Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War

“As long as both sides recognized that they needed each other, there was peace. The next generation, however, came to see things differently.” 

Philbrick foreshadows the devastating rift in relations between the Pokanokets and the second-generation Pilgrims that led to King Philip’s War.

“When violence and fear grip a society, there is an almost overpowering temptation to demonize the enemy.” 

Philbrick astutely suggests that fear lay at the root of the English settlers’ discriminatory behavior towards the Native Americans.

“I soon learned that the real-life Indians and English of the seventeenth century were too smart, too generous, too greedy, too brave—in short, too human—to behave so predictably.”

Many people are familiar with the story of the Mayflower’s voyage and the founding of Plymouth, but Philbrick’s account of this period in history seeks to challenge that easy familiarity and complicate the “predictable” narrative of relations between the English and the Native Americans.