Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World

by Nick Bunker

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.

Genres: History, American History, Nonfiction, Religion, Audiobook, Historical, 17th Century

489 pages, Hardcover

First published April 13, 2010

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 2 out of 5]

This Thanksgiving, in the spirit of season’s readings, I decided to get a book on the Mayflower pilgrims. When you go looking for Pilgrim books, you quickly learn that there aren’t that many to choose from, unless of course you are between the ages of 3 and 10. Most of the Pilgrim literary canon consists of titles for children, in which you learn that the Pilgrims dressed ridiculously, made everlasting peace with the Indians, and hunted goggle-eyed turkeys with comically enormous blunderbusses.

If you are an adult looking to read up on the Plymouth Colony, there are two mainstream options. The first is Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War, which was published in 2006. Philbrick’s fine book interprets the Plymouth adventure through the lens of war, specifically King Philip’s War of 1675, a bloody contest that literally decimated the military-age men of New England. I liked Mayflower a lot, but at the end of the day, it wasn’t the story I sought out.

The second option is Nick Bunker’s 2010 Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World. This book takes a much different tack from Philbrick’s. It chooses to devote most of its time to the English side of the Atlantic, methodically telling the story of why the Brownist Separatists we call the Pilgrims decided to cross the ocean in the first place. Much like Philbrick, however, Bunker has managed a specific kind of feat: writing a Pilgrim book without any Pilgrims.

The most important thing to know about Making Haste from Babylon is that it is all over the map. Its defining characteristic is confusion, digression, loose ends. As a narrative, it is an utter failure. Bunker’s inability to connect the dots, conclude a thought, or defend a thesis undermines all his laudable research and literary ability. If this book was a person, it’d be the grandpa who keeps sneaking out of the assisted-living facility to wander the streets bold and bewildered.

Bunker begins his sprawling story with a lengthy prologue set in Maine – of all places – that focuses on the beaver trade. He tells this set-piece through the eyes of an eagle, and goes into considerable detail as to the topography and geography of the area. There are also enough beaver facts to gladden the heart of any fan of genus castor. The prologue is emblematic of Making Haste from Babylon. It displays Bunker’s facility with a wide array of trivia. It provides a wonderful sense of place, so that you believe Bunker actually stood in these places so he could describe it just so. Unfortunately, it also has only a tenuous connection to the Pilgrims themselves. (The tenuousness is made worse by Bunker’s seeming inability to connect his own dots).

The best example I can give of this book’s failings is Bunker’s telling of the Mayflower’s sailing. He starts with the ship leaving port under the command of Captain Jones. Then, without warning, Bunker turns into my three year-old daughter at dinner time, distracted by everything else in the harbor. His storyline meanders away from the Mayflower to discuss a bunch of other ships, moves onto cod fishing, and suddenly skips back to dry land – England – as though the Pilgrims never set sail in the first place. If the Pilgrims ever landed at Plymouth Rock in this book, I must have missed it.

The vast majority of this book is spent on the religious movement that spurred the Pilgrims to leave for America in the first place. Bunker tells the story of Robert Browne, who gave rise to the Separatist movements. These dissidents were critical of the Church of England, and especially the Church’s maintenance of certain Catholic worshipping customs. The Separatists hated kneeling, altars, and clerical vestments. I mean, they really hated them. As Americans, we often gaze fondly upon the Pilgrims as avatars of religious freedom. But when you study them between the lines, they come across as jerks and bullies. They didn’t want to worship freely, they wanted everyone to worship just like them, and to read the Bible just like them, and if you didn’t, you could burn loudly in hell.

The pious bleating of the Separatists did not sit well with King James I, a nutty little fellow who came to hate the Pilgrims. The Separatists were persecuted and prosecuted for running afoul of King James; however, when push came to shove, James let them leave for Holland.

Bunker explains this all in exasperatingly excruciating detail, with no eye for chronology or cohesion. He gets credit where it’s due. It is obvious he’s visited every library and courthouse and clerk’s office in England sniffing for primary sources. He’s read every scrap of paper and walked in every footstep, all in an attempt to give definition to the vague traces of men such as William Bradford. The facts overwhelm, however, and Bunker is unable to keep the reader from inundation. Imagine a cattle stampede. Imagine those cattle spreading in every possible direction. Now imagine those cattle as facts. Bunker is the cowboy, trying to chase them down. The reader is the one getting run over. That’s this book.

