…they readily went to war…

Book review:

Mayflower:

A Story of Courage, Community, and War

by Nathaniel Philbrick (b1956)

New York: Viking, The Penguin Group, 2006

461 pages

Philbrick offers his usual compelling narrative in Mayflower.

It becomes clear rather quickly that he’s not telling the elementary school version of the Pilgrims and Plymouth Rock and the “first Thanksgiving” that you may remember from your childhood.

The Pilgrims—the Separatists, as they named themselves—didn’t come to North America to establish religious freedom. They were escaping from limitations on their religious freedom that they had endured in England, and later, to some extent, in Holland. As the years went by in Plymouth and the Massachusetts Bay colony, they certainly did not extend any tolerance of religious freedom to those Europeans and Native Americans who held different religious beliefs.

The Pilgrims were not simply a happy, peaceful people. They readily went to war with the Indians, in both defensive and offensive campaigns.

Many of the Pilgrims suffered gruesome physical privations and many of them died soon after arriving in what greedy European promoters liked to call The New World.

If you’re thinking how wonderful it would have been to be a Pilgrim in Plymouth in 1620, think again.

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Above all: Poems of dawn and more with 73 free verse poems,

and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)

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Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War…book review