Excellent and thorough book. King Philip's War is barely a footnote in most school textbooks, but it was a hugely important event in our local and national history. As a South Shore resident, I found this particularly interesting and profound.

Picked this one up yesterday off the local library's sale shelves. It was already on my to-read shelf. Looks pretty good from my start last night. Some of my own ancestors arrived further north(Charlestown) about ten years later on. I'm one of the few people who HAS read about the bloody and disastrous King Philip's War, but this book will be(when I'm finished) the most I've learned about it - by far.

Moving along with the Pilgrims who's story is a lot more complicated than I ever learned in school. So interesting ... before they even got to the New World there had already been a number of visits and encounters between Europeans and the locals in the Eastern New England seashore area. Plus(duh!), those locals were having their own history before the invaders arrived. Good stuff!

So interesting to read how much the south shore of Massachusetts was NOT the unspoiled virgin wilderness one might have been led to picture based on grade school "mythology." Looks like there were a number of visitations by Europeans before the Pilgrims got there. This book contains two pretty good maps of the area drawn by Capt. John Smith and Samuel de Champlain. Pretty soon they're going to meet an English-speaking Indian name Squanto(?)! It was the Pilgrims' good fortune that serious misfortune had recently been visited upon the local Indians by way of a deadly epidemic that decimated their population. The Plymouth area was a pretty sweet location for them(Pilgrims) and was devoid of any Indians-in residence. They had all fled the plague ... probably introduced by European explorers. Ain't that always the way ...

And so to the early on downside(for the Indians) of colonist paranoia - probably the first slaughter of natives by Europeans, at least in New England. There WERE other atrocities committed on a smaller scale in the area before the Pilgrims landed, and inter-Indian political shenanigans were a factor as well, but the end result was the seemingly pointless bloody slaying of a bunch of Red Men by a Myles Standish-led crew, when a little talking might have settled the problems more peaceably. It's gonna get worse all around before this book is done, about 50 years on from where I am now.

I now go back in time a couple of hundred years(from the America of Jesse James) to pre-colonial New England. Lots of communities have sprung up in the mid-1600's in the general area of Plymouth, which has become a bit of a backwater. There's not enough land to go around and the local Indians are becoming more reluctant to part with it as their own homeland keeps shrinking as the Pilgrims keep needing more of it. They DO pay for it ... the crowding is pointing inevitably to the downfall of Indian culture and the newer waves of white inhabitants have little regard for the Indians and their culture. As will become the case in the 19th century out in the Midwest and Far West, the Indians come to be seen more and more as obstacles to white expansion and progress. Not a good place for them to be, of course. I grew up in the vicinity of Worcester, Mass., not that far from Plymouth(saw the rock once) and if there were any Indians around I was never aware of them. There was a kid in school named Earl ... he had the look. What's being described by the author is the beginning of the run-up to King Philip's War. Next up ...

In the middle of the years-long King Philip's War and what a bloody mess it was, especially for the Indians. In it's way it's kind of comparable to The Little Big Horn and Custer's Last Stand. The Indians had plenty of victories, but in the end this will turn out to be a disaster for them. Americans are pretty well versed(thanks to Hollywood) in the Indian Wars of the mid-late 19th century. The slant has gone from white mythology to revisionism. Little focus has fallen on the 17th century conflicts back east. The outcome here in the 21st century? There are VERY few Indians living east of the Mississippi River. Pretty much all gone now and it's sad ... sad ... sad ...sad. And shameful.

And so ... the ugly-deadly war continues, along with the suffering. The combatants are fighting on and over the same large patch of ground, mostly southern and eastern New England, modern day Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts. You know that the English will win because of numbers, technology and culture. They are suffering about as much as the Indians, but eventually the Indians will suffer much, much more. It's a sad and bloody history, and here we are a days after Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples Day. For me it was interesting to read about the Indian encampment at Wachusett Mountain(which we called[as does Wikipedia] Mount Wachusett) BITD. From our house up on the second highest hill in Boylston we could see MW very clearly and nicely.

Finished up a few days ago with this interesting sort-of-standard history of the settling of Pilgrims in SW coastal Masachusetts and of their dicey and ultimately disastrous political relations with them. The story culminates in and account of King Philip's War, an event that set the stage for the virtual elimination of indigenous peoples and their culture. Most of what's left of that is a lot of Indian names of towns and such and a big casino in Eastern Connecticut. So very sad ...

