Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick
If Jamestown wants to be as famous as Plymouth, a top priority ought to be finding better authors to write about the place. While James Horn's A Land As God Made It was servicable at best, Nathaniel Philbrick has added another solid entry to his growing library of sea-related titles with his latest book, Mayflower.
Perhaps the biggest distinction between the two books, and one of the latter's greatest strengths, is that Philbrick takes his history from the initial gatherings of Separatists in England all the way through the conclusion of King Philip's War. Perhaps the chronology simply lends itself better to a narrative arc than the Jamestown story, but where Horn's book abruptly ends with the dissolution of the Virginia Company, Philbrick gives a full view of how the Pilgrims' settlement fit into the full seventeenth-century history of the New England colonies:
[T]he story of the Pilgrims does not end with the First Thanksgiving. When we look to how the Pilgrims and their children maintained more than fifty years of peace with the Wampanoags and how that peace suddenly erupted into one of the deadliest wars ever fought on American soil, the history of Plymouth Colony becomes something altogether new, rich, troubling, and complex.
It becomes clear from the first encounters with Massasoit that peace between the colonists and the Wampanoag was heavily contingent on the personalities involved, and it is no surprise when the tensions that lurked throughout the text boil over into open warfare after Massasoit's death. While Philbrick does not describe the war as inevitable, his examination of internal machinations of both the English and the Native Americans makes clear that peaceful coexistence was fragile from the start.
In particular, the portrait he paints of Massasoit, his son, Metacomet (Philip), and other leaders suggests sophisticated political, diplomatic, and military thinking on the part of the Native Americans, who could see the growing threat of colonialism and reacted accordingly. Their choices were not without flaws: their growing dependence on military resources that only Europeans could provide (guns and ammunition) gave the British an advantage when war broke out. Philbrick suggests, however, that but for the Mohawk alliance with the British, the natives might have secured the support of the French and won that war, a remarkable counter-factual. Of course, disunity between native tribes would prove to be a major enabling factor in their slaughter at the hands of Europeans and Americans for two centuries thereafter.
While Mayflower is a decidedly popular history (with a decidedly misleading name, since the transatlantic voyage only takes up 10 pages of the book), it defies the common defects of the genre, with analysis that digs at least a few inches beneath the surface and a solid 80 pages of notes and biblography. Philbrick has a pleasant if unspectacular style, a few notches above staid academics but not the equal of McCullough or Ellis.
Recommended for fans of Philbrick's other books and those interested in colonial New England history.
