Mayflower

 

Mayflower – by Nathaniel Philbrick

So first thing’s first. This book really isn’t about the Mayflower – or specifically about the famed Mayflower voyage that is embedded in every American’s brain by the time they’re six years old. The first half of the book is, but then the narrative strays.  That’s too bad because the first half of the book that does deal with the famed voyage is outstanding. After that, the author essentially changes focus and we read about the conflicts between the newly arrived Puritans and their Native American neighbors.  That in itself wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, but the problem is that this portion of the book becomes very tedious and uninteresting.

I really wish the author would have stuck with and focused on the Mayflower voyage throughout the whole book. Maybe he simply ran out of things to write?  Could be, as what we read is, in fact, very detailed.  We begin several years before the voyage in the countries of England and Holland and read about the events that led the individuals to set out on such a treacherous voyage.  And it was quite treacherous.

When these individuals finally arrived in the new world, they were a far cry from the neat, smiling, well-scrubbed faces that we saw in the illustrations in children’s books back in school.  This was a haggard, motley crew, and more people died on the voyage due to disease and starvation than survived.  Once the lucky survivors disembark, they quickly discover that they’re not alone in this new land, and the transported Europeans and Native Americans are awfully cautious towards each other.  They meet from time to time, nervously sniffing each other like strange dogs in the road. Today, many have been led to believe that these “Indians” were peaceful people and yet the white man took advantage of them and took their land away from them through bloody conflict.  This is a bit of a stretch, and we read here that the eventual skirmishes weren’t quite as cut and dry as that.  We forget that there wasn’t only one tribe of “Indians” and the different tribes didn’t always get along with each other either, so the new colonists essentially are entering a hotbed of conflict when they first arrive to their new home.

Well, once that story is done, we switch to the ongoing conflicts between the colonists (not only those who arrived on the Mayflower) and the many Native American tribes. It should be pointed out that the majority of this takes place a good fifty years or so after the Mayflower arrives.  The biggest antagonist for the relocated Europeans is an Indian named “King Philip” and the book proceeds to then tell the story of “King Phillips War”.  The problem here is that it just isn’t very interesting. Apart from the reflections from the work of Mary Rowlandson, a 38-year-old Christian captive of the Indians during this time, it’s very hard for the reader to stay focused and the book really did become a chore to finish.  This is such a shame since the first part was so interesting and informative.

I’m not sure what other works to recommend around the Mayflower voyage. I did notice that the bibliography for this work was rather huge.  I wish the author would have kept his focus on the title of the book. Maybe had he not consulted so many sources, the narrative wouldn’t have drifted too far off course.