By: Jonathan Lindberg

In 1620, one-hundred-and-two English dissidents, along with hired sailors and servants, boarded a rickety boat so-named the Mayflower, setting sail for a New World, there to establish a colony based on the idea of religious freedom, or rather, a freedom from a religion controlled and directed by the state.

And so begins the first great American story of immigration, not in New York City or along the Mexican-American boarder, but rather at a desolate, sandy coast known as Cape Cod, at a place the Pilgrims would eventually rename after the English port from which they departed, Plymouth.

Over the past one-hundred-and-fifty-years, the reputations of these first settlers, the Pilgrims, have taken a slow and steady hit. William Bradford, Miles Standish, Benjamin Church, and Josiah Winslow. Hardly the kind of names associated with the foundation of America. Hardly the kind of names we know much about. But such was not always the case.

In the years leading up to the American Civil War of the 1860s, the Pilgrim legacy was one of celebrity. Of Plymouth Plantation, written by William Bradford, was a national bestseller. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow penned the best-selling poem, The Courtship of Miles Standish. Plymouth itself became a national refuge, a symbol of perseverance and hope in the years of civil strife.

However, somewhere between Abraham Lincoln declaring November 25 National Thanksgiving Day and the recent Native American Activists declaring November 25 a National Day of Mourning, historians are slowly reassessing just how Americans established themselves on this land and what that method of doing so actually means.

In Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War (Viking Press, 358 pages), New England Historian Nathaniel Phillbrick seems to have a hard time deciding who in fact the reader should be rooting for. The book itself is a balancing act, depicting on one side the absolute courage of the pilgrims as they wandered blind through the New England wilderness during those first few terrifying days, and then describing the all-out deceit and vindictiveness they used there-after, profiting from the hands-that-helped them, namely the Pokanoket Indians, after that first bleak winter.

Mayflower is what it is, a book of history. Not an all-out indictment of the pilgrims, nor an attempt to wash clean the hands of the Native Americans. Rather, Phillbrick draws a neutral line between the two. All the characters are assembled, well-equipped with their flaws. Phillbrick simply tells their story, offering sympathy to both sagas, the Plymouth Pilgrims and the Cape Cod Indians. As the subtitle to the book indicates, it is the complicated history of their courage, their community, and their war.

Of the three, community is the one spot in which the story lags. In 1623, after two long years of food shortage, the Pilgrims, under the guidance of Plymouth Governor William Bradford, discover the now-staple of contemporary American culture, capitalism. During the first two years, the Pilgrims worked communal farms. The shared food was sparse. Then in 1623, Bradford declared each Pilgrim family responsible for their own food supply and land, and suddenly, the struggling colony flourished. Suddenly, everyone had enough.

Over the next fifty years, the colonists lived in relative peace, slowly weaning themselves from any dependence on the Cape Cod Indians they might have felt, slowly crawling, then walking, then eventually running. Mayflower becomes as much as anything, a story of fathers and sons. Two generations of reversing roles. How the first generation of pilgrims established peace with the Native Indians, and how the second generation did everything they could to break it down.

The story climaxes with the last great war of the Cape Cod Indians, King Phillip’s War, named after the Indian Sachem Metacomet who took on the Christian name Phillip, then took on the colonies. The end result is inevitable, certain defeat, yet this by no means detracts from the story itself, the struggle for survival, which Philbrick tells with marked excellence.

Most of what we know about American history begins and ends with the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock in 1620, then a quick catapult to 1776 and the fury of the Revolution. However, the Pilgrims left their mark, just as the Founding Fathers did over a hundred years later. Of the one-hundred-and-two passengers aboard the Mayflower, thirty-five million American descendents exist today. Puts new meaning on the Biblical command, be-fruitful-and-multiply.

And so, this country is their country, much more so now than when they were alive. Sure, Plymouth and Cape Cod have become commercialized, overrun by tourists and traps romanticizing our foundations; however, it is the legacy of the Pilgrims which still remains. Their history is our history, for better or worse.