Being an old Anthropology major I would have liked a lot more accounting and description of the clashing cultures. I do like standard history, but the perspective taken by Anthro seems to be more objective and "scientific."

- 3.75* rounds up to 4*.

What I loved about this historical account is that it covered the stories of many of the immediate passengers of the Mayflower from pre-journey through their children and how they shaped the early development of the colonies. It was less about the Mayflower journey and more about the cultural developments created by the harsh environmental challenges as well as both the successful and failed attempts of developing relationships with the native population. It better oversimplifies or beautifies the era, nor does it neglect the noble efforts of some to create healthy relationships. Rather, it tells the more complex story of how there were both successes and failures in those early days. Sadly, it appears that the first 50 or so years depicted the integration that America should have been, and then how it devolved from there into what it became. The "could haves" are really "should haves" that were destroyed by foolish arrogance and ignorance.

Very well written. Excellent story telling.

This feels almost like a summary of A Game of Thrones, replete with drama, treachery, and betrayal. Everyone is horrible in their turn! Good intentions lead to disaster! Evil intentions lead to triumph! NOBODY IS BLAMELESS!

Philbrick abandons the myths surrounding both the Pilgrims pre-1960 and the Natives post-1960. Both were fundamentally human and both have been undeservedly sanitized & eulogized by later generations. What is more, it wasn't a matter of two clear sides, since there were MANY different tribes in the Plymouth-area, all of whom constantly fought & betrayed EVERYONE. The native tribes were far from the "noble savages" modern revisionists wish them to have been, just as the pilgrims were far from the "united saints" American traditionalists wish them to have been. Really, everyone involved was very, very human and all of them were just trying to do their best.

Interesting Notes:
--The native peoples in the region were almost universally taller and broader than the Europeans (likely owing to the Amerindian's higher protein diets, I'll note).
--Large numbers of native peoples voluntarily & eagerly adopted Christianity (though often syncretized with their own ritual praxis) because of its similarities to their basic belief structure. As a result, the leaders who didn't switch to Christianity lived in constant fear of being abandoned by their people for leaders who did.
--The "Indians" were often such strict observers of their form of puritan-influenced Christianity that they would actively rebuke colonists they found "toiling on ye Sabbath."
--Squanto was actually a cunning politician who used the Pilgrims against the enemies of his tribe; he encouraged his enemies to believe that the Pilgrims' supplies were actually the source of the diseases that had wiped out so many indigenous people (including his own family) and told other natives that, if they didn't "play nice," the Pilgrims would open their barrels of plagues and wipe out all remaining natives.
--"Squanto" wasn't his real name -- it was a title he gave himself upon returning from Europe because that was the name of the local version of "Satan" and he figured the pretense would work as an intimidation tactic. Which it probably did!

My only real objection to the book is the bizarre 2006-era political diatribe he injects at the end.

Overall, really enjoyed this. I think it's both fun and important to read more in-depth accounts of historical events, especially ones as charged as the first 75 years of the United States, ranging from the pilgrim's landing through King Philip's War.

My one real concern about the book is that, I guess understandably considering it's called Mayflower, the book still very much is from the point of view of the pilgrims. They, and any Native Americans that ally with them, are the heroes, and any Native Americans that fight them are the enemy. The book does seem to try to give respect and consideration to many of the Native leaders, and I'm sure the goal was to be as objective and fair as possible. However, great detail is given to all the horribly gruesome killing methods some of the Natives used during war (people living through scalping, splitting fingers, etc.), whereas most of the English maltreatment of the Natives appears to be unfair/stacked trials, death by hanging or firing squad and enslavement --which are bad, don't get me wrong. But late in the book, they call out the fact that the Native Americans were unique in that they didn't rape their female hostages. That's fascinating. By calling that out, does that mean the Pilgrims & Puritans did do that? Did they not? Do we just not know but suspect? The book certainly calls out Pilgrims and Puritans for straight up murdering many villages, and burning women and children alive in their villages. Nathaniel Philbrick is usually pretty upfront about the good, the bad, and the ugly, but th ebook still left me with questions. At least in Heart of the Sea he brings up the racial implications of one particular event and admits we don't know the answer. Perhaps it's just a matter of cruelty by the Natives being better documented by the Pilgrims & Puritans because of course, but I would have liked this disparity more clearly addressed.

Still, it seems a MORE fair and honest account of those early years than any I've read before. Philbrick shows the strength and character of Native leaders just as he shows the weaknesses and flaws of the English characters. I came out of it with a much better understanding of how the country was founded, for good and for ill, and I am happy to learn more of the many non-white movers and shakers of the history of this country which tend to so often be glossed over and forgotten.

