Reviews

Finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in History

• New York Times, Best 10 Books of 2006

• Newsweek, Best Books of 2006

• Publisher’s Weekly, Best Books of 2006

• Boston Globe, Best 12 Books of 2006

• Washington Post, Best Books of 2006

• Chicago Tribune, Best Books of 2006

• San Francisco Chronicle, Best Books of 2006

• San Francisco Gate, Best Books of 2006

• Salt Lake City Tribune, Best Books of 2006

• Denver Post, Best Books of 2006

• Booklist, Editors Choice 2006

• Amazon.com, Top 50 Books of 2006

• Christian Science Monitor, Best Books of 2006

• Booksense, Best Books of 2006

• American Library Association, Notable Book of 2006

• Twenty weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list.

• A main selection of the Book of the Month Club

• A Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

“[Philbrick] has written a judicious, fascinating work of revisionist history. Mayflower is a surprise-filled account of what are supposed to be some of the best-known events in this country’s past but are instead an occasion for collective amnesia. As Mr. Philbrick points out, the national memory tends to skip from the first Thanksgiving to the Shot Heard ‘Round the World without a clue about the 150 years in between.”—  JANET MASLIN, NEW YORK TIMES

“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.”—  JONATHAN YARDLEY, WASHINGTON POST

“[V]ivid and remarkably fresh. . . [T]his is a story that needs to be continually refreshed, and Philbrick has recast the Pilgrims for our age of searching and turmoil. He gives what a 21st-century reader needs to find in the material: perspectives of both the English Americans and the Native Americans. Doing so requires a lot of reading between the lines (or in the case of the Indians reading between nearly nonexistent lines), but informed speculation—coaxing meaning out of inert data—is part of the job of writing history.”— RUSSELL SHORTO, NEW YORK TIMES SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW

“Engaging and enthralling . . . Nathaniel Philbrick’s mastery of narrative becomes clear. The adventures and misadventures of these pilgrims, in their first fatal steps on the unknown land, are recorded in exemplary detail; this is living history at its best, animated and defined by human actions and reactions. This narrative, of a small group finding its identity within a wild landscape, has all the wonder of a fable or a legend; but it also has the conviction and verisimilitude of a faithful account.”— PETER ACKROYD, LONDON TIMES

“Gripping . . . compelling . . . Philbrick has a gift for drawing telling details from the primary accounts on which much of his book is based. . . [He] seamlessly weaves into his tale much of the new understanding of native people, the environment, the impact of disease, and other topics gleaned from the previous generation of historical scholarship. . . a fascinating story, and one Philbrick tells very well.”— JENNY HALE PULSIPHER, BOSTON GLOBE

“Philbrick triumphs in Mayflower because he combines [hindsight] with empathy to challenge twin myths about America’s beginnings. The original Pilgrims were neither religious patriots nor bloody conquerors. And the native Americans they befriended, then betrayed were more sophisticated and less peaceful than commonly believed.”— JIM ROSSI, LOS ANGELES TIMES

“History is at its most potent when the lessons of yesterday flow naturally into today. Here, brilliantly constructed, is a river of resonance. We have warlords and constantly shifting alliances, treachery, bribery, bungling. We have religious extremism, racial hatred, military carnage and cover-ups. This could be Afghanistan or Iraq, as bloodily relevant as the latest roadside bomb. Instead, across four centuries, Nathaniel Philbrick offers us the New England of the Mayflower pilgrims, the benign myths that helped shape modern America and what really happened . . . enthralling.”— PETER PRESTON, THE LONDON OBSERVER

“Riveting . . . a signal achievement. . . Philbrick enlightens and even astounds . . . a new, vital story that most of us never learned, but have always, somehow, thought we knew.”— BEN COSGROVE, SALON MAGAZINE

“Forget Disney World. I’m going to Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts this summer. I’m hauling my kids off to see that New England re-creation of the 1627 Pilgrim settlement. Not to mention the famous rock and a replica of the Mayflower. The reason: Nathaniel Philbrick’s new book, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War. . . It’s not that Philbrick has uncovered a cache of 17th-century documents. Rather, it is Philbrick’s subtle and detailed portrayal of not just the Pilgrims but also of the various tribes and sachems (leaders) that makes Mayflower so compelling.”— DEIRDRE DONAHUE, USA TODAY

