Review
By P.A. MacLean
RedwoodAge.com

Forget the stories of settlers buying Manhattan from the Indians for $24 worth of beads. The Native Americans and the original 102 pilgrims who set out for the Plymouth Colony in 1620 witnessed more political intrigue than the court of Prince Machiavelli.

Author Nathaniel Philbrick disrupts our comfortable assumptions about the mythic story of early European arrivals in America from the outset by recounting the early Puritans fled England, not for America but for Leiden, Holland, exiles from the Church of England.

As foreigners in Holland, forced to work menial jobs and not particularly welcome, they ultimately chose to emigrate to America, despite the sensational stories of Indians flaying people alive and the failures of past settlement attempts. Between 1619 and 1622, the Virginia Company would send 3,600 settlers to the Jamestown colony, and over the three years 3,000 would die, Philbrick recounts.

Despite the dangers, they traveled to London-families with children and three pregnant women-to board the Mayflower for a flight to the New World. He evokes the trials of crossing the Atlantic for 65 days aboard the Mayflower as she "blundered her way through storms and headwinds, her bottom a shaggy pelt of seaweed and barnacles, her leaky decks spewing salt water onto her passengers' devoted heads."

The Pilgrims left not during the warmth of summer but later, in November, facing winter at sea spent in a fetid 75-foot long by five-foot high 'tween deck, a claustrophobic warren of rooms above the hold but below the upper deck.

While their destination was the mouth of the Hudson River, weather took them farther north, but the grueling voyage made the sandy peninsula called Cape Cod more than welcome.

The Pilgrims faced not only a winter with few provisions and little knowledge of how to survive in the new land, but they arrived at a time of crisis for the native population.

The Indians had been decimated by disease spread by European fishermen. Disease that killed up to 90 percent of some native populations along the eastern shores had hit the 12,000 Pokanokets that occupied Narragansett Bay and cut them to a few thousand. And their charismatic leader Massasoit faced the more than 20,000 enemy Narragansetts, who controlled the western reach of the bay.

New World Politics
While Massasoit could forge alliances with Massachusetts and Nausets to neutralize the threat, the arrival of Pilgrims also provided leverage in his battle to regain power. From this opening saga of the power distributions among thousands of Indians along the coastal Northeast, Philbrick takes us on a tour of political intrigues that would rival European capitals of the era.

The predation of beaver and otter by pilgrims to repay European debts and increasing demand for land to settle as more arrived strained the land. Ultimately, the fragile link between pilgrims and Indians erupted into a war, known as King Philip's War, named for one of the native chiefs. Philbrick describes how it nearly exterminated both colonists and natives alike in the region and changed the initially cordial relations.

The highly disciplined and insular pilgrims learn over time they must cooperate and co-exist with their Indian neighbors who initially helped them to survive. A regular trade in real estate evolved to fit the Indians' desire for European tools, weapons and cloth.

Meanwhile the pilgrims' lack of financial skill hurt their ability to pay off the debt of the colony's license. Despite shipping £10,000 in beaver and otter pelts-worth an estimated $2 million in today's dollars-it did little to reduce their £6,000 debt.

From the duplicitous, English-speaking Indian who, as a translator, misleads both sides, to the leadership and critical role of a female Indian chief, Philbrick weaves a vibrant fabric of detail we never learned in grammar school of the often deadly and cunning tale of human frailties and heroism that formed the pilgrim's progress in a new land.