Historian brings 'Mayflower' to life

PROVO — By the time the Pilgrims and American Indians enjoyed what we call Thanksgiving together in the fall of 1621, half of the Pilgrims who had arrived on the Mayflower were dead.

In fact, an overture from a Wampanoag leader named Massasoit provided the Pilgrims a desperately needed reprieve and launched a tense and complex peace that lasted 55 years.

When that peace shattered, it created a political reliance on England that eventually gave birth to the American Revolution, bestselling author Nathaniel Philbrick said Tuesday at Brigham Young University.

The New York Times Book Review called Philbrick's 2006 best-seller "Mayflower" a vivid and fresh retelling of the Pilgrim tale. For BYU, Philbrick was another in a growing line of narrative historians to visit campus.

In 2005, BYU invited the master of the medium, David McCullough, author of "1776" and "John Adams." This year, Philbrick was preceded to the Marriott Center podium by Ken Burns, whose narrative history appears on film, and BYU history professor Jenny Hale Pulsipher, who said "writing that is dead on the page won't bring history to life."

"I don't know that there's anything conscious" to the spate of narrative historians hosted by BYU, Pulsipher said Tuesday. "If we can impute anything, I think it's that history is important. If it's unreadable, nobody will learn it. We should celebrate people who write well."

Philbrick agreed during a 45-minute question-and-answer session. "I'm trying to make this compelling to read," he said, "so you're learning without even knowing you're learning."

That Puritan separatists and American natives lived together peacefully as long as they did is miraculous considering how their relationship started. The Pilgrims landed 387 years ago this week — on Nov. 11, 1620 — and promptly stole native corn and ransacked native sepulchres.

Then, in the first encounter between the two groups, they traded shots. That is why Philbrick told 2,020 people at Tuesday's BYU Forum Assembly that "Mayflower" is a survival story. "This is a book in many ways about diplomacy," he said. "Tension is incessant."

Among the diplomats was Massasoit. When he and the original Pilgrim leaders were gone, the peace ended. His son, King Philip, led his people against the English settlers in a conflict that was twice as bloody as the Civil War.

"The English realized they owed a debt to Massasoit," Philbrick said, "Unfortunately, it didn't project into the second and third generations. That's the tragedy of this story. We have very short memories."

King Philip's War changed everything about America, he added. It was no victory for the English. To survive, the remarkably independent separatists were forced to turn to the crown for help, and for the first time a royal governor was sent to New England.

"You can say that many of the seeds of what would create the American Revolution were sown with King Philip's War," Philbrick said. "I wanted to start with a voyage that we all know about and take it to another voyage."

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