned, they
landed in November, low on supplies. Luckily, they were met by the
Wampanoag Indians and their wizened chief, Massasoit. In
economical, well-paced prose, Philbrick masterfully recounts the
desperate circumstances of both the settlers and their would-be
hosts, and how the Wampanoags saved the colony from certain
destruction. Indeed, there was a first Thanksgiving, the author
notes, and for over 50 years the Wampanoags and the Pilgrims lived
in peace, becoming increasingly interdependent. But in 1675, 56
years after the colonists'' landing, Massasoit''s heir, Philip,
launched a confusing war on the English that, over 14 horrifying
months, claimed 5,000 lives, a huge percentage of the colonies''
population. Impeccably researched and expertly rendered,
Philbrick''s account brings the Plymouth Colony and its leaders,
including William Bradford, Benjamin Church and the bellicose,
dwarfish Miles Standish, vividly to life. More importantly, he
brings into focus a gruesome period in early American history. For
Philbrick, this is yet another award-worthy story of survival. May
9
From The Washington Post''s Book Worldwashingtonpost.com
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.
From Booklist
Departing from his customary nautical stories, including the
phenomenally popular In the Heart of the Sea 2000, Philbrick
makes landfall with the saga of the Pilgrims. By necessity, all
modern writing about the founding colonists relies on William
Bradford''s Of Plymouth Plantation, interpreting it through modern
historical sensibilities that incorporate native perspectives on
the newcomers from across the ocean. Long gone is the once
inculcated version of friendly Indians helping starving English
religious refugees through hard times. The scholarly thesis now has
the Pilgrims arriving amid coastal Indian societies that had been
decimated by a pandemic. The Pilgrims appeared in 1620 as a
potential ally to the weakened Pokanokets and their sachem
Massasoit against neighboring enemies: the Massachusetts and the
Narragansetts. Philbrick essentially recounts this reigning
interpretation with sensitivity to landscape description, narrative
suspense, and understanding of motivations: piety, wrath,
gratitude, duplicity--a panorama of human character and historical
portent is on display in Philbrick''s skillful rendering.
Chronologically tracking the fortunes of the alliance struck by
Massasoit with Bradford, Philbrick carries events through the
second generation, in whose collective hands the alliance exploded
into King Philip''s War of 1675-76. A sterling synthesis of sources,
Philbrick''s epic seems poised to become a critical and commercial
hit.
Gilbert Taylor
From AudioFile
Author Nathaniel Philbrick strips away the prettiness of what we
learned in grade school about the Pilgrims and their religious
beliefs. We hear accounts of their pulling out the bowels of live
Indians, stealing their food, and taking their possessions. Life in
the New England colonies offered more death and disease than
freedom at first, and the truthful aspects of the settlers''
struggles must be rated "R." George Guidall narrates the gruesome
details as he tells a cozy story, varying his expression and
emphasis to maintain the listener''s interest in every sentence.
Somehow he knows how to pronounce the hundreds of native names and
places as if he used the words every day. J.A.H.
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.
Book Dimension
length: cm19.7 width:cm12.8
關於作者：
Nathaniel Philbrick is the author of the New York Times
bestseller In the Heart of the Sea, which won the National Book
Award, and Sea of Glory, winner of the Theodore and Franklin D.
Roosevelt Naval History Prize.
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