A war with bad guys on both sides in early America

Today's American knows that the Mayflower was the first ship to bring white settlers to New England, and that a year later they had a feast with the Indians that we still celebrate on the fourth Thursday of November. Nathaniel Philbrick covers that and much more in his new book, "Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War" (Viking, 461 pp., $29.95).

Philbrick's story is not mainly about physical survival. He explains, for example, that the Pilgrims brought no draft animals, so that when they wanted to build a fort, they had to haul the logs themselves. He does not chronicle the arrival of horses and oxen, or point out what other aspects of English culture allowed the Puritans to survive in North America. But the settlement that almost dies in its first winter — a story he does tell — becomes the seed of a colony whose success leads to a political crisis two generations later.

The book is really two stories joined in the middle. The first third is set around the journey to the New World and the landing at Plymouth in 1620, and is tightly focused; the middle third accounts for the next 55 years of life in New England, and is diffuse; and the final third refocuses on King Philip's War.

It is a war of extermination, or of cultural defense, depending on how you look at it. It is started by Philip, son of Massasoit, the Pokasset chief who had attended the first Thanksgiving. Massasoit had made allies of the Pilgrims. Philip aims to kill them. He prepares for the conflict by selling off tribal land to buy muskets. The author compliments the Indians for being quick to learn to use the flintlock musket, but the Indians cannot craft muskets themselves. The tribes who attack the whites — and Philip is able to enlist only some of them — are so dependent on farmed corn that they need to win their war in time for spring planting.

Author appearance


Nathaniel Philbrick will read from "Mayflower," 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Elliott Bay Book Co., 101 S. Main St., Seattle; free (206-624-6600 or www.elliottbaybook.com).

Philbrick, who won the National Book Award for "In the Heart of the Sea," vows not to tell a morally simplified story, "either the time-honored tradition of how the Pilgrims came to symbolize all that is good about America" or "the now equally familiar modern tale of how the evil Europeans annihilated the innocent Native Americans." This is a story of individuals, and though Philbrick tends to apply a tougher moral standard to the whites, he finds wisdom and folly on both sides. There is also appalling cruelty by both sides.

Philbrick's hero is a settler, Benjamin Church, who insists that his people not see all Indians as the enemy, as many were violently inclined to do. Church makes a deal with a neighboring tribe to switch sides and support the settlers. He adopts Indian ways of war. He recruits loyal Indians into his force, and is successful. He also opposes an effort to sell captives into slavery, though the white leaders in Boston, who had interned loyal Indians on a barren island, put hundreds of captives on slave ships for the Caribbean.

It is a book with a lesson, which is about not demonizing your opponents, and trying to find the humanity in them, and learning from them. Mainly the story justifies that. It is well written, and engaging at the beginning and the end. It is also a part of American history almost unknown, particularly in this corner of the country, where one can go through 12 years of public school, which I did, without ever hearing of Massasoit, the Pokasset tribe or King Philip's War.

Bruce Ramsey: bramsey@seattletimes.com