Excellent account of the Pilgrims, and the Native Americans during the settlement of the English at Plymouth Rock. This was a very educational volume concerning the early history of our nation.

A must-read if you're from New England or interested in early colonial era history. Philbrick's Mayflower is written to capture your interest in a way you might not expect a book on the Pil--*YAWN!*--grims could. You'll find much more detail with way more truth in this book than anything you learned about those uptight prigs in elementary school!

Big sigh of relief to have finally gotten through this.....Like a lot of other people, I imagined this book would be about the Mayflower and its passengers, and what they did when they reached America -- seeing how the title of the book is "Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War." That's the book Philbrick wrote for the first 100 pages or so, but evidently, he changed his mind and decided he was going to write something else after that. It's too bad he didn't change the title while he was at it.
The rest of the book, until the last 10 pages is a lengthy, dull, battle-by-battle account about King Phillip's War, which I'd never heard of, and I doubt many other readers have either. That's not to say it's unimportant. It is a crucial part of early American/United States history that set the tone for all the subsequent Indian wars in this country. Of that, there's no doubt.
Unfortunately, the history as Philbrick has written it is hard to follow, and his bias becomes painfully obvious as the narrative progresses. Even though Philip, an Indian sachem, started the war, which involved the brutal murder of unarmed English settlers multiple times, Philbrick seems to think the Indians were the only victims who unfairly lost their land and lives. In fact, if the English would have just packed up and gone back to England amidst all this carnage, all would be well with the world today, he seems assert.
The first part of the book does a decent job of giving us background about the Pilgrims and the social and political reasons they had for leaving Holland -- more background that most readers and Americans have no idea about.
I'd hoped the book would continue with that history and talk about how the rest of New England colonies were settled and why, but he glosses over the rest of the "English" history of the time period and veers off into a military play-by-play so full of arcane detail, I'm not sure many readers would be able to follow it. If you're not intimately familiar with the geography and topography of the Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island coastlines, as well as all the Indian tribes who were living there in the 1620s to 1640s, you're probably going to have a hard time with this book.

The first English settlers to establish a permanent a colony in New England beginning with Plymouth near Cape Cod.

This book covers primarily the relationship the English settlers (specifically those of the Mayflower and their descendants)  had with the Native American tribes of the region.

The book is loaded with detail including the names of the settlers, the names of the Native Americans when available, and the locations of the events mentioned in the book.  This makes for excellent quality historical narrative in my opinion.  The author also includes the modern day place names whenever possible which is very useful.

Sometimes the familiarity of a story can blind us to its quality and character, and such is the story of the Mayflower. The author apparently wanted to write a revisionist story about the settlement of Plymouth but decided instead to broaden the scope of the Mayflower to discuss the fateful nature of various choices, including the absence of pastors for Plymouth and the insatiable land hunger of the second generation of Pilgrim and Puritan settlers and the way that decisions and choices made by people avoided conflict or created a near-genocidal war that has shaped New England to this day. The author notes the struggles of community and how it is that people can be blind to the way that they appear to others, and this book does a good job at framing Thanksgiving in such a way that the mutual appreciation of the Pilgrims and their neighbors did not last as the Pilgrims and Puritans forgot their initial struggles and made decisions that led to the disastrous and sanguinary King Phillip's war, a war that was far larger than its often ineffectual namesake, a war that was a genuine civil conflict among the native peoples of North America.

This book is a bit more than 350 pages and it tells the story of the Pilgrims from the late 1500's and early 1600's to the bloody aftermath of King Philip's War in the late 1670's. We begin with a look at English Separatists and their attempts to be free to practice their beliefs (even if they were not always keen on giving those freedoms to others) and to remain English in the face of cultural pressures in the Netherlands. Despite numerous problems, including their capacity for being duped, the Pilgrims found themselves struggling to establish themselves in a Massachusetts that had been decimated by disease shortly before their arrival, but thanks to some support and their own diplomatic and military skills, they managed to preserve their own safety and encouraged a larger Puritan settlement within ten years of their own arrival. The growth of their communities and the dispersing of people in search of land and money led to increasing pressures on native tribes, which eventually exploded into a war that the author talks about in considerable detail for its fierceness and for its consequences on the people of the region and their historical reputation.

