The Mayflower generation and the burden it bears

Source

The Mayflower. By Rebecca Fraser .St Martin’s Press; 384 pages; $29.99. Published in Britain as “The Mayflower Generation”; Chatto & Windus; £25.

THE story of the Mayflower and its passengers has been told so many times that one cannot help wondering whether the ship’s importance has been overstated. It is not that her journey from Southampton to New England in 1620, carrying dozens of English religious separatists from the Dutch city of Leiden (whither they had fled to escape an England they considered to be under a papist cloud), was not an important event. But it is scarcely possible to exaggerate how large a weight that one small, dilapidated cargo ship, sold for scrap less than five years after her historic voyage, has been asked to bear in America’s imagination. So famous is she that one needs to remind oneself that she was certainly not the first to make the voyage, that the colony at Jamestown in Virginia had existed for more than a decade when she arrived, and that once in New England, migrants from the Mayflower were swamped by a much larger number of Puritans sailing to Massachusetts during the 1630s.

Rebecca Fraser, a British historian, deals with this overabundance of history by focusing upon one leading family—that of Edward Winslow, a printer, diplomat and author—but also by widening the time-frame, following some of the passengers until July 20th 1704. On that day the last living one, Peregrine White (“Peregrine” means “pilgrim”), who had been born on the Mayflower, died, and the “Mayflower generation” passed into history.

The Mayflower’s story—that of radical-Protestant separatists seeking somewhere in which to practise their faith, along with their tolerant attitude to different cultures, symbolised in the first “thanksgiving”, shared with local “Indians”—has become central to the American psyche. Broadly speaking this wholesome story, favourable to the Americans, is true. But it is scarcely the whole truth.

This is why, not surprisingly, the longer view taken by Ms Fraser has its rewards (as well as its drawbacks). At times the lives and hardships of multifarious descendants in the new world fail to sustain the book’s early momentum. But it is engagingly written and often compelling. There is an eye for memorable detail: for the fact, for instance, that Mayflower pilgrims came to the new world loaded down with Dutch cheese, but no seed. The later account of “King Philip’s war” is both graphic and gripping. When various local Indian groups united against the English threat, having up until that point fought among themselves as much as offering concerted resistance to the European outsiders, the colonists’ nightmare came to pass. Ms Fraser ably explains the fears and emotions on both sides.

The author is a careful researcher, fair and level-headed. She is also an excellent painter of characters; in judging them, she looks at their deeds with contemporary mores in mind. When the pilgrims killed women and children in King Philip’s war she cites their belief that they were in God’s favour, rather than focusing on the revulsion this inspires today. The long view offers a clear sense of how the ideals driving many on the Mayflower became diluted as the decades passed. But it does show how they lived on in Plymouth’s more tolerant attitude during the infamous witch frenzy which gripped much of the rest of New England late in the century. Only one person, as she points out, was ever charged with witchcraft in Plymouth.

Even if the Mayflower shelf is a crowded one, this is a book that deserves its place on it.