Making Haste from Babylon
The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History
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4.7 • 6 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
At the end of 1618, a blazing green star soared across the night sky over the northern hemisphere. From the Philippines to the Arctic, the comet became a sensation and a symbol, a warning of doom or a promise of salvation. Two years later, as the Pilgrims prepared to sail across the Atlantic on board the Mayflower, the atmosphere remained charged with fear and expectation. Men and women readied themselves for war, pestilence, or divine retribution. Against this background, and amid deep economic depression, the Pilgrims conceived their enterprise of exile.
Within a decade, despite crisis and catastrophe, they built a thriving settlement at New Plymouth, based on beaver fur, corn, and cattle. In doing so, they laid the foundations for Massachusetts, New England, and a new nation. Using a wealth of new evidence from landscape, archaeology, and hundreds of overlooked or neglected documents, Nick Bunker gives a vivid and strikingly original account of the Mayflower project and the first decade of the Plymouth Colony. From mercantile London and the rural England of Queen Elizabeth I and King James I to the mountains and rivers of Maine, he weaves a rich narrative that combines religion, politics, money, science, and the sea.
The Pilgrims were entrepreneurs as well as evangelicals, political radicals as well as Christian idealists. Making Haste from Babylon tells their story in unrivaled depth, from their roots in religious conflict and village strife at home to their final creation of a permanent foothold in America.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This superb book secures for the Pilgrims their iconic perch among the earliest founders of colonial America. Bunker, a British investment banker turned journalist, has succeeded in writing a major history, unprecedented in its sweep, of the Plymouth Colony, a history centered on the 1620s but not exclusive to that decade. If short on interpretation and on the drama inherent in the settlers' enterprise, it is long on facts. Bunker takes his history in two directions, downward into some never before used archives (which allows him to add detail and texture), and outward into the entire world context of the Pilgrim settlements. Never before has such a comprehensive and thoroughly researched study of the subject appeared. If sometimes fatiguing by the volume of detail (e.g., in a disquisition on one settlement, directions to the site include turn left at the Dunkin' Donuts ), it scoops up every relevant character and links all to the basic tale of indomitable courage, religious faith, commercial ambition, international rivalry, and domestic politics. The results are stunning. Certain to be the dominating work on the Pilgrims for decades. 20 illus., 4 maps.
Customer Reviews
Wonderful
A beautiful account of what can drive people across an ocean to set up a new life. Really well written and never boring. A must read!
Really an amazing history of the Plymouth colony
The only reason I don't give this 5 stars is that if you are looking for a literary re-telling of the Plymouth colony (i.e. a modern interpretation of William Bradford's history) then this is not that book. But, for anyone seriously interested in more than just the facts and dates, this book is indispensable. It goes beyond the usual history and looks into the background of the Pilgrims and the era in which they lived to try and answer the questions - who were they, what did they believe, what influenced them and why did they migrate to the New World. In addressing these questions much of the book addresses in detail the social, economic and political conditions in England in the early 1600's. And the answers are surprising - it is a story of religion and of class and freedom and of beavers. The book is a long and sometimes dense read, but well worth it for the insight it provides.