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Richard James Havis

Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War

by Nathaniel Philbrick

Viking, HK$234

Most immigrants to the US  find the Thanksgiving holiday confusing. Ask any American, and they'll explain that it's a celebration of the day the English pilgrims made  peace with the Native American Indians by sitting down to eat with them. As Nathanial Philbrick's  pop history page-turner points out, that's essentially true. But there was  more going on behind that now-mythical event than is  known.

All countries need their myths, and the US is no different. The Thanksgiving holiday was instituted in Victorian times to help provide the founding of America with its own.

Philbrick isn't in the business of myth-busting, although his work is often sympathetic to the Native Americans. What's  known about the  Mayflower voyage and the Pilgrim fathers' settlement at Plymouth is true, he says. His book aims to go deeper and examine the complex web of alliances and enmities  between the settlers, the Indians and  European governments.

The result is an exciting, if sometimes confusing, gallop through the vast forests, tentative wooden settlements and Indian wigwams of 17th-century America. Mayflower,  with a thick wedge of readable notes, can be split in two parts.  The first is devoted to the voyage  and the early days of the  Plymouth settlement in the 1620s. The second skips forward to the 1670s to examine the settlers' war with the Indians, and the move from a fragile harmony between the  races to a state of  English domination.

What's fascinating  is the deep analysis of the politics behind the events. The early chapters detail the English pilgrims' initial relocation  to Leiden in Protestant Holland. These ultra-Protestants thought worship would be easier in the Netherlands, but it transpired that the Dutch were too liberal-minded for them. The actual  Mayflower voyage was an uneasy alliance between merchant financiers - who helped pay for the trip on condition that the settlers hunted fur for them on arrival - grumpy sailors bent on sabotaging the voyage, and the fanatical Christian settlers.

The early years of the settlement at Plymouth were equally complicated. Relationships with the Native Americans were cordial, but this tentative peace was a result of Indian realpolitik rather than acceptance. Massasoit,  of the Pokanoket  tribe, realised that allying himself with the English settlers would give him political leverage over his Indian enemies. Others used the English to raise their standing among the tribes, which were often  at war. Even King Philip's  war of 1675 - so-called after the nickname of the Native American leader who attempted to unite the Indians against the English - was as much about grabbing power as removing the settlers. The depiction of the Native Americans - drawn from contemporary Native-American historians and institutions - portrays them as neither 'noble savages' nor murderous primitives, but skilled diplomats with the capacity to wage violent war.

Philbrick's  account  is enjoyable reading and parts, such as the settlers' use of a huge screw- like device to repair the Mayflower at sea, are fascinating. A Pilgrim document containing civil codes to be applied in the settlement is a tiny precursor to the American Constitution. Liberal readers may baulk at the author's refusal to discuss whether the English settlement of America can be morally justified. But Mayflower succeeds  as an informative narrative and a rip-roaring adventure story about the founding of the United States.



Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War