Mayflower

[Monte Davis]

I strongly recommend Nathaniel Philbrick's new book (which kept me up most
of last night). It's as good as deeply researched semi-pop history gets,
taking us from the separatist cultists in Leiden through Plimoth to King
Philip's War in the 1670s, per capita the bloodiest that
Euro-North-Americans have yet experiienced:

http://www.amazon.com/Mayflower-Story-Courage-Community-War/dp/0670037605/sr
=8-1/qid=1170345019/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-3147738-4287345?ie=UTF8&s=books

Presumably everybody here is long over the old fourth-grade pageant version
of the Pilgrims: they didn't call themselves that, and "Philip" -- sachem
Metacom of the Pokonokets -- didn't call himself King, and friendly "here's
how to grow maize" Squanto was a schemer playing all the angles, and by the
second generation the "shining city on a hill" had become a real-estate
speculation on steroids, etc.

And presumably you have at least an open mind about the subsequent swing of
the pendulum: the "genocide began at the shoreline" version.

Philbrick navigates between them with a very Pynchonian "it could have been
different" attitude that makes the time and place feel as full of
possibility as Mason & Dixon's frontier in the 1750s, or the Zone or Merle's
Midwest. No anarchists per se, but his heroes (on both sides] are those who
try to keep choices open; his villains, those who create inevitability by
acquiescing in it. So who should pop up along the way?

".on October 5 [1675], the Indians fell on Springfield.. only thirteen of
more than seventy-five houses and barns were left standing. 'I believe forty
families are utterly destitute of subsistence,' John Pynchon, son of the
town's founder, wrote; 'the Lord show mercy to us. I see not how it is
possible for us to live here this winter. the sooner we [are] helped off,
the better.' Pynchon, who had been named the region's military commander,
was so shaken by the devastation that he asked to be relieved of his
duties."

Yes, "the town's founder" was William Pynchon, author of the heretical  _The
Meritorious Price of Our Redemption_, and first of that ilk in the
ambiguously brave new world.



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