As a genealogist with direct ancestors who arrived in Maine in 1626 this book was fascinating. The actual voyage of the Mayflower was interesting, but the account of their arrival and the next 50 years had me reading into the wee hours of the morning. Philbrick describes the first years of misery and death, sickness, hunger and discovery; and of the support of the Pokenokets, the sachem Massasoit, and Squanto. The second half of the book focuses on King Philip's war of 1675 which just about decimated the Native American population of New England and in which several of my direct ancestors perished or were captured by the Indians. The machinations and horrific attitude on both sides created a war in which there were no winners.

Fascinating in-depth narrative of the voyage of the Mayflower and the subsequent settling of the pilgrims. There's so much more to the story we all learned in elementary school!

When you think of the Mayflower and the Pilgrims coming to America in 1620 you first think of new settlers in a new land establishing a colony and the first Thanksgiving. After that, what do you know? This book fills in all the details that are very surprising. The second generation of Pilgrims made it very precarious in southern New England. Very well researched and informative, this book is a must read for those interested in early American history.

Multiple award winning author Nathaniel Philbrick* has written a thrilling account of the 102 pilgrims (and two dogs!) who sailed to the New World on board The Mayflower in 1620. The author focuses primarily on two of the pilgrims: “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.” The pilgrims were from Leyden in Holland, but they were Englishmen who practised a puritanical form of Christian faith which was not welcome in England. "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."

After 65 days at sea they finally saw land, and it was at Cape Cod that they disembarked. This was about 220 miles north of the land which had been granted to them. However, it wasn't feasible for them to travel on (they tried, but failed) and so they settled. Not another inhabitant was to be seen for some time, but they found many skeletons. Plague had decimated the numbers of the inhabitants during 1616-1619. When explorer Samuel Champlain** had previously explored this region it was different: "As a map drawn by Samuel Champlain in 1605 shows, the banks of the harbor had been dotted with wigwams, each with a curling plume of wood smoke rising from the hole in its roof and with fields of corn, beans, and squash growing nearby. Dugout canoes made from hollowed-out pine trees plied the waters, which in summer were choked with bluefish and striped bass. The lobsters were so numerous that the Indians plucked them from the shallows of the harbor. The mudflats were so thick with buried clams that it was impossible to walk across the shore without being drenched by squirting bivalves." When the pilgrims arrived there didnt seem to be much by way of food.

Eventually they encountered some Indians, and Mr Philbrick describes the uncanny facility of these people to mimic the English language. Initially the two groups of people learned from each other and established trade, give or take a misunderstanding or two. Later there was a large influx of English people who left England due the policies of Charles I. When Charles lost his head and he was replaced by the Puritan government of Oliver Cromwell, some of these people returned to England.

With people coming and going and a younger generation reaching adulthood attitudes changed on both sides of the metaphorical fence. “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.” A series of events finally led to the disastrous King Philip’s War (1675-1677). The last section of the book is devoted to the war and its aftermath. Philip was the son of Massasoit, the leader or sachem of the Pokanokets, with whom the Plymouth Colony had a mutually beneficial relationship. Suffice to say that for various reasons Philip detested the English, and as his war against the English progressed the latter disregarded who was friend or foe amongst the different Indian tribes, and as paranoia set in the attitude was that the only good Indian was a dead one. Dead, that is, or enslaved. Here are the horrific statistics of the war: “During the forty-five months of World War II, the United States lost just under 1 percent of its adult male population; during the Civil War the casualty rate was somewhere between 4 and 5 percent; during the fourteen months of King Philip’s War, Plymouth Colony lost close to 8 percent of its men. But the English losses appear almost inconsequential when compared to those of the Indians. Of a total Native population of approximately 20,000, at least 2,000 had been killed in battle or died of their injuries; 3,000 had died of sickness and starvation, 1,000 had been shipped out of the country as slaves, while an estimated 2,000 eventually fled to either the Iroquois to the west or the Abenakis to the north. Overall, the Native American population of southern New England had sustained a loss of somewhere between 60 and 80 percent.”

There are lots of interesting details in the book, and even if one is familiar with the history (which I am not) it is worth reading. Mr Philbrick gives a well balanced account; there is good and bad in both the English and Indian camps. The author concludes the book with the interesting story of Plymouth Rock, emblem of the pilgrims’ arrival, which was carted to and fro and suffered some mishaps.

