Comments on Reading "Mayflower"

I recently posted on Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War by Nathaniel Philbrick. I will sign off on the book with this posting. I should begin by saying the Philbrick writes well (as one might guess since he has won the Pulitzer Prize), and the book is quite readable, although it tells me more about a large cast of characters than I really want to know or am likely to long remember.

It is hard to pierce the myth and think about the Pilgrims as real people. To the extent that I can do so, I think I really would have disliked them individually and collectively. There lives revolved around a religious orientation which not only don't I share, but almost no one shares. I must conclude that they were deluded. I note that half the passengers on the Mayflower did not survive the initial colonization, and that many of the people who had thought to join the first wave of colonization wisely backed out. I must conclude that those who did not were foolish and unable to predict the short term future. Given the failure of the Plymouth Colony to live up to its religious purposes they were also unable to predict their long term future. Finally, many of them failed to treat the native Americans in a Christian manner.

It may be useful to put these people into a different historical perspective. The Mayflower landed in New England in 1620. Galileo got his telescope in 1609; Shakespeare and Cervantes both died on April 23, 1616.

The book, contrary to its title, is primarily about two small wars declared by the Puritans on the native Americans in the aftermath of the founding of the Plymouth. Philbrick suggests, and I find it credible, that the English systematically and deliberately invaded an already occupied land. Allying themselves with some tribes and taking advantage of the destruction of social systems and decimations of populations by epidemics of (European) diseases, they attacked and conquered the survivors, selling a significant portion of the survivors as slaves to pay for the wars of conquest. The end of the process was a New England populated almost entirely by the descendants of European immigrants with the few reminants of the native American population living in tiny reservations, their culture totally destroyed.

Were this version of the founding of the first of the colonies which succeeded and evenually became the United States to be widely understood, rather than the myths built around Plymouth Rock, John Alden speaking for himself, and the first Thanksgiving, then we might be less confident about the virtue of our American heritage and more worried about the our historical tendency to impose our will on the weak whenever we are strong enough to do so.

I guess this conclusion more than justifies the reading of the book!

You know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
The Athenians to the Melians
The Melian Dialog
in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian Wars.