Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War

Show me a group of the most brave and courageous men and women facing almost certain death in order to solidify their values for the generations to follow, and I will show you the Pilgrims. Nathaniel Philbrick's new, bestselling book, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War has little to do with the jolly Thanksgiving drawings you colored in first grade. Instead of the happy and peaceful myth that has grown around these brave settlers, and their historic meal, this book paints a grim picture of hardship and struggle. Death, disease and betrayal are common place, and all before even departing for the New World. And while passage on the Mayflower was miserable at best, and life threatening at worst, their arrival at America was only the beginnings of their problems.

Philbrick's book is not all death and despair, however. Relying on personal journals recorded by William Bradford and others, the author is able to accurately recreate everyday life for the Pilgrims, which, while undoubtedly difficult, was also filled with triumph, both large and small. The true achievement this book obtains is bringing each character to life. Reading Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War is like journeying back to the original Plymouth settlement and meeting such noble characters as Miles Standish and the Indian chief Massasoit. You will shed a tear at their affliction one page, then laugh out loud the next, and feel a pride well up inside you through out for being an American.

From the bestselling author of In the Heart of the Sea—winner of the National Book Award—the startling story of the Plymouth Colony

From the perilous ocean crossing to the shared bounty of the first Thanksgiving, the Pilgrim settlement of New England has become enshrined as our most sacred national myth. Yet, as bestselling author Nathaniel Philbrick reveals in his spellbinding new book, the true story of the Pilgrims is much more than the well-known tale of piety and sacrifice; it is a fifty-five-year epic that is at once tragic, heroic, exhilarating, and profound.

The Mayflower’s religious refugees arrived in Plymouth Harbor during a period of crisis for Native Americans as disease spread by European fishermen devastated their populations. Initially the two groups—the Wampanoags, under the charismatic and calculating chief Massasoit, and the Pilgrims, whose pugnacious military officer Miles Standish was barely five feet tall—maintained a fragile working relationship. But within decades, New England would erupt into King Philip’s War, a savagely bloody conflict that nearly wiped out English colonists and natives alike and forever altered the face of the fledgling colonies and the country that would grow from them.

With towering figures like William Bradford and the distinctly American hero Benjamin Church at the center of his narrative, Philbrick has fashioned a fresh and compelling portrait of the dawn of American history—a history dominated right from the start by issues of race, violence, and religion.