“[This] is history as it should be written, with clean prose, eminent fairness, the narrative power of a good novel and a point to make. Philbrick’s account of economic and racial issues and the tragedy that ensued rings as true now as it did when the Pilgrims were peopling and depeopling New England.”— JAY STRAFFORD, RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH

“Philbrick is blessed with writing and storytelling talent that illuminates the conflicts and fleshes out the stick-figure characters we were all fed in Propaganda 101. . . For unsanitized American history, turn to this compelling book.”— JESSE LEAVENWORTH, HARTFORD COURANT

“Exceptional . . . By tying the arrival of the Pilgrims to King Philip’s War of 1675-1676 in the same book, Philbrick delivers a lesson that seems to be constantly forgotten, especially today.”— DAVID HENDRICKS, SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS

“Philbrick avoids the overarching moral issues and takes no sides. He is telling a story about early America and explicitly relates it to themes of later American history. It’s about how dreams of harmony and prosperity, a godly Eden in the wilderness, changed to land-lust, racism, cynical expediency, and war. And about how a disadvantaged but relatively stable society was driven to desperation and finally decimated.”— DAVID MEHEGAN, BOSTON GLOBE

“Mayflower is a jaw-dropping epic of heroes and villains, bravery and bigotry, folly and forgiveness. Philbrick delivers a masterly told story that will appeal to lay readers and history buffs alike. Clearly one of the year’s best books; highly recommended.”— LIBRARY JOURNAL

“For Philbrick, this is yet another award-worthy story of survival.”— PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, STARRED REVIEW

“Philbrick’s epic seems poised to become a critical and commercial hit.”— BOOKLIST, STARRED REVIEW

“A remarkably sensitive account: 21st-century readers could ask for no more insightful reinterpretation of America’s founding myth.”— KIRKUS, STARRED REVIEW

“Mayflower is a splendid account of a nearly forgotten era in America’s Colonial past. Thoroughly researched, carefully documented and engagingly written, this rewarding history describes a tragic collision of cultures with sensitivity, intelligence and considerable grace.”— JOHN ALDEN, BALTIMORE SUN

“Many years ago, historian Samuel Eliot Morison said, ‘There is more bunk written about the Pilgrims than any other people. . . .’
“Although historians have done an admirable job telling the story of the Founding Fathers, they have pretty much left the Pilgrims to the myth-makers. Into this huge void has jumped Nathaniel Philbrick, to willingly correct the problem.
“The result is a factual history of the Pilgrims, the Mayflower and King Phillip’s War that should be considered definitive for many years to come. It is also a fine historical narrative that the average reader should find both interesting and entertaining.”— DENNIS LYTHGOE, DESERET MORNING NEWS

“Philbrick has performed an important and timely service in reminding Americans that our forefathers were once undocumented, desperate and at times even unscrupulous.”— MARK JOHNSON, MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL

“For history enthusiasts, Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower is the season’s must-read.”— FRITZ LANHAM, HOUSTON CHRONICLE

“Engaging and fast-paced. . . a compelling tale of disruption and destruction.”— HENRY L. CARRIGAN JR., ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION

“[V]ivid, trenchant storytelling . . . an important and compelling work.”— REGIS BEHE, PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW

“[I]t’s a best seller for a reason ˜ it’s wonderful reading that explodes and explores some myths about the Pilgrims and the Indians, and will fill in gaps in your understanding of how this country was founded.”— JANE SEE WHITE, ARIZONA DAILY STAR

“Mayflower is solid history for our time, neither Manifest Destiny nor political correctness, not heroes versus villains, not definitive abstract answers on what the past means. Rather, this is balanced, objective food for thought about who we really are as a people.”— MIKE LILLICH, INDIANAPOLIS STAR

