The Mayflower Generation by Rebecca Fraser — between two worlds

To set sail on the Mayflower in September 1620 was to tempt providence. The little cargo ship was used to ferrying cloth to Bordeaux and bringing back wine: four years after the battering voyage that took her from Plymouth to the New World, she was sold for scrap. On her transatlantic journey she was overloaded with passengers, including refugees from another, even less suitable ship, the Speedwell. These Dutch pilgrims brought with them a lot of cheese, a full suit of armour, a beautiful little cradle and two dogs. Meanwhile, there were no fishing rods aboard the Mayflower, neither cattle nor sheep, no building materials, nor fruit nor vegetable seeds. The average camping trip is better planned.

Luckily, as the Pilgrim Fathers always firmly believed, providence was on their side. Despite ferocious storms, only one passenger died on the eight-week voyage — though many more would not survive the first winter in New England. Convinced that an ever-vigilant God watched and judged their every move, and adhering firmly and literally to the words of Scripture, they aimed to emulate the first apostles, eagerly anticipating the Second Coming. While the Stuart kings were beginning, as they saw it, to drag the established Church of England dangerously nearer to Roman Catholicism, these extreme Protestants came to believe that their future belonged with like-minded men and women who were gathering in the Dutch city of Leiden. This captivating, scholarly and addictively readable book tells their story.

Rebecca Fraser has the rare gift of being able to marshal and communicate a mountainous quantity of often original research in such a deft and elegant manner that it never becomes indigestible or irrelevant. There are lovely asides: the passion of the settlers for cranberries; the tendency of Indians to fire arrows indiscriminately, just because they could; the nature and purpose of wampum; the strange names Puritans gave their babies, among them Fear, Resolved and Wrestling. When a sidestep outside her rigorous chronological account is required, she executes it nimbly, without breaking her stride. If she reaches a period of scanty evidence, she admits it, and her suggestions carry the conviction of expertise. Everything is rooted in provable fact, much of it new.

The central character is Edward Winslow, who was 25 when the Mayflower sailed and 60 when he died, aboard a ship off the island of Hispaniola in 1655. Winslow clearly deserves this attention. In the opinion of Cotton Mather, a third-generation Boston minister writing some 50 years after Winslow’s death, to give a proper account of all that he did for the New England colonies might not be “expected until the resurrection of the just”.

Exuberant, energetic, occasionally exasperating, Edward was the only one of the original Pilgrim Fathers whose portrait was painted: the year was 1651, and he was in London, representing the colony he had materially helped establish: in his hand he holds a letter signed “from yr loving wife Susanna”. She too had emigrated on the Mayflower, and their son Josiah would eventually take his father’s place, becoming “the first governor of a New England colony to be born there”. Between them, the span of their years covered pretty much the whole lifecycle of Puritanism, from its early, often admirable idealism, to the bloody horrors of the English Civil War, followed by Cromwell’s Commonwealth, and culminating across the Atlantic in the crucible of the Salem witch trials.

But it was to the Indians — as Fraser carefully explains, of the many terms used to describe their people, this is the one preferred by the Bureau of Indian Affairs — that they owed their very survival, that first terrible winter. The March after they landed, a sachem, or chief, of the Wampanoags named Samoset, naked save for a leather-fringed belt, strolled out of the forest with the greeting “Hello English”.

Thus began a relationship between Winslow and Massasoit, king of the Pokanoket tribe. It was a real friendship, based on an acceptance of parity, of deep mutual respect and even of affection, which led to a period of genuine, sensual, prelapsarian contentment. The subsequent, extremely violent unravelling of this understanding is both profoundly sad and depressingly symptomatic of so much that was to follow in the centuries to come.

The Mayflower Generation: The Winslow Family and the Fight for the New World, by Rebecca Fraser, Chatto & Windus, RRP£25, 384 pages

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