Here are a few snippets:
“The cosmology of the Pokanokets included as many as thirty-eight gods and spirits, most of them linked to various aspects of the physical world—the sun, moon, sea, fire, and a wide range of animals.”

“One of the more remarkable characteristics of Indian corn or maize is that, if kept dry, the kernels can be stored indefinitely. In Mexico, storage pits containing perfectly preserved corn have been unearthed that were at least a thousand years old.”

“As the French explorer Samuel Champlain had discovered fourteen years earlier on the south coast of Cape Cod, the Indians’ bows and arrows were fearsome weapons. Made from a five-and-a-half-foot piece of solid hickory, maple, ash, or witch hazel and strung with a three-stranded length of sinew, a Native bow was so powerful that one of Champlain’s men was skewered by an arrow that had already passed through his dog—making, in effect, a gruesome shish kebab of the French sailor and his pet.”

“The land surrounding Plymouth was so poor that it was necessary to fertilize the soil with dead herring. Although women were the ones who did the farming (with the sole exception of planting tobacco, which was considered men’s work), Squanto knew enough of their techniques to give the Pilgrims a crash course in Indian agriculture.”

“Countless Victorian-era engravings notwithstanding, the Pilgrims did not spend the day sitting around a long table draped with a white linen cloth, clasping each other’s hands in prayer as a few curious Indians looked on. Instead of an English affair, the First Thanksgiving soon became an overwhelmingly Native celebration when Massasoit and a hundred Pokanokets (more than twice the entire English population of Plymouth) arrived at the settlement with five freshly killed deer.”

Those who were persecuted for their faith in England soon became the persecutors when Quakers arrived on the scene. “Soon after, the Quakers, who began arriving in New England in 1655, were persecuted with a vehemence that climaxed with the hanging of four men and women on Boston Common between 1659 and 1661. It was the Puritans who led the way in persecuting the Quakers, but the Pilgrims were more than willing to follow along.”


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*”AWARDS AND HONOURS
In the Heart of the Sea won the National Book Award for non-fiction; Revenge of the Whale won a Boston Globe-Horn Book Award; Sea of Glory won the Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt Naval History Prize and the Albion-Monroe Award from the National Maritime Historical Society; Mayflower was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History.”

**For further reading on Samuel Champlain I recommend Champlain's Dream


###
Any errors in this review are entirely my own, so please don’t blame the book’s author!

Maybe a bit of a 4.5.... but still, I very much enjoyed this book.
My only real quibble is that during the extensive King Philip's War section... Philbrick perhaps gives too much detail and too much blow by blow accounting... reusing long sections of his source material like the Church book. I would have been happier to have Philbrick paraphrase and give us some broad strokes and thin this section down a bit.

BUT... having said that... I'm very pleased that he didn't write merely 150 pages on the Mayflower and the Pilgrims and just stop his history a few years after they arrived, and were becoming settled in the new world. That really would have been an incomplete and almost false book.... and so I am grateful that Philbrick continued on another 50/60 years and took us through King Philip's War and what happened to the Indians (in 2024 we should be saying indigenous peoples, but perhaps because of his source material, Philbrick uses the word Indians exclusively).

The saddest story for me is the selling of the Indians into slavery in the Caribbean.
Pg 252:
In fact, when several hundred Indians surrendered to authorities in Plymouth and Dartmouth after being assured that they'd be granted amnesty, Winslow and his cronies on the Council of War refused to honor the promise. On August 4, the council determined that since some of the Indians had participated in the attacks, ALL of them were guilty. That fall they were shipped as slaves to the Spanish port of Cadiz.

Pg 345
It has been estimated that at least a thousand Indians were sold into slavery during King Philip's War, with over half the slaves coming from Plymouth Colony alone. By the end of the war, Mount Hope, once the crowded Native heart of the colony, was virtually empty of inhabitants. Fifty-six years after the sailing of the Mayflower, the Pilgrims' children had not only defeated the Pokanokets in a devastating war, they had taken conscious, methodical measures to purge the land of its people.


All of this book is fascinating, but the ending is just one of utter sadness.

A small group of "Pilgrims" from England came to the new world to be able to have their own little isolated community, and be able to worship as they pleased.
Seems so feeble a thing to eventually lead to the virtual extermination of a people.