“Since the release of Mayflower, Philbrick has been criticized for sympathizing too much with the Indians and going out of his way to point out the faults, even the crimes, of the Pilgrims. In truth, Philbrick is not playing favorites. It is simply that the Indians, particularly Massasoit, chief of the Pokanokets, are the most complex, interesting characters in this book. Massasoit and Squanto are both conflicted characters, and although they play dangerous political games with their new neighbors, it’s hard not to get a sense that they, Massasoit especially, had a sense of the history in the making. . . . In a time when politicians are demonizing ‘illegal immigrants,’ Philbrick shows that many of us descended from the original illegal immigrants. Just as importantly, he shows that history, like politics, is never as simple as good guys vs. bad guys. It never wraps up as neatly as a child’s book.”— BRIAN HICKS, CHARLESTON POST AND COURIER

“For your Fourth of July reading, open a mind-opening book about an immensely important American war concerning which you may know next to nothing. King Philip’s War, the central event in a best-seller that is one of this summer’s publishing surprises, left a lasting imprint on America. Americans in this era of sterile politics have an insatiable appetite for biographies of the Founders. But why are so many readers turning to a book —  “Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War” by Nathaniel Philbrick —  that casts a cool but sympathetic eye on an era usually wrapped in gauzy sentimentality? One reason might be that it is fun to read about one’s family: Philbrick estimates that there are approximately 35 million descendants of the passengers on the Mayflower. (Do the math: 102 passengers; 3.5 generations in a century. But remember, 52 passengers died of disease and starvation before the first spring.) Perhaps a second answer is that the story is particularly pertinent as America is engaged abroad in a clash of civilizations and is engaged at home in a debate about immigration and the common culture.”— GEORGE WILL, WASHINGTON POST

“In this excellent account, Nathaniel Philbrick details the horrors and the heroics that shaped New England over the half-century after the Mayflower’s 1620 landing. His Pilgrims, their descendants and those who followed them to the New World are by turns practical-minded survivors and intolerant zealots, compassionate sometimes in their treatment of American Indians and greedy often in their lust for native land. Their brilliance shone in the Mayflower Compact and their stupidity led to war and destruction. Likewise, Philbrick’s Indians are more than cardboard cutouts. He provides richly drawn portraits of Massasoit, the powerful native leader who first made treaty with the Pilgrims; the duplicitous Squanto, his rival; and King Philip, Massasoit’s son and instigator of a 14-month war that killed an astonishing number of Indians and colonists alike (but mostly Indians). Nor are the native tribes monolithic in either their respect or hatred for the English. Reconstructing the political motivations behind their terroristic attacks, actions that branded them savages at the time, one can’t help but consider the modern parallels. Ditto, the examples of religious extremism.”— RONNIE CROCKER, HOUSTON CHRONICLE

“Philbrick’s book is a myth-busting account of the Pilgrims and the generation that succeeded them, with equal focus on the natives they encountered. . . . What Philbrick manages to draw from diverse scholarship, and the perspective with which he frames settlement and the ensuing war together, . . . creates a surprising picture and argument about the antecedents of American life.”— ART WINSLOW, CHICAGO TRIBUNE

Mr. Philbrick has written a fair-minded, thoughtful analysis of how the Plymouth colonists strongly influenced the future of America. All Americans —  including the millions of descendants of the Mayflower passengers (those who survived, Mr. Philbrick points out, had an average of seven or eight children per family) —  can read the story with appreciation for our forefathers’ courage and perseverance, as well as for their willingness to learn from their mistakes.”— PRISCILLA TAYLOR, WASHINGTON TIMES

“Marvelous . . . popular history at its best. . . . As Philbrick wisely observes, ‘unbridled arrogance and fear only feed the flames of violence.’ But he refuses to take a lopsided position with regard to the Pilgrims, and sensibly asks readers to take a sympathetic backward look at these intrepid settlers, who, under the inspired leadership of Bradford and others, ‘maintained more than half a century of peace with their Native neighbours’ before all hell broke loose.”— JAY PARINI, GUARDIAN UNLIMITED

