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The story of Plymouth Colony, told afresh through the life of one of its lesser-known founders, the Puritan printer Edward Winslow. David M. Shribman reviews ‘The Mayflower’ by Rebecca Fraser.
Tomorrow at 10 a.m., my brothers and I will huddle on a rickety Massachusetts grandstand a quarter mile from the Atlantic Ocean watching our old high school’s football gladiators face our most dreaded gridiron rivals from the adjacent colonial town. It is a Thanksgiving Day ritual as revered by us as the turkey feast that will follow. One of the cherished elements of the morning observance is to listen to the reedy strains of teenagers standing at midfield playing “We Gather Together,” which we and our fellow spectators believe to be the most American of anthems.
In truth, the hymn that includes the phrase “Beside us to guide us, our God with us joining” was originally called “Wilt Heden Nu Treden” and came from Holland. This instance of cultural appropriation is a mere coincidence—no one had the bright idea in 1935, when the tune was included in the national hymnal of the Methodist Episcopal Church, to search for a Dutch song of praise as a Thanksgiving homage to the Pilgrims’ sojourn in Leiden before they embarked for America. But like many historical accidents, there is a poignancy—a poetry, you might say—to the coincidence.
All of this came to mind while weaving through “The Mayflower,” Rebecca Fraser’s account of the Pilgrims’ progress. In the canon of American folklore, the tale begins in England and moves across the ocean—a seek-the-Lord’s-blessing journey that involves faith, daring, struggle and forbearance and that leads, of course, to the first Thanksgiving in November 1621. At that point, usually, the story peters out, much as many of us, post-feast tomorrow, will lapse into a food coma and doze in front of the third quarter of the Chargers-Cowboys game.
There is nothing sleep-inducing about the chronicle crafted by Ms. Fraser, who by a separate family tradition—she’s the daughter of British historian Lady Antonia Fraser, who has given us biographies of Mary Queen of Scots and Marie Antoinette, among others—knows a good story. In Ms. Fraser’s telling, the Thanksgiving Day events so central to American identity and character merit a mere three sentences in a book that spans more than 300 pages. The lesson: There is more to the Pilgrims’ story—more to American identity and character—than our Thanksgiving rituals and reveries.
PHOTO: WSJ
THE MAYFLOWER
By Rebecca Fraser
St. Martin’s, 358 pages, $29.99
St. Martin’s, 358 pages, $29.99
Ms. Fraser hangs her tale on the apprentice printer Edward Winslow, who came under the sway of Reformation scholars and was, as she puts it, “seized by a sort of valiant unquenchable fire.” Like others, he made his way to the Dutch city of Leiden, probably in 1617, hoping for freedom to worship at a time when, in England, he and his co-religionists felt themselves to be victims of persecution. Europe, Ms. Fraser tells us, was encrusted in what was known as the Little Ice Age, a period rather different from our own warming era.
The exigencies of frigid Holland were little as compared with the challenges, spiritual and physical, to come. It was in Leiden, where Frans Hals painted and religious exiles flourished, that Winslow was drawn into the circle of William Bradford and William Brewster, two breakaway Congregationalists whose spiritual searching was geographical as well as theological. For Winslow and others, religious fervor was mixed with the desire for exploration and colonization—for a new start in the New World.
These devout voyagers—eventually leaving from Plymouth, England—thought of themselves as spiritual searchers crossing a metaphorical Red Sea to the new Promised Land. Their passage bore little resemblance to the biblical episode. Sea swells and sea squalls, and the mounting autumn cold, were among the hardships they endured aboard the Mayflower until they made landfall in what is now Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Their greatest achievement was not survival but an agreement—a document that was, Ms. Fraser says, “a consequence of their endeavor.” The Mayflower Compact set out a case for self-governance, creating a broad social contract to “combine ourselves together into a civil body politic.” [JB emphasis] From these democratic beginnings a powerful idea took root in a frozen foreign soil.
Much of the story that follows is familiar if only in a gauzy grade-school way: the planting of corn; the sicknesses and the deaths (one a day, for a period); the Indians, including Samoset, Squanto and Massasoit (names once known to every New England schoolchild). It was with Massasoit—“grave of countenance, and spare of speech,” in a contemporary account—that a rudimentary treaty of peace was signed. Article 6 proclaimed: “That when their men came to us, they should leave their bows and arrows behind them, as we should do our pieces when we came to them.”
This was not to be a peaceable kingdom, however, despite the fervent wishes of Winslow, whose repertoire of devout beliefs included coexistence with the natives and self-rule for the colonies. The astonishing influx of settlers from England upset the fragile balance of natives and colonists just as the idealism of the early days went into eclipse, though not without considerable discussion of materialism and grace, worldliness and wickedness. At one point, amid concerns that the colony had drifted from its godly moorings, charges of sedition filled the air. Ours is not the only American epoch when vital questions have been debated with breathless urgency.
Ms. Fraser’s tale offers an intimate view of colonial life, an approachable companion to more forbidding scholarly studies. Its principal flaw is that it wanders too widely, largely the result of the wanderings of its main character. But the emphasis on the Winslow story has purpose as well as poignancy. It was under the command of Edward’s son Josiah that colonial militiamen killed the son of Edward’s great friend Massasoit, during a war among colonists and Indians in the 1670s. But there is more. Josiah Winslow —a merchant trader dealing in sugar, iron and cloth and “part of the ferociously rapid infant American capitalism,” in Ms. Fraser’s characterization—was as fired with business acumen as Edward had been with religious fervor. In that way he was as much a founder of the American way as his father.
Mr. Shribman is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