This book is a long one, but its tale is one that is worth thinking about. The author's approach to his subject points out that history is made up of the repercussions that spring from the choices of people, ourselves included. The author has some clear points to make about those choices, seeing in people like Benjamin Church and William Bradford the opportunity to learn from others and seek to deal fairly with others, and seeing in others the hostility and lack of knowledge or interest in others that can lead to disastrous mistakes that can have serious consequences for the lives of societies as a whole. While there are other writers who have sought to deny the Pilgrims as being people of decency at all, this author can be praised for having a far more complex view of humanity that shows the way in which honorable conduct, severe weaknesses, and personality drama unite the personal and political and demonstrate the common humanity that we all struggle with and that sometimes allows us to, even in spite of ourselves, become people of grand historical importance, as was the case with the people discussed in this book, for all of their diverse backgrounds and worldviews and perspectives.

Omg. This book should not be disguised as a novel!! It's really a text book- don't be fooled!! I must finish this one by this thanksgiving and impress everyone at the dinner table with my knowledge of the first thanksgivingers hardships and triumphs. I think it's been 2 yrs. I've been trying to finish this one:p

Interesting read, and by far the best account of the Pilgrims' ordeal that I've seen so far. The first half of the book is a real page-turner which details the pre-Mayflower days in England and Holland -the ordeal of finding financing while avoiding persecution from their mother country - and moves on to the 10-week voyage and the harrowing first winter in Plymouth. The author then skips forward about 40 years, to give his account of King Philip's war and the consequent annihilation of most of New England's indiginous peoples (as well as the ultimate destruction of European-Indian relations). My problem was that I felt that by glossing over the years between the first days of the colony and the war with Massasoit's son, we aren't given enough of a context for the war, and I felt I wanted to understand both sides. The author continually refers to the grown children of the Mayflower passengers and how the ideals outlined in the Compact were broken down over the years, but since we aren't let in on the *story*, we simply have to take the author's word for it. As a result, I found the account of the war a bit less interesting than the first half of the book.

I will say this: Philbrick does make many of the historical characters come alive - particularly Miles Standish and Benjamin Church - fleshing out and breathing life into many of the figures that we all have embedded in our consciousness as grade-school characatures.

"Mayflower" to świetna pozycja historyczna i w pełni rozumiem, dlaczego otrzymała nominację do Pulitzera - Philbrick włożył w pracę ze źródłami ogrom pracy i niesamowicie ciekawie odtworzył historyczne postaci, ich osobowości oraz motywacje. Zafascynowało mnie jego spojrzenie na relacje Pielgrzymów, pierwszych angielskich osadników w Ameryce Północnej, oraz rdzennych mieszkańców tych okolic. Autor mocno niuansuje ich relacje, nie pozwalając sobie na czarno-białe spojrzenie, ale w ten sposób chyba tym mocniej wybrzmiewa krzywda (czy to nie zbyt słabe słowo) wyrządzona Indianom przez Europejczyków.

Tyle że... gdybym wcześniej lepiej znała tę historię i charakter książki, dwa razy zastanowiłabym się nad lekturą. O ile pierwsze połowa dotycząca pierwszych lat kolonii Plymouth pochłonęła mnie bez reszty, o tyle druga dotyczyła przede wszystkim konfliktu zbrojnego. Opisy kolejnych działań wojennych, choć z pewnością nie nudne, nie były w stanie mnie zainteresować. Zabrakło mi trochę tego codziennego życia osadników. Autor nie pisze też w najbardziej wciągający sposób, a do tego tłumaczenie w wielu miejscach brzmi kulawo.

"Mayflower" nie było książką do końca przeznaczoną dla mnie, ale i tak wyciągnęłam z niej masę wiedzy i tzw. "świadomości". Polecam.

A little bit of a backstory on this, one of my ancestors came over on the Mayflower so I have a personal interest in the people who made the journey.

This book featured the well written information I have come to expect by Nathaniel Philbrick. I enjoyed reading this piece of history.

Possible spoilers......

I didn’t give this book five stars, because I thought that one event was focused on too much, and not the actual people who made to journey and survived. I won’t say what the event it. You have to read the book and find out for yourself.