“[I]f Bradford is this book’s conscience —  its reason and cognitive sense —  in regard to doctrine and accountability, then Church provides the smell of gunpowder, the tall tales, that give ‘Mayflower’ much of its gusto. Philbrick’s own hallmark is a subtler strand of narrative, a way of arranging anecdotal accounts as a series of voicings, pure characterizations based on small, personal details that eventually give us a wide, rich sense of an individual. . . . Philbrick excels in piquant details and characterizing touches, and his ‘Captain Shrimp’ [Miles Standish] practically lifts himself from the page. . . . [T]here’s something, in a literary sense, hyper-modern about [Standish’s] tendency to dart from one quarry to another, mere suggestion and primal gratification seemingly impetus enough —  the orgastic rending of Cormac McCarthy’s Western ‘Blood Meridian’ first witnessed in the hinterlands of earliest New England. In a seven-page account of a Standish-led raid, the clamor of evil practically rings off the page, an episode out of America’s own ‘Holinshed’s Chronicles.'”— COLIN FLEMING, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

“[V]astly compelling. . . . Philbrick reanimates the allure, the seasickness, the gore and the contradictions within a complicated chronicle of a national origin that some 19th-century writers tended to sentimentalize for a variety of reasons, including Westward expansion, the Civil War, and the rediscovery and full publication of William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation.”— GRETCHEN GURUJAL, CANADIAN PRESS

“[A]t its heart, Mayflower is an eloquent testament to the human frailties responsible for so much bloodshed over the centuries–a lesson that still resonates in 2006. That’s not the only timely lesson from America’s early days. For starters, how about using religion as a rationalization for violence? Heard about that lately? That’s essentially what the Pilgrims did when they unleashed Indian allies to take vengeance on other Indians. It’s also what happened when the Pilgrims themselves massacred Indian women and children by burning crowded wigwams–in one instance from a tribe that was still at peace with them. Don’t misunderstand. This is no good-guy/bad-guy scenario. The colonists displayed mind-boggling courage, resilience and creativity in tackling the obstacles they faced. What’s more, Indian leaders were responsible for their share of unjustified violence and cruelty. Indeed, for both sides, the horrors of the late 17th century were a far cry from the golden glow of Thanksgiving legends. So why focus on the negatives at a time of coming celebrations for Jamestown’s 400th anniversary? Because those costly failures are an essential part of the story–a part we dare not ignore. We at The Free Lance-Star will be covering much more about Jamestown in the coming months–the good and the bad of that experience. The replica of the Godspeed will arrive in Stafford in 15 days. The quest for federal recognition by Virginia-based Indian tribes will continue. The story of Jamestown amounts to a continuing, complicated tale that will require our journalistic energies. It also offers an opportunity to understand more fully our history. In Mayflower, Philbrick argues that the war of 1676 was caused in part by the failure of second-generation Pilgrims to learn lessons from the first generation–hard-earned lessons of how to live and work peacefully with the Indian population. When it comes to avoiding unnecessary violence, there’s still time to learn.”— ED JONES, THE FREDERICKSBURG FREE LANCE-STAR

“In Mayflower, Philbrick’s largest topic yet, the author’s generous distillation of the essential, his shrewdly plain way with words, his quietly dramatic pacing, his infectious fascination with the subject matter —  all make this book a rare pleasure for the reader…. Mayflower is a fine book in every way: It is packed with illustrations, not in a printer-dictated sheaf, but right in the text where the reader wants them. The historical traveler is helped by superb and numerous maps by Jeffrey L. Ward. The end notes by Philbrick, which an academic might have shoehorned into the narrative to provide his bona fides, are here sequestered in a 50-page narrative on sources —  a rich dessert after the healthy meal of the book.”— CHARLES TRUEHEART, BLOOMBERG NEWS

“[This] is a history that reads like tragedy, that is populated by fallible humans on all sides and that resounds with what-if moments. . . . Mayflower is one of the best histories of unintended consequences you’re ever likely to read.”— ALDEN MUDGE, BOOK PAGE

“This important account of the first permanent settlement in New England unfolds a rousing tale of adventure even as it prompts us to rethink America’s early history. . . . Philbrick not only tells the Pilgrims’ story from a fresh perspective, he makes it resonate with the America of 2006.”— JACK KELLY, AMERICAN HERITAGE

Preface

The Two Voyages

We 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.

