What I've Read: Mayflower

The subhead for this book is: A Story of Courage, Community and War. This could not be more true when it comes to the story of those first 100 pilgrims who took a three-month boat ride from England to Plymouth.

Philbrick uses the courage, community and war as a way to divide this book into three distinct parts, but it's not a gimmick. Instead, it's literally the three phases the original Plymouth colony went through in the first 50 years of its existence. The courage it took for them to make the voyage in the first place (when things like no water, they had to subsist primarily on beer and wine alone), and then those first few months when the genius captain thought arriving just before the start of winter was a good idea (it wasn't; nearly half the population of the boat died in the first year they were on land).

The community part sums up the following 30-plus years. Meeting, interacting, trading and building relationships with the local Native Americans was not rose-colored paintings of everyone around the Thanksgiving table by any means. There were fights, peace accords and eventually a mutual understanding that two completely different races of people were going to live in close proximity to each other without knowing a damn thing about the future. They decided they were all in this together and for almost a quarter of a century the pilgrims and puritans slowly expanded but made deals with the tribes to make sure no one was overly offended.

The third act of the book is really about how this all went to shit with the passing of the original pilgrim voyagers and how it was, for all simplicity, the kids' damn fault. All the original settlers' kids grew up and decided they wanted everything to themselves, and started expanding at a freakish pace and taking whatever the hell they wanted, peace accords be damned. Eventually small decisions by tribal leaders turned out to have horrible consequences that they probably didn't realize at the time (because it was 1640 and we're talking about a time when furs and herbs were still a big deal on the trading market). What resulted was several ugly wars and the near complete decimation of native tribes in the area. Some stunning numbers are thrown at you, such as how (as a percentage of population), King Philip's War was more costly in lives for Native Americans than all of World War I and II combined for the U.S. population.

This is a really good read if you want to learn some real truths about what taking a risk and landing in a completely unknown place with unknown people must have been like 400 years ago when you were lucky to have one change of clothes. It's dense and takes a bit to get through everything, but there is never anything wrong about seeing where the roots of our current nation began. Philbrick's a great writer so I highly recommend his stuff.