Like many historical works this book has its slow moments. Nonetheless I learned more about the early history of our country from this reading than I did from all those textbooks in secondary school. I was totally unfamilar with King Phillips War or who King Phillip was. Living on the south coast of Massachusetts I was particularly interested in the local geographical references. This should be required reading for high school students, particularly those living here in New England.

First off, I am to blame for having expectations. I thought Mayflower would be an easy reading general history of the Pilgrims and the foundation of the Plymouth Colony. It was, for about 1/3 of the book. It was so general that I don't think I learned anything. Little attention is paid to the how's and why's of the Pilgrims departure from England. It is explained that they didn't like the formal Church of England so they left. Okay, that's a bit to broad for me. Little detail is provided about who the individuals were- only a few people get any attention. Once the colony is established all military activity is attributed to Miles Standish. Little biographical information is given about him and no primary sources are quoted so I can only assume his motives are the author's conjecture.

The narrative itself focuses mostly on the Indians who are portrayed in greater detail but in a confusing manner. The final 1/3 of the book focuses on King Philip's War- fought 50+ years after the founding of Plymouth. The section/chapter transitions seem like they were written by an editor not the author as they contain rather cliché `cliffhanger' foreshadowings. So on this score it had little to do with my expectations and more to do with the style- which I did not like.

As to the books broadness the author speaks of military technology in the colony as having moved passed that of Europe. Specifically he talks about various types of muskets: the flintlock, snaplock and matchlock varieties. But at no point does he explain what those are, how they differ, or why one is better suited to Indian fighter vs. fighting a European style army. This kind of thing is typical throughout the book. The author tell us one paragraph of the great abundance of fish, whales, birds, deer, shellfish etc. in the area of Plymouth and in the next paragraph tells us how the Pilgrims are starving. He does little to explain how or why they were unable to take advantage of the natural resources or why they came so unprepared.

The author is most critical of the Pilgrims decades AFTER Bradford and Massasoit were gone. He hardly mentions that Bradford for decades DID embrace our nations most treasured values -- democracy (gosh -- Bradford led with town meetings!), separation of church and state (no religious leaders held political office while Bradford was Governor), free enterprise (tossing the original socialist system overboard), and trial by jury (12 jurors). Bradford is the "grandfather of America" and all of New England, and many Natives, mourned his death.

Bradford wanted a small community, and was OPPOSED to Europeans coming over the sea and grabbing land, but you'd never know it to read Philbrick's book.

Philbrick suggests Bradford was naive, trusting the merchant backers, but he did so when there was no choice. Why did Philbrick omit the examples of Bradford's shrewdness ... when he personally uncovered a plot to overthrow Plymouth and exposed the plotters... or when the King sent a new governor and some at Plymouth wanted to overthrow the man, but Bradford wisely and correctly waited the man out, saying, "Governor Gorges hates it here, and he'll soon return to England" (which he did)? He omitted 90% of the positive facts about Bradford and the Pilgrims during the Bradford years.

Philbrick makes a big deal of the Pilgrims stealing seed corn from the Natives. But they had just landed in the New World, had heard nothing but horror stories about the savages, and .. by the way ... after meeting and making peace with the Natives, PAID them back. The author mentions Bradford taking the helm of a fishing boat, but downplays his heroism -- the colony was about to starve and no one else would said the ship, so Bradford sailed into tracherous waters, at great personal risk (and with success).

Bradford enabled the New World to become the United States. No Bradford, no US. The author seems to think it was easy for the Pilgrims and the many non-Pilgrims on the Mayflower to form a peaceful community; even after describing all the failed colonies, Philbrick hardly gives Bradford credit for building the houses, government, legal system, economic system, judiciary, and foreign relations. But Bradford pulled off a miracle, and he did it with courage, humility, tolerance, brilliance, honesty, and respect (of Natives and of the colonists who elected him 31 times).

Plymouth was overrun by Puritans who, under Winthrop, was a nasty theocracy. The author criticizes Bradford's intolerance, yet he opened the doors to Quakers and others persecuted elsewhere. True -- he didn't want the Quakers to stay, becuase they were disruptive )stripping naked and screaming during their church services). But Philbrick doesn't mention this. This Week magazine, in the current issue, gives a scathing review of Philbrick, saying his history was unscholarly, and for some reason he calls a "hero" the white man who chopped the Indian leader into 4 parts. My criticism is that the author must have deliberately wanted to do a politically correct "hatchet job" on the Pilgrims, downplaying the wonderful human values and leadership strengths of Bradford, implying that he was responsible for evils by the colonists long after he left office.