Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War
by Nathaniel Philbrick
Penguin Books May 2006
480 pgs., hardcover, $19.99 at Amazon
Reviewed by Gila Hayes
The myths and legends of Thanksgiving feature stories of shared feasts, not hard-fought and bloody battles. Unvarnished history suggests there was a lot more fighting and a whole lot less feasting. A book I read this month comments that most American school books regaled us with stories about the Plymouth landing then unceremoniously jump to 1776 and the struggles of the Revolutionary War. The bloodshed in the intervening years – and its cause – is rarely mentioned. In November, I indulged my interest in early American history, starting with In Their Own Words, a book that attempted to translate the journals of Edward Winslow and William Bradford from the language of the early 1600s into comprehensible sentences. While authentic, those pages were awfully dry, so I closed the book without finishing Bradford and Winslow’s reports and journals. Instead, I read Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War, by historian Nathaniel Philbrick.
Religious liberty motivated fewer than half of the 102 people who came across the Atlantic in the Mayflower late in 1620, packed below decks of what by today’s standards would be a small ship. The religious pilgrims called themselves “Separatists,” and termed those not of their faith, “Strangers.” Still, upon arrival, believers and non-believers alike managed to agree to the Mayflower Compact and establish a civil government separate from the religion of the pilgrims. The Compact was needed because before setting sail, they’d received a patent for land in the Virginia Company, but didn’t make it that far north, so were not governed by the company and through it, English King James. Later, a second patent granted them the land where they fetched up near Cape Cod. The New World scarcely promised riches and success or an easy life. Philbrick writes, “Jamestown, founded in 1607, could hardly be counted a success.” Over 80% of its early settlers died in the first three years from starvation, disease, and war.
The Mayflower arrived on the New England shoreline in early winter, so landing parties were hampered by cold and storms. Their first shore excursion brought back mussels, but the seafood had toxins that sickened the pilgrims, so corn found in Indian graves and in native dwellings from which the natives had fled was taken. While troubled by what was essentially their theft of the corn, the pilgrims were unable to connect with the natives to trade. An epidemic had reduced the native population along the eastern shore of Narragansett Bay, and initially encounters with Indians were few. An exploratory party followed a small group of natives a short distance into the woods, and while they found huts and fields, early expeditions only occasionally saw and exchanged hostilities with natives, instead of the trade they anticipated. That first winter was brutal and nearly half of the first wave of Plymouth Colony immigrants died before spring.
In mid-March, an Indian walked boldly into the settlers’ village. This was the sachem Samoset. He had learned some English from fishermen and other explorers and was able to tell them a bit of the history of the area, including details about other natives. He was sent by another sachem, Massasoit, who had access to the interpreter, Squanto, who is a leading character in the tales of the pilgrims’ first year. Philbrick writes that Squanto turned out to be a bit shifty, a detail I don’t remember from the stories about the pilgrims.
William Brewster, who had been a diplomat in England before joining the Separatists, put together a reception for Massasoit, whom he called the Indian King. Through Squanto’s interpretive efforts, they forged an agreement not to harm the other’s people, to provide mutual defense from other enemies, to return stolen tools, and to disarm when they met. The pilgrims may not have been aware that there were other powerful Indian groups who weren’t as friendly. They also could not have known that the interpreter likely misstated the terms of their peace agreement by telling the sachem that the gunpowder barrels beneath their storehouse contained plague, the disease that had so recently killed so many of the Indians.
Squanto had been kidnapped in 1614 and taken to Europe. When he escaped and found his way back to the New England shore, he found his village wiped out by plague. Applying language skills he learned in captivity, he interpreted for Massasoit. On Squanto’s first visit to Plymouth colony, he ingratiated himself to the pilgrims by catching and bringing them eels, which they considered very good eating. When summer arrived, Massasoit had him show them how to fertilize their corn with spawning herring. Barley and seed peas the pilgrims brought from England did not flourish on Cape Cod.
Philbrick observes that the first Thanksgiving, now so enshrined in myth, likely occurred several months earlier than our current observance on the final Thursday of November. With crops harvested, and a good number of migratory waterfowl brought down by four men sent out to go “fowling,” Plymouth Governor William Bradford declared a time to “rejoice together.” Edward Winslow’s writings suggest a “gathering that was similar to a traditional English harvest festival—a secular celebration that dated back to the Middle Ages in which villagers ate, drank, and played games.”
