Thanksgiving was just the beginning
Nat Philbrick exposes America's "most sacred national myth"
BY MARLI GUZZETTA INDEPENDENT ARTS EDITOR
Conducting research for his latest release, "Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community,

Nathaniel Philbrick

and War," historical author Nathaniel Philbrick felt surprised by two things: how peaceful things were between the first Pilgrims and the Native Americans and how violent they became.

"We all think we learn the story of the Mayflower and the Pilgrims in elementary school. The first Thanksgiving, that's usually where the story ends, but really that's where the story begins," said Philbrick, Founding Director of the Egan Maritime Foundation on Nantucket Island and author of the bestselling, Nantucket-based "In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex," winner of the 2000 National Book Award.

In general, Philbrick explained, our accepted historical identity "leap frogs" from the first Thanksgiving to the American Revolution. "There's a 150-year gap, and what's lost is the Indians," he said.

According to Philbrick, the first generation of Pilgrims shared a "fascinatingly bicultural community" with the Indians for about 50 years. "Fifty years of peaceful coexistence is extraordinary, given Western and native interactions in North America," he said.

But that peace eroded with the second and third generations of Pilgrim settlers, according to Philbrick.

"While the first generation established a relationship based on mutual need, the second generation started seeing Indian allies as an impediment to success, especially when their furs ran out and the only thing the Indians had of value was land," he summarized. "But as any Nantucketer knows, real estate is a cruel market, particularly if you're a native. After the fur trade ran out, the Indians knew that the only way to acquire the Western goods that they'd come to depend on was to sell their land...and this created a disturbing dynamic."

By 1675, the younger English wanted to look ahead to the day when they could have the Indians' land, according to Philbrick, and the younger Indians blamed their forefathers for selling off their legacy. "And that created tensions that erupted," Philbrick said.

The "eruption" was King Philip's War, what Philbrick described as "a crisis of leadership on both sides." Named after the Massasoit sachem Metacom, also known as "Philip," it was a 14month long, New England-wide battle between the Indians and the English settlers and their Indian sympathizers. The war had its share of American heroes, many of them unsung, including Ben Church, who, along with William Bradford, function as lead characters in "Mayflower."

The war also had its share of dismemberments and beheadings, including one carried out by Miles Standish, detailed by Philbrick in the book.

The actions of the English settlers during the conflict surprised even Philbrick.

"If you would have told me 15 years ago that slavery was an issue you could associate with the Pilgrims, I would have said, 'Really?' But during the war, the Plymouth colony decided to ship off surrendered and captured Indians as slaves," he stated. "This is not the image of the Pilgrims we're taught."

In the end, King Philip's war took 5,000 lives from a community of 70,000, becoming the bloodiest, per capita, of any American war.

Philbrick said his historical writings on Nantucket were fundamental in preparing him for this book.

"It was helpful to cut my historical teeth on Nantucket, which was once a small community with an intense religious focus: Everyone was interrelated and had an extraordinary sense of themselves as people of destiny, as the Pilgrims did," he said. "Working my way through the rise and fall of Nantucket provided me with a baseline of knowledge, and having worked through that kind of process was helpful in tackling what is our most sacred national myth, the story of the Pilgrims."

While the myth may represent what we as Americans hope to be, the real story of the first few generations of Pilgrims established a tone for American culture that resonates far beyond its time, according to Philbrick.

"The Pilgrims aren't this exemplary exception to the disturbing history of our land," he said. "They are a microcosm of what this nation would become."

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