In the early spring of 1623, Edward Winslow walked into Massasoit’s village and found the great sachem unable to see, his mouth furred, his people already mourning him. Winslow’s medicine bottles had broken on the road. He scraped the man’s tongue clean, fed him fruit preserves off the tip of a knife, and when that worked, sent for chickens to make a broth. Later, at Massasoit’s request, he cooked a duck; the sachem ate too much of the fat, relapsed, and recovered again. When he could sit up, he repaid the Englishman with the most valuable thing he had: warning of a plot by the neighbouring Massachusett to wipe out the English. Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick is full of battles and storms, but this small, strange scene of nursing holds its central idea. The colony survived because two peoples decided, for reasons of their own, that they needed each other.
Friendship as Statecraft
What makes the book so absorbing is that no one in it is a symbol. Massasoit is a sachem whose nation had been gutted by epidemic just before the English arrived, who had been forced to bow to the Narragansetts, and who saw in a few sick strangers a way to restore his standing. The English are frightened, hungry and quarrelsome, and they need corn far more than they need converts. Their interpreter, Squanto, is cleverest of all. Philbrick shows him spreading the rumour that the newcomers kept the plague stored in barrels beneath their storehouse, ready to release on their enemies. The barrels held gunpowder. The lie made him indispensable to both sides until it nearly cost him his life.
The book does not flinch from what this pragmatism produced. In 1623 the Plymouth captain led a pre-emptive killing at the settlement of Wessagussett and brought a sachem’s head home to display on the fort, and the Pilgrims’ own pastor, still in Leiden, wrote to reproach them. Philbrick lets that letter stand as the conscience of the colony. Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick is at its best in these chapters, where every alliance has a price and every kindness has a motive, and where the reader can see half a century of consequences being set in place.
The Sons Who Let It Fall
The second half belongs to the next generation, and here the book becomes a tragedy. Massasoit’s son Philip, burdened with an English nickname he never used, watched the colony buy up his people’s land at prices its own court kept low. Josiah Winslow, son of the man who once nursed Massasoit, grew into a governor who saw the Pokanokets as an obstacle. A disputed murder trial in 1675, built on a single witness, tipped them into war. Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick is blunt that both men could have stopped it, and that neither had his father’s patience for the slow, irritating work of living beside people whose interests were not his own.
The war itself is told with great narrative force. Mary Rowlandson, taken from Lancaster in a February raid, carries her dying daughter through the snow and later meets Philip face to face in captivity. Weetamoo, the Pocasset sachem, tries to stay out of the fighting and is pushed into it. Awashonks of the Sakonnet comes over to the English side and changes the war’s direction. The colonists’ habit of enslaving even those who surrendered turns neutral peoples into enemies, which is perhaps the book’s most damning argument. Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick does not soften the brutality on either side, and its scenes of massacre, execution, mutilation, starvation and the sale of children are hard reading.
Where the book is weakest, it says so itself:
- Philbrick admits that authentic Native voices are almost absent from the record, so Massasoit, Philip and Weetamoo reach the page through English eyes, and their inner lives stay thinner than the colonists’.
- The closing celebration of Benjamin Church, the frontier captain, as a prototype American hero sits awkwardly beside the fact that he profited from selling captives.
- Some moments of feeling, especially Philip’s last days, are narrated with a confidence the sources cannot quite support.
Nathaniel Philbrick Takes Down the Holiday
The epilogue is where the season comes in. Philbrick traces how the comforting legend was built, piece by piece and long after the fact. The famous rock went unremarked for well over a century before an elderly man identified it in 1741. Bradford’s manuscript history vanished from New England and sat for generations in an English bishop’s library before a senator brought it home in 1897. The godly Pilgrims, he notes, would not have recognised the national holiday Abraham Lincoln proclaimed in 1863, and their harvest gathering only became the centre of the story around 1900.
He sets against that a darker image. When Philip was killed in August 1676, his head reached Plymouth on a day the colony had set aside for giving thanks, and it stayed on display there for decades. Since 1970, Native people and their allies have gathered at Plymouth each Thanksgiving for a National Day of Mourning, and the book helps a reader understand why. Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick is not an argument against the holiday. It is an argument for knowing what sits behind it.
Where Nathaniel Philbrick Found the Story
Philbrick has lived on Nantucket since 1986, and the island led him here. Researching its past, he found a record of Philip crossing the water to visit the island, and trying to explain the journey sent him back to Philip’s father and the Pilgrims. An earlier book, Abram’s Eyes, had already examined Nantucket’s Native legacy, and a lifelong sailor’s instincts (he was an All-American racing sailor at Brown) give his ocean chapters their authority.
His acknowledgments credit Wampanoag friends who had died before the book was finished and a Narragansett tribal historian who read the manuscript. The finished work reached the final shortlist for the Pulitzer in history, and Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick remains the book many Americans turn to first when they want the story without the costume.
After the Last Page
What stays is the sickbed and the severed head, half a century apart, and the sense that everything between them was a choice. Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick is not the final word on Plymouth, and it never pretends that English documents can tell the whole of it. As storytelling, though, it is superb, and as a corrective for the holiday week it is hard to beat.
Readers who want the Native perspective on gratitude and exchange should follow it with The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer, whose idea of a gift economy reads very differently after these pages. Jill Lepore’s The Name of War goes deeper into how the war was written about and remembered. For another narrative history of a country sliding into conflict its leaders could have prevented, The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson makes a fine companion. Families with young children might pair it with the picture book Keepunumuk, a Wampanoag telling of the harvest story.
The peace lasted fifty-five years. It took one generation to forget why it mattered.
You might also like: For the Wampanoag side told at full length, read This Land Is Their Land by David J. Silverman, which refuses to end the Plymouth story at the feast.