We’ve 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 Winslow—son of former Mayflower passengers Edward and Susanna Winslow—had 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 Philip’s War. Philip was the son of Massasoit, the Wampanoag leader who greeted the Pilgrims in 1621. Fifty-four years later, in 1675, Massasoit’s 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 Philip’s 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 region’s 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.

The colonial forces ultimately triumphed, but at a horrifying cost. There were approximately seventy thousand people in New England at the outbreak of hostilities. By the end of the war, somewhere in the neighborhood of five thousand were dead, with more than three-quarters of those losses suffered by the Native Americans. In terms of percentage of population killed, King Philip’s War was more than twice as bloody as the American Civil War and at least seven times more lethal than the American Revolution. Not counted in these statistics are the hundreds of Native Americans who, like the passengers aboard the Seaflower, ended the war as slaves. It had taken fifty-six years to unfold, but one people’s quest for freedom had resulted in the conquest and enslavement of another.

It was Philip who led me to the Pilgrims. I was researching the history of my adopted home, Nantucket Island, when I encountered a reference to the Wampanoag leader in the town’s records. In attempting to answer the question of why Philip, whose headquarters was in modern Bristol, Rhode Island, had traveled more than sixty-five miles across the water to Nantucket, I realized that I must begin with Philip’s father, Massasoit, and the Pilgrims.

My initial impression of the period was bounded by two conflicting preconceptions: the time-honored tradition of how the Pilgrims came to symbolize all that is good about America and the now equally familiar modern tale of how the evil Europeans annihilated the innocent Native Americans. I soon learned that the real-life Indians and English of the seventeenth century were too smart, too generous, too greedy, too brave—in short, too human—to behave so predictably.

Without Massasoit’s help, the Pilgrims would never have survived the first year, and they remained steadfast supporters of the sachem to the very end. For his part, Massasoit realized almost from the start that his own fortunes were linked to those of the English. In this respect, there is a surprising amount of truth in the tired, threadbare story of the First Thanksgiving.

But the Indians and English of Plymouth Colony did not live in a static idyll of mutual support. Instead, it was fifty-five years of struggle and compromise—a dynamic, often harrowing process of give and take. As long as both sides recognized that they needed each other, there was peace. The next generation, however, came to see things differently.

When Philip’s warriors attacked in June of 1675, it was not because relentless and faceless forces had given the Indians no other choice. Those forces had existed from the very beginning. War came to New England because two leaders—Philip and his English counterpart, Josiah Winslow—allowed it to happen. For Indians and English alike, there was nothing inevitable about King Philip’s War, and the outbreak of fighting caught almost everyone by surprise.

When violence and fear grip a society, there is an almost overpowering temptation to demonize the enemy. Given the unprecedented level of suffering and death during King Philip’s War, the temptations were especially great, and it is not surprising that both Indians and English began to view their former neighbors as subhuman and evil. What is surprising is that even in the midst of one of the deadliest wars in American history, there were Englishmen who believed the Indians were not inherently malevolent and there were Indians who believed the same about the English. They were the ones whose rambunctious and intrinsically rebellious faith in humanity finally brought the war to an end, and they are the heroes of this story.

It would be left to subsequent generations of New Englanders to concoct the nostalgic and reassuring legends that have become the staple of annual Thanksgiving Day celebrations. As we shall see, the Pilgrims had more important things to worry about than who was the first to set foot on Plymouth Rock.

It is true that most of what we know about seventeenth-century New England comes from the English. Though in recent decades, archaeologists, anthropologists, and folklorists have significantly increased our understanding of the Native American culture of the time. Any account of the period must depend, for the most part, on contemporary narratives, histories, letters, documents, and poems written by English men and women.

I have focused on two people, one familiar, the other less so: Plymouth governor William Bradford and Benjamin Church, a carpenter turned Indian fighter whose maternal grandfather had sailed on the Mayflower. Bradford and Church could not have been more different—one was pious and stalwart, the other was audacious and proud—but both wrote revealingly about their lives in the New World. Together, they tell a fifty-six-year intergenerational saga of discovery, accommodation, community, and war—a pattern that was repeated time and time again as the United States worked its way west and, ultimately, out into the world.
It is a story that is at once fundamental and obscure, and it begins with a ship on a wide and blustery sea.