There are things to be learned here, certainly. Making Haste from Babylon tries admirably to get to the heart of the Separatist movement. You learn some of what made these folks tick. You also learn that their voyage to the New World was not simply a spiritual journey, but a financial one. The Separatists sprang from the gentry; their voyage to America was a capitalistic endeavor. They were backed by investors who expected a return. In this way, they were part of the larger game of British Empire. James I may have thought them pests, but he let them sail to America with a charter to found the second colony after Jamestown.

As I mentioned before, the major thing missing from this Pilgrim tome is the Pilgrims themselves. If you’re looking for a take on the first Thanksgiving, you’ll miss it if you blink. If you’re looking for an idea of what life was like for these people, either aboard ship or in their squalid hovels, you won’t get it.

Any historian searching for the Pilgrims has to deal with an unfortunate reality: there is just not a lot of documentation. When it comes to Plymouth Colony, the major source is William Bradford himself, who wrote Of Plymouth Plantation. The problem with relying on this manuscript is that it picks and chooses what to describe, leaving us with great gaping knowledge holes. In order to round out a book, a writer/historian has to go looking elsewhere. This, I imagine, is why Philbrick concentrated on King Philip’s War, and why Bunker is so obsessed with the Pilgrims’ time in Scrooby and Leiden.

I could have accepted this, after a fashion, had Bunker delivered a better account. Since he does not, I could never recommend this book, for fear of having it thrown back my way. There are bits of shimmering insight, high quality writing, and freshly revealed sources. All that gets lost in sloppy editing, framing, and storytelling. These faults made Making Haste from Babylon an unnecessary chore.

After two Pilgrim books, I think I’ve learned a lesson. The Pilgrim story works better as myth than history. There are too many unknowns to give us a full, factually-accurate recounting of what passed for the First Thanksgiving. Instead of chasing that whale, I’ve decided to accept this truth. I’m not going to worry about whether and in what manner English Separatists and American Indians came together to celebrate the qualified survival of the English and cement a local alliance. I will ignore, in this instance, all the treachery and betrayal that followed. Instead, I will spend my Thanksgivings getting drunk and eating turkey and maybe resting my wine glass upon a certain book that tried really hard but came up a little short.

[Joshua Horn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Writing a book about the Pilgrims in the 21st century with new and groundbreaking research is difficult. So much has been said about them, and there are just not that many primary sources. But Nick Bunker has done it in striking fashion. He has unearthed a lot of original sources in archives to produce something really unique.

I wouldn't recommend this book as your first, or probably even second, book about the Pilgrims. But for people who are already familiar with the story, this is really valuable - its everything you never knew about the Pilgrims. If this is your first book, it would be quite confusing, as he skips, or skims over, a lot of the most dramatic parts of the story in favor of deep dive segments on background characters, literary analysis or sweeping descriptions of the landscape through which they operated.

I did disagree with a few of the author's statements and interpretations, but I'm not going to talk about those in detail. Like many others in my opinion I think he may not fully grasp the Pilgrim's theological beliefs, but he does do them the justice to say that religion was a critical motivation for them.

[Steve Donoghue]

Even in the crowded field of Pilgrim histories, this one takes pride of place - not only for its enormous breadth of research, but also its wonderfully-done narrative, following the Puritan movement, the whole life-cycle of the Mayflower expedition, and the harrowing and fascinating personal stories of the Plymouth Colony's earliest years. A rich, meaty masterpiece of popular history.

[Lauren Albert · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author is like a toddler who can not make it from one end of a room to the other because he keeps getting distracted by what he passes on the way. I can understand why Bunker would discuss the Beaver fur trade as it affected the Pilgrams, but why would this turn into a discourse on fashion and the history of the Beaver felt hat???? Why do we need to know about the dissection of King James' body? This tendency extends to his drowning the reader in detail about everything--the natural environment, sailing, etc.

He also has a tendency to speculate about things that are oddly irrelevant to the supposed subject of the book. Beaver hats "reached London"..."perhaps on the head of the Duke of Anjou and his entourage when he came to seek the hand of Queen Elizabeth." The Pilgrims landing at Provincetown saw a school of whales, "like the little fleets of dolphins she must have passed ten weeks before along the coast of Devon." Arrrghhh. I have 100 pages left and I'm masochistically skimming through to the end.

[Kristi · Rating 3 out of 5]

The good -- Bunker does a ton of original research, using documents such as shipping records, title deeds etc. to flesh out the lives of the Pilgrims, their families, and their financial backers. Bunker examines the religious, political, and economic reasons for coming to America -- giving what seems like fair weight and respect to each.

Lots of interesting material here. We see, for example, how economically challenging living in Leiden was like for the Puritan exiles, many of whom sailed on the Mayflower; the importance of trading in beaver skins was for the survival and expansion of the northern American settlements (due to the rage for beaver hats in England); and the Biblical perspective of the writings of early settlers --e.g. how the land was called a "wilderness" a la Exodus, and how otherwise trivial events were recorded to illustrate God's work of judgment or mercy in their lives.

