Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War
Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War
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Nathaniel Philbrick on Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.
Why he wrote it
A name in Nantucket’s town recordsThe book began not with the Pilgrims but with a single Wampanoag name that appeared in Nantucket’s municipal records. Philbrick was deep in research for Away Off Shore, his history of the island, when he encountered a reference to the leader known as Philip, whose territory centered more than sixty-five miles away in what is now Bristol, Rhode Island. Why had Philip come to Nantucket? Answering that question required going back to Philip’s father, Massasoit, and then further still to 1620.
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.
What Philbrick found when he followed that thread back to the Pilgrims was not the story he had been taught. William Bradford’s Of Plimoth Plantation, a seventeenth-century firsthand account of the Plymouth Colony’s founding, had been sitting in the historical record the whole time, but school had never pointed him there.
Mayflower came out of my reading for my first work of history, Away Off Shore, a history of Nantucket. I wanted to know more about New England, to put the island in context, so I read Of Plimoth Plantation [by William Bradford]. I thought, This is so much more interesting than anything I was taught about the Pilgrims in school. So I researched them through King Philip’s War; that’s where I got my chance to begin writing about war.
When Philbrick came to the material he carried, like most readers, two ready-made narratives: the Pilgrim myth of moral origin, and its modern inversion. He found that the actual historical record dismantled both, because the people in it refused to behave like symbols.
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.
That gap between the myths and the humans behind them became the engine of the book.
The scope of general ignorance about the period, including his own, struck him as a reason to write rather than a caution. He had assumed, as most Americans do, that the Mayflower story was essentially settled knowledge.
I thought I knew about the voyage of the Mayflower, but when I started to explore what happened when an old, leaky ship arrived off the coast of New England in the fall of 1620, I soon realized that I, along with most Americans, knew nothing at all about the real people with whom the story of our country begins.
How he wrote it
Capturing surprise before it fadesPhilbrick’s standard practice across all his books is to keep a research journal through the first year on a new topic, recording what startles him before the material becomes routine. The journal is not just a note-taking tool. He returns to it before he begins writing, treating his own early reactions as a guide to what readers will find alive on the page.
I find that when I’m new to a topic, that’s when I’m catching the best details. It’s all new to me—it’s what the reader will respond to. Because you can so easily over-know a topic, and you lose the magic.
For Mayflower’s structure, Philbrick anchored the fifty-six-year narrative to two figures who had each left substantial firsthand written accounts. One was the colony’s governor, William Bradford, whose Of Plimoth Plantation covered the founding generation. The other was far less familiar to modern readers.
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.
His revision process has a fixed final stage that he applies to every chapter. After editing on the page, he takes the printed chapter to his wife and reads it aloud. He credits that single step with catching failures that silent editing misses.
I print out the whole chapter, edit it, spend a day looking it over, then reprint it, and take upstairs and read it aloud to my wife. That is the most critical point... The rhythm of the prose is something I’m really trying to work on. So when I’m reading it aloud, I’ll hear the prose and go, That sucks.
fairfieldwriter.wordpress.com, “Mike Lupica | Fairfield Writer’s Blog”The standard he was aiming for had been set early, when a local bookseller told him a draft of Away Off Shore read too academically: he wanted prose that was clear and concise, integrated information from many sources, and assumed no prior knowledge in the reader.
He is candid that expertise is not what draws him to a subject. The books he writes are the books he could not find when he went looking, driven by curiosity rather than mastery.
I write these books not because I’m an expert in the field, anything but. I write these books because it’s a topic I’m curious about and I just haven’t found a book that tells it from the perspective that I’m interested in. [paraphrased from audio]
What he wants us to sit with
A war that did not have to happenThe argument Philbrick returns to most insistently is that King Philip’s War, the conflict that consumed New England from 1675 to 1676 and killed a larger share of the colonial population than any later American war, was not the inevitable consequence of European settlement. Two specific leaders made choices that detonated it, and two specific leaders could have made different ones.
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.
His heroes are the people who, in the middle of that war, refused the logic of total enmity. Philbrick wanted readers to know these figures existed, because their existence changes what the war means: it was not a clash of irreconcilable peoples but a failure that others, on both sides, were actively working to prevent.
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.
Philbrick reads the Plymouth arc not as a contained colonial episode but as a template that reappears throughout American expansion. When he began researching Bunker Hill, his 2013 book on the opening battles of the Revolution, he found that the seventeenth century had not closed. The farmers who fought at Lexington and Concord were still living in the shadow of wars their grandparents had fought.
Almost as soon as I started my research on this book [Bunker Hill], I began to understand that the American Revolution was as much about the unfinished business associated with that earlier era [King Philip’s War] as it was about issues like liberty, freedom, and taxation without representation.
The preoccupation connecting Mayflower to every other book Philbrick has written is the same one he identified when asked what his work is really about. The whale ship Essex, the Pilgrims, the crews and communities he keeps returning to all share a single condition.
All my books are, one way or another, about communities under tremendous stress—whether they are Pilgrims or the crew of a whale ship that has just been rammed by a whale.