Mayflower

"This is a straight history but – and this is key – the emphasis is on the story. In this book Nathaniel Philbrick takes an event every American schoolchild knows about – the sailing of the Mayflower to North America in 1620 – and turns the comfortable mythology about that moment on its head. Mayflower completely disrupts the story of happy Indians meeting pacifist settlers to tell a very different and essentially tragic tale of politics, power dynamics, generosity, betrayal and war. Like my own book, Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North, Philbrick here is dismantling soppy, misty-eyed notions about North America’s founding as simply a test of endurance and religious purity to look instead at a set of dynamics that were harder, more complicated and more real. Much of this book involves King Philip’s War, a brutal conflict that in 1676 sped up and down the Eastern seaboard claiming thousands of lives on both sides. Though historians have long known about the events that Philbrick describes, he tells the story in arresting prose that dispenses with the notion of grateful Indians and brave Pilgrims, to provide a rather grittier and more realistic look backward at those earliest days. We are a young country and we tend to hold tight to some fairly simplistic and naïve readings of our history. Scholars know better. But they don’t always get the word out past those ivy walls. To me it seems critical to have this material penetrate the public consciousness. Books in this vein are valuable because they reach past the classroom, past the doctoral students, and past the library walls to touch the general public. I’m sure there are those who were scandalised by each of these works. But, in my experience, readers hunger for truth and a great story. Combine the two and… there you go. Mayflower and Ten Hills Farm both aim to seduce readers into basically rethinking what they think they already know. That’s tricky. But Mayflower was a bestseller and it still keeps jumping off the shelves, and I have had really fantastic reactions to Ten Hills Farm from all kinds of people. The reason is that these books carry a kind of wonderful Ah Ha! energy. And that’s fun. The whole point is to excite and inform people about the world they inhabit. I think books that explode standing myths like these have a potentially huge audience. I’m biased, of course, but I never will understand why historians don’t write more accessibly – all the time. Which gets me back to the fact that the word ‘story’ is embedded there – and should be. Until that happens the historians are just leaving the field open for the rest of us. Well, my book tells the story of 150 years of slavery on a 600-acre farm in Massachusetts first owned by John Winthrop, the first governor of the colony. Winthrop arrived in America in 1631 and took the land shortly after. Within a decade, settlers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony had enslaved African and Native American workers. At Ten Hills Farm, generations of slaves worked the soil and tended to the needs of whites. This is a story that ultimately reflects upon the lives and fates of tens of thousands of blacks and Indians, yet most Americans have no clue that slavery ever existed in the North. By understanding this story as a human one that stretched across families and generations moving from England to North America, the Caribbean and Africa, readers gain a whole new understanding about attitudes on race and also on the somewhat false divide between North and South. This was a shared history. We just erased the Northern half. That’s convenient. But pathologising the South and keeping this history out of the history books certainly does not help us move forward. I think the recovery of this knowledge holds the potential to regenerate conversations about race in this country. Seeing the whole picture is a powerful shift of perspective. Some of the greatest families in the North were very much part of this trade in human beings and helped found major and enduring institutions like Harvard Law School, which, in fact, was created by a gift from one of Ten Hills Farm’s slave-holding and slave-trading owners, Isaac Royall Jr."