At this point many American history books skip blithely forward to the Revolutionary War. That’s an unfortunate oversight, because it glosses over the arrival of more boats full of other settlers, increasing pressure on the native population, and on the colony, as well. Sorely unprepared, the newest arrivals stressed the already meager food supplies.
Not all the subsequent waves of immigrants were welcome at Plymouth. Some adhered to Church of England practices, which the original pilgrims had literally fled across the ocean to escape. Quakers and Baptists also came and were, for all practical purposes, banished from the Plymouth colony. Rhode Island became “a haven for Baptists, Quakers, and other non-Puritans,” Philbrick writes. Other immigrants were even less God-fearing and their drinking, dancing, and failure to observe days of worship troubled the Separatists. Still, the colonists came together enough to confederate as the United Colonies, primarily to counter increasing threats from Indians.
The Plymouth colonists dictated that their court would oversee purchases of Indian lands, but to whom did the land belong? England? The indigenous population? The entire idea of owning the land was foreign to the Indians at first, but they needed the resources its sale could provide. Opinions about land values are questionable, although Philbrick disputes accusations that the pilgrims stole the Indians’ land, noting, “Today, the sums paid for Massasoit’s lands seem criminally insignificant. However, given the high cost of clearing Native land and the high value the Indians attached to English goods, the prices are almost justifiable.” His argument stumbles a little in light of treaties requiring official approval of land sales, which stymied competitive pricing.
The pilgrim’s long-lasting alliance with Massasoit survived until he died, but little longer. Treaties were broken on both sides. As land and resources became scarcer, alliances broke down between the Plymouth colony and the Wampanoag Indians who, under the of rule Massasoit’s son, Philip, were pushed on to smaller and smaller territories and became increasingly desperate. Philbrick comments that “more than half a century of peace with their Native neighbors” dissolved into over a year of bloodshed, villages and homes burned down, and Indians captured in skirmishes shipped off to the Caribbean as slaves. He calculates that the percentage of the population killed during what is known as King Philip’s War was twice that of the Civil War and up to seven times greater than the per capita deaths during the American Revolution.
Today, popular apologist culture likes to portray these incidents as racist and oppressive, and while it is indisputable that the colonists stole from and murdered the natives, the sons of the Mayflower immigrants and the son of Massasoit all bear responsibility. In short, while their fathers excelled at cooperative peace, the second generation failed miserably. Some of the natives had converted to Christianity and not all the colonists hated Indians, but both factions suffered terrible violence from the other. Fear and hatred was rampant.
The latter half of Philbrick’s book focuses on the story of Benjamin Church, grandson of one of the original Mayflower immigrants. It is an interesting narrative of unorthodox martial skill as an Indian fighter, combined with an intuitive understanding of the natives for whom he seemed to feel considerable sympathy. The fight no longer was only skirmishes against poorly armed adversaries; French explorers and the English, too, had sold guns to the Indians.
Still, Church excelled at navigating the swamps and wilderness that stymied traditional European fighting tactics and he became famous for capturing the most Indians. That contrasts against the vignette the book tells of one elderly captive, destined for a slave boat, whom Church pitied and allowed to go instead to Swansea to live out his final years. Some have suggested the tale of the elderly Indian named “Conscience” was an attempt by Church’s son to whitewash his father’s record of bloodshed.
Whether or not the story of “Conscience” is factual, that Church understood the Indians, and knew how to work with the friendly tribes, and history records his earlier objections to decisions to sell captured Indians into slavery. Philbrick describes Church as “the indignant critic of authority who, despite his best intentions, finds himself dragged into moral compromise, violence, and tragedy.”
He closes with a truth we would do well to ponder. “For peace and for survival, others must be accommodated. The moment any of them gave up on the difficult work of living with their neighbors—and all the compromise, frustration, and delay that inevitably entailed—they risked losing everything. It was a lesson that Bradford and Massasoit had learned over the course of more than three long decades. That it could be so quickly forgotten by their children remains a lesson for us today.”