From persecuted to persecutors: The Mayflower Pilgrims fall out

The Mayflower’s journey did not simply end with landfall at Plymouth Rock, if indeed it ever arrived there in the first place — John Turner points out that no mention was made of the rock for 150 years after the Pilgrims disembarked; but the little ship has continued its voyage into mythology ever since. At the end of The Great Gatsby, Scott Fitzgerald writes of that ‘transitory enchanted moment’ when human beings came face to face with something commensurate with their capacity for wonder.

The Pilgrims gave substance and longevity to that transitory vision when they set up their community in the wilderness. Ten years later the Arbella arrived just a short way up the coast with its own elevated sense of destiny: their community would be ‘a city on a hill’, as Governor John Winthrop put it. But it’s the Mayflower passengers, that shipload of carpenters, weavers, coopers and merchants, who have the prior claim on our imagination.

As a result, their adventure has received plenty of coverage over the years. In 2006 Nathaniel Philbrick published Mayflower, a history that covers almost exactly the same time span as Turner’s book, from early days in England and Leiden, to the transatlantic crossing, the settlement at New Plymouth and the trials and tribulations of the colony, culminating late in the 17th century in the savagery of King Philip’s War. Turner’s rather odd title, a quotation from Plymouth Colony’s long-serving governor William Bradford, is also the title of Philbrick’s first chapter.

It is the subtitles, however, that show how the two books diverge. Philbrick’s is ‘A Voyage to War’, and his book is a sinewy account of the endless conflicts, double-dealing, massacres and battles that took place between the settlers and the Natives who happened to inhabit this so-called wilderness before the Mayflower ever dropped anchor.