Copyright (c) 2006 by Nathaniel Philbrick

For Book Groups

1. What beliefs and character traits that typified the Pilgrims enabled them to survive in the hostile environment that greeted them in the New World? Did some of the same traits that helped them survive limit them in other ways? How so?

2. In Of Plymouth Plantation, a work quoted in Mayflower, William Bradford attributes the death of a “proud and very profane” sailor aboard the Mayflower to “the just hand of God” (pp. 30–31). What does this almost jubilant response to another person’s suffering suggest about the nature of Bradford’s religious beliefs? How did this attitude continue to reveal itself in the other experiences of the Pilgrims and the Puritans?

3. Philbrick shows us that many of the classic images that shape our current view of the Pilgrims—from Plymouth Rock to the usual iconography of the first Thanksgiving—have been highly fictionalized. Why has America forsaken the truth about these times in exchange for a misleading and often somewhat hokey mythology?

4. The Pilgrims established a tradition of more or less peaceful coexistence with the Native Americans that lasted over fifty years. Why did that tradition collapse in the 1670s and what might have been done to preserve it?

5. Discuss the character of Squanto. How did the strengths and weaknesses of his personality end up influencing history, and why did this one man make such a difference?

6. The children of the Pilgrims were regarded in their own time as “the degenerate plant of a strange vine,” unworthy of the legacy and sacrifices of their mothers and fathers (p. 198). Why did they acquire (and largely accept) this reputation? Was it deserved? Were the denunciations of the second generation a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy?

7. The Pilgrims and Puritans thought that the greatest gifts they could give the Indians were spiritual. The Indians, to the contrary, tended to be most impressed by the things the Europeans brought with them. How did this lack of agreement help to undermine relations between the two peoples? What were some of the other key misunderstandings that drove a wedge between the natives and the Europeans?

8. Compare Philbrick’s portrayals of natives in Mayflower with the ways in which they have been represented in popular culture, for instance, in Hollywood movies. How does Mayflower encourage us to rethink those representations? On the other hand, are there some popular images of Native Americans that seem to be somewhat rooted in what actually happened in the seventeenth century?

9. In the chaotic, atrocity-filled conflict known as King Philip’s War, does anyone emerge as heroic? If so, what are the actions and qualities that identify him or her as a hero?

10. As Mayflower shows, the American Indian tribes of New England were not a monolith, either culturally or politically. However, the English were not consistently able to think of them as separate tribes with different loyalties and desires. How did misconceptions of racial identity complicate the politics of King Philip’s War?

11. During King Philip’s War, significant numbers of Native Americans sided with the English. How do you regard those who took up arms against their fellow natives? Do you see them as treacherous, opportunistic, or merely sensible? If you had been a native, which side would you have taken, and why?

12. Philbrick shows that the English, as well as the American Indians, engaged in barbaric practices like torturing and mutilating their captives, as well as taking body parts as souvenirs. Could either side in King Philip’s War make any legitimate claim to moral superiority? Why or why not?

13. Mary Rowlandson, who wrote a memoir of her abduction during the burning of Lancaster, Massachusetts, often used the word “strange” when trying to explain why God seemingly strengthened the “heathens” in their fight against the God-fearing English. Why was it so hard for Rowlandson to understand the political events going on around her? Why was it so important for her to see them in terms of divine justice?

14. Philbrick likens the story of King Philip to Greek tragedy. Is this a useful way of thinking about Philip and the war that bears his name? Why or why not?

15. One reviewer of Mayflower asserted that Nathaniel Philbrick “avoid[ed] the overarching moral issues [of his subject] and [took] no sides.” Do you find this to be true? Are there moral lessons Philbrick wants us to learn? If so, what are they?

16. History often reveals as much about the time in which it was written as it does about the time it narrates. What aspects of Mayflower mark it as a book written in the early twenty-first century?

17. Philbrick says that the conditions that led to the outbreak of King Philip’s War “remain a lesson for us today” (348). How do you think this may be true?