A good read for sure but the title is a little misleading. This book is centered around two specific events and the transition between the two is rather rough. The first 150 pages are about the Mayflower voyage, the first Puritan settlement in Plymouth, Massachusetts and their symbiotic relationship with the Pokanoket tribe. The focus of the second half of the book is the Puritan vs. Indian conflict known as King Philip’s War. This involves all of New England and happened about 65 years after the Plymouth settlement is established. Frankly, I was a little lost during the transition and it was a hard to follow for a few pages. I think that a more appropriate title would have helped. Something like the “Mayflower and King Phillip’s War” or “The Puritans in the New World 1610-1676” would have been more accurate.

The settlement in Plymouth would not have survived the first year if it were not for their relationship with the Pokanoket Indians. The New England tribes were decimated by European diseases which they had no resistance to. Historians surmise that it was the plague that struck them in the first decade of the 17th century. The plague killed up to 90% of the Indians that had inhabited New England. The area where the pilgrims would eventually establish the first settlement of Plymouth had contained thousands of Indians just a few years prior to Mayflower's arrival. When the Pilgrims arrived it was unoccupied.

The Pokanoket tribe was hit especially hard by the plague and they were weakened more so than several of the neighboring tribes. These tribes, such as the Narrangasetts, took advantage of their weakened neighbors. The Pokanoket chief, Massasoit, leveraged his relationship with the Pilgrims to survive against the Narrangasetts. The two groups more than co-existed. The two groups had a symbiotic relationship. Unfortunatly, the Pilgrim’s ancestors had forgotten how critical the Pokanokets were to the survival of their forefathers. Subsequent generations of Puritans took advantage of the Indians. This led to a war with the Pokanokets that on a per capita basis was the bloodiest war in the history of North America.

The lessons gleaned form the pages of this book have been repeated over and over again throughout history. Bad policy started King Phillip’s war. It could have been easy to avoid. Revenge was taken by the frustrated Puritans who could not catch the warring factions so they conveniently took revenge against praying and neutral tribes. On the other side, allies of Pokanoket sachem King Phillip killed the relatives of Plymouth descendants of whom King Phillip considered friends. The conflict spiraled out of control.

The war was not going well for the Puritans until Mayflower descendant Benjamin Church recruited a strike force of Puritans and Indians from friendly tribes. He was able to convince warring Indians to change sides and join Church’s party. Church granted them amnesty and these Indians in-turn taught Church their tactics. They taught the Puritans how to move without being detected and how to avoid ambushes and how to set them. Church and his combined strike force used these tactics to hunt down King Phillip and to end the war.

The book gives Benjamin Church his due as one of the first great early American Indian fighters that you never heard of. Like the pilgrims, Church would not have been successful without his reliance on friendly Native Americans.

Enjoy the book.

Another fine Brick of Narrative history. Facts may be "all over the place" sometimes, but we still learn how the presence of undergrowth and extra inaccessible swamps determined the seasonal start of King Philip's war, together with a Puritan's house fuel consumption (75 acres of wood per annum).

Pilgrims! Indians! War!

This is an in-depth look at the first years of the colonists in New England, and also the terrible war with the Indians that the next generation faced. Philbrick's book is called Mayflower, but only the first section of it focuses on the sea voyage and the Mayflower Compact. I was especially interested in learning what the colonists did in the early days of their settlement, how they adapted to the land and worked on their homes. However, a majority of the book is about King Philip's War, which was the conflict between the Pilgrims and native Americans (although the Pilgrims did have some Indian allies). It's complicated.

I had previously read Philbrick's book In the Heart of the Sea, which I really enjoyed, but I struggled to finish Mayflower. I did learn some interesting details, including that before coming to the New World, the English Puritans first went to live in Holland because it was known for being religiously tolerant. But they felt they couldn't stay there.

"Their chief worry involved their children. Gradually and inevitably, they were becoming Dutch. The congregation had rejected the Church of England, but the vast majority of its members were still proudly, even defiantly, English. By sailing to the New World, they hoped to re-create the English village life they so dearly missed while remaining beyond the meddlesome reach of King James and his bishops."

I appreciated this look at early American history, and I'm glad I read it, even though it was rather dense in the later chapters about the conflict. I would still recommend it to those interested in reading more about the Pilgrims or the First Indian War.

Opening Passage

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 the Wampanoags maintained more than fifty years of peace 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.