The bad -- Unfortunately, Bunker apparently included every bit of research in this book. Exhaustive detail. As a fairly casual reader, it was overwhelming at times to wade through.

The ugly -- occasional purple prose. When Bunker tries to do narrative nonfiction, it's not pretty. Fortunately, most of the time he sticks to the facts.

I give the book 3 stars b/c of its interesting material that helped me understand the Pilgrims and their time better.

[James Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nick Bunker tells a history of the Mayflower Pilgrims and the settlement of Massachusetts we didn't get in school. The Pilgrims weren't fundamentalists. The author makes clear there were no fundamentalists in a Europe in which religion had such a large presence. Deeply inspired by Calvinism, the British Puritans were those who felt the British Crown hadn't gone far enough in separating itself from Catholicism. The Pilgrims were marginalized and frowned-upon within English society, but the sailing to Massachusetts aboard the Mayflower was much more a commercial venture than it was a flight from persecution. It was even sanctioned by a British government that had begun to realize the economic potential of North America and the need to compete with other European powers for dominance there. The Calvinist separatists, wanting to leave the country, were convenient seeds to plant in the fertile New World.

The greater portion of Making Haste from Babylon is the history of the Puritan society prior to the Mayflower and how it developed within the larger English society of the late 1500s and early 1600s. The story is complex and is told with the broad brush needed to cover the whole picture of English religion and commerce of the time. Bunker's telling is filled with many richly-drawn characters from both the Pilgrims and the less severe, more conventionally religious population. He necessarily spends time discussing the lives of the Pilgrims themselves in England and in Holland, where many of them migrated to avoid harassment by an Anglican-dominated Britain. The Massachusetts part of the story, the initial interactions with the Indian peoples there, the early struggles with farming, takes on the flavor of an adventure. Even as commercial venture with the Crown's blessing, life in the colony remained treacherous until the arrival of domesticated animals in the early 1630s. This made possible farming which provided surpluses. That plus the beaver fur trade, which had been slow to develop, insured the colony would be able to sustain itself.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book will tell you more about the Pilgrims than you could ever have imagined knowing--and in rich, beautiful prose. Nick Bunker has undertaken massive research on the English side of the Atlantic, creating a full background--sociological, economic, theological, and more--of the people whom we have known much better from the accounts of their voyage to Massachusetts and what happened once they got here. But Bunker locates them as well in the culture of Elizabethan and Jacobean England in ways that make individuals and the group and their ideas come to life. This is one of the most satisfying historical books I have ever read.

Bunker reminds us, at the outset, that the first colonies in America were actually occasions for investment by relatively wealthy Englishmen who did not themselves make the journey. He does so by starting obliquely with a discussion of the trapping of beaver (by Native Americans, who were very good at it) in what is now Maine and the trade along the Maine coast with English ships. This specific region was linked economically to the Plymouth colony and it demonstrated in 1628 (at last, the investors will have thought) that the colony could be financially viable. Not surprisingly another group sailed to Massachusetts two years later to found Boston.

The political experiences of the future colonial leaders -- especially during times of religious repression or (occasionally) of relative acceptance -- and economic survival in their midlands dwellings gave them the sort of background that helped them survive in the entirely different, but equally uncertain, world of New England.

All in all, a terrific read for anyone with an interest in this part of the world or the early English settlement of North America.

[Jenny Brown · Rating 2 out of 5]

I did not finish this book. I agree with the many other reviewers who found the mass of details poorly digested.

In addition, the author's massive collection of historical trivia did not encourage me to trust him because when he ventured into areas where I know something about what he was writing about, his facts were often off.

For example, the map he uses to display Indian hunting territories in the 1600s features a large man-made lake created in the 1930s. His long, mostly irrelevant discourse on Puritan Bible reading harps on (and mistranslates) the Hebrew word, b'midbar, that happens to be the Hebrew name of one of the Five books of Moses.

His "revelation" that the Mayflower colonists traded furs is not news and after reading about 82 pages I could not find any reason to keep on reading. He struck me more as a collector of trivia than a historian, and the fact that there were no blurbs for this book from any American historians is telling.

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like anything about pilgrims so I was predisposed to enjoy this, but it's very rambley. Lots of cool facts but the poor author cannot tell you anything without distracting himself - and you the reader - with something else.

You will learn much about the beaver, though.

[Gayla Bassham · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting but oddly organized. I felt like it kept switching back and forth between topics and I kept getting lost. Possibly this had to do with my attention span more than anything else.

[Stewart · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent history of the voyage of the Mayflower and the early years of Plymouth Colony. Everything you always wanted to know about the "Pilgrims" and the women who loved them. (I'm kidding about that last part).

[Moses · Rating 4 out of 5]

Don't pay attention to the negative reviews saying this book is meandering and that the author can't stay on topic. The key is found in the subtitle: "The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World."

The author presumably has no interest in a play-by-play account of the Pilgrim voyage and early settlement - who among us is unfamiliar with the story? I've read Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation, although I didn't think much of it at the time.

Instead Bunker tries to recreate the world(s) of the Pilgrims - the world of New England geography and tribal politics, the world of the beaver trade, the world of religious nonconformity and separatism in eastern England, the world of exile in Leiden, the world of seafaring traders.

If you think these things are uninteresting, skip this book. But I think they're fascinating and I accept Bunker's thesis that much of what he adds to the traditional account is helpful in the work of historical reconstruction. Although Bunker is long-winded and moves from topic to topic quickly, this is a good read.

One star knocked off because sometimes there is TOO much meandering, such as the lengthy section near the beginning imagining a fictitious bald eagle flying over the Kennebec River in Maine. Too much, too soon in the book.

Also, Bunker's understanding of Christian theology is severely limited. He refers to the "stern" God of the Pilgrims, often referring to this deity as "Calvin's God." It is disappointing that Bunker, who seems open to overturning historical consensus in other areas, still has blinders on when it comes to understanding Calvinism, which seen within the context of 16th century religion, not to mention its Augustine and Pauline antecedents, is not particularly radical in its conception of God's sovereignty. Calvin and his followers merely repristinated divine sovereignty in a way that, although vigorously opposed, is often now accepted as following the biblical authors faithfully. [N.B. the Pilgrims themselves were indeed religious radicals, but this is less the influence of Calvin and more Knox and others].

[Jen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is fine.

/end review

Oh that's not going to cut it, will it? The religious upheaval in England (and Europe to be fair) during the 1600s has always held my interest. Not so much the pilgrims, but more the great changes and the "oh, crud, that king/head thing took it a bit too far, didn't it?" realization. Then you have the Glorious Revolution. It's all a bit of a romp.

This book isn't a romp.

There is a lot of great information in this books. Amazing amounts. Interesting stuff. Unfortunately, it's also exceedingly difficult to follow--esp in audio book form when you're suddenly in another country entirely. I don't think, however, that this problem would be entirely solved by me reading it on paper. I just think I'd be more frustrated. The book jumps around rapidly without giving much in the way of historical or geographical setting, so it's hard to keep track of where or when you are.

The book does an excellent job of showing that there were far more motivations to the pilgrims than simply religious freedom. No motive is purely one thing, and Bunker shows that economics and current politics influenced those setting off for Massachusetts a great deal. Also how the colony had to invent new civil structures. Honestly, I think that last bit could have been a really good book on its own.

I would read that too.

[Roberta · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think the best thing I can do regarding this book is to share a few reviews from other readers:

"If this book was a person, it’d be the grandpa who keeps sneaking out of the assisted-living facility to wander the streets bold and bewildered."

"Imagine a cattle stampede. Imagine those cattle spreading in every possible direction. Now imagine those cattle as facts. Bunker is the cowboy, trying to chase them down. The reader is the one getting run over."

"The author is like a toddler who can not make it from one end of a room to the other because he keeps getting distracted by what he passes on the way."

"Arrrghhh. I have 100 pages left and I'm masochistically skimming through to the end."

I would also add that one could start a drinking game with respect to the number of times that the author uses the phrase "As we shall see...." I am convinced that this book had no editor.

[Robert Morris · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting book. Bunker convincingly makes the case that our picture of the Puritans needs to be revised, but fails to produce the book that does it. He has clearly done a ton of investigating. If the research is half as innovative as he keeps telling us it is, then he has done the field a service with this book. It added to my knowledge enormously, which wins it three stars.

The problem with the book is that he is never sure what he wants it to be. Is he telling a story? Is he critiqueing the historiograpny? Is it meant to be an economic or environmental history? He tries to do all of it, and fails. It's possible to tell a tangent filled story well, but this text is just a mess. There is clearly some deep learning here, if he'd told it in a more straightforward way it could have been a great book. Unfortunately he didn't and it isn't.

[Daniel Hoffman · Rating 4 out of 5]

The subtitle of this is "The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World," and the "Their World" part is no joke. This isn't exactly a history of the Plymouth Colony so much as a detailed exploration of its whole historical/cultural/economