The narrator does an excellent job with the pronounciations of the Indian proper and place names. The background gained from the study of the events at Plymouth in the 1620's allows for a deeper understanding of King Philip's War that would have been impossible in a stand-alone context. It takes place 50 years later than the Pilgrim's landing and is fascinating in its own right. The second period, King Philip's War, leads directly from the first but is much less famous. The initial chapters about the fitting out of the Mayflower (and the Speedwell) and the financial macinations are a bit tedious, but the story picks up very quickly with the voyage across the ocean and the landing around (but likely not on) Plymouth Rock.
However, the details of the Pilgrims and that first Thanksgiving are nothing that you have learned in school. The basic story is there and (thankfully) the outline is what we all tend to believe. The first period - the emigration of the Pilgrims from the Old World to the New is of course well-known, but not particularly well-understood. Mayflower is a fascinating account of a two early episodes in American History. 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.įascinating book about a little-understood time 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. 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.
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.
Yet, as best-selling 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 55-year epic that is at once tragic, heroic, exhilarating, and profound. 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.
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