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Nathaniel Philbrick - Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War

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Nathaniel Philbrick Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War
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From the perilous ocean crossing to the shared bounty of the first Thanksgiving, the Pilgrim settlement of New England has become enshrined as our most sacred national myth. Yet, as bestselling author Nathaniel Philbrick reveals in his spellbinding new book, the true story of the Pilgrims is much more than the well-known tale of piety and sacrifice; it is a fifty-five-year epic that is at once tragic, heroic, exhilarating, and profound. The Mayflowers religious refugees arrived in Plymouth Harbor during a period of crisis for Native Americans as disease spread by European fishermen devastated their populations. Initially the two groups - the Wampanoags, under the charismatic and calculating chief Massasoit, and the Pilgrims, whose pugnacious military officer Miles Standish was barely five feet tall - maintained a fragile working relationship. But within decades, New England would erupt into King Philips War, a savagely bloody conflict that nearly wiped out English colonists and natives alike and forever altered the face of the fledgling colonies and the country that would grow from them. With towering figures like William Bradford and the distinctly American hero Benjamin Church at the center of his narrative, Philbrick has fashioned a fresh and compelling portrait of the dawn of American history-a history dominated right from the start by issues of race, violence, and religion. For sixty-five days, the Mayflower had blundered her way through storms and headwinds, her bottom a shaggy pelt of seaweed and barnacles, her leaky decks spewing salt walter onto her passengers devoted heads. There were 102 of them - 104 if you counted the two dogs; a spaniel and a giant, slobbery mastiff . They were a most unusual group of colonists. Instead of noblemen, craftsmen, and servants - the types of people who had founded Jamestown in Virginia - these were, for the most part, families; men, women, and children who were willing to endure almost anything if it meant they could worship as they pleased . It was a stunningly audacious proposition. With the exception of Jamestown, all other attempts to establish a permanent English settlement on the North American continent had so far failed. And Jamestown, founded in 1607, could hardly be counted a success . Between 1619 and 1622, the Virginia Company would send close to 3,600 settlers to the colony; over that three-year period, 3,000 would die. In addition to starvation and disease, there was the threat of Indian attack. At the university library in Leiden [the town in Holland where the Puritans had lived] were sensational accounts left by earlier explorers and settlers, telling how the Indians delight to torment men in the most bloody manner that may be; flaying some alive with the shells of fishes, cutting off the members and joints of others by piecemeal and broiling on the coals. How could parents willingly subject their children to the risk of such a fate? In the end, all arguments for and against emigrating to America ended with the conviction that God wanted them to go. Formats : EPUB, MOBI

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May flower

Picture 1

ALSO BY NATHANIEL PHILBRICK

The Passionate Sailor

Away Off Shore: Nantucket Island and Its People, 16021890

Abrams Eyes: The Native American Legacy of Nantucket Island

Second Wind: A Sunfish Sailors Odyssey

In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex

Sea of Glory: Americas Voyage of Discovery, the U.S.

Exploring Expedition, 18381842

VIKING Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group USA Inc 375 Hudson - photo 2

VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephens Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa


Penguin Books, Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England


First published in 2006 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.


Copyright Nathaniel Philbrick, 2006
Maps copyright Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2006
All rights reserved


Maps by Jeffrey L. Ward

Illustration credits appear at the end of this book.


LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Philbrick, Nathaniel.
Mayflower: a story of courage, community, and war / Nathaniel Philbrick.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 978-1-1012-1883-9
1. Pilgrims (New-Plymouth Colony) 2. MassachusettsHistory
New-Plymouth, 16201691. 3. Bradford, William, 15901657.
4. Church, Benjamin, 16391718. I. Title.
F68.P44 2006
973.2'2dc22 2005058470


Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the authors rights is appreciated.

To Melissa

Contents

Discovery


They Knew They Were Pilgrims

Dangerous Shoals and Roaring Breakers

Into the Void

Beaten with Their Own Rod

The Heart of Winter

In a Dark and Dismal Swamp

Thanksgiving


Accommodation


The Wall

A Ruffling Course


Community


One Small Candle

The Ancient Mother

The Trial


War


Kindling the Flame

The God of Armies

In a Strange Way

The Better Side of the Hedge

Conscience


List of Maps

Tracks of the Speedwell and the Mayflower, JulyNovember 1620

Track of the Mayflower off Cape Cod, November 911, 1620

Tracks of the Three Exploring Expeditions, November 15December 12, 1620

Plymouth Harbor

New England, 16251674

Mount Hope Region, JuneJuly 1675

Southern New England and New York during King Philips War, 16751676

Preface: The Two Voyages

W E ALL WANT TO KNOW how it was in the beginning. From the Big Bang to the Garden of Eden to the circumstances of our own births, we yearn to travel back to that distant time when everything was new and full of promise. Perhaps then, we tell ourselves, we can start to make sense of the convoluted mess we are in today.

But beginnings are rarely as clear-cut as we would like them to be. Take, for example, the event that most Americans associate with the start of the United States: the voyage of the Mayflower.

Weve all heard at least some version of the story: how in 1620 the Pilgrims sailed to the New World in search of religious freedom; how after drawing up the Mayflower Compact, they landed at Plymouth Rock and befriended the local Wampanoags, who taught them how to plant corn and whose leader or sachem, Massasoit, helped them celebrate the First Thanksgiving. From this inspiring inception came the United States.

Like many Americans, I grew up taking this myth of national origins with a grain of salt. In their wide-brimmed hats and buckled shoes, the Pilgrims were the stuff of holiday parades and bad Victorian poetry. Nothing could be more removed from the ambiguities of modern-day America, I thought, than the Pilgrims and the Mayflower.

But, as I have since discovered, the 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. Instead of the story we already know, it becomes the story we need to know.

In 1676, fifty-six years after the sailing of the Mayflower, a similarly named but far less famous ship, the Seaflower, departed from the shores of New England. Like the Mayflower, she carried a human cargo. But instead of 102 potential colonists, the Seaflower was bound for the Caribbean with 180 Native American slaves.

The governor of Plymouth Colony, Josiah Winslowson of former Mayflower passengers Edward and Susanna Winslowhad provided the Seaflower s captain with the necessary documentation. In a certificate bearing his official seal, Winslow explained that these Native men, women, and children had joined in an uprising against the colony and were guilty of many notorious and execrable murders, killings, and outrages. As a consequence, these heathen malefactors had been condemned to perpetual slavery.

The Seaflower was one of several New England vessels bound for the West Indies with Native slaves. But by 1676, plantation owners in Barbados and Jamaica had little interest in slaves who had already shown a willingness to revolt. No evidence exists as to what happened to the Indians aboard the Seaflower, but we do know that the captain of one American slave ship was forced to venture all the way to Africa before he finally disposed of his cargo. And so, over a half century after the sailing of the Mayflower, a vessel from New England completed a transatlantic passage of a different sort.

The rebellion referred to by Winslow in the Seaflower s certificate is known today as King Philips War. Philip was the son of Massasoit, the Wampanoag leader who greeted the Pilgrims in 1621. Fifty-four years later, in 1675, Massasoits son went to war. The fragile bonds that had held the Indians and English together in the decades since the sailing of the Mayflower had been irreparably broken.

King Philips War lasted only fourteen months, but it changed the face of New England. After fifty-five years of peace, the lives of Native and English peoples had become so intimately intertwined that when fighting broke out, many of the regions Indians found themselves, in the words of a contemporary chronicler, in a kind of maze, not knowing what to do. Some Indians chose to support Philip; others joined the colonial forces; still others attempted to stay out of the conflict altogether. Violence quickly spread until the entire region became a terrifying war zone. A third of the hundred or so towns in New England were burned and abandoned. There was even a proposal to build a barricade around the core settlements of Massachusetts and surrender the towns outside the perimeter to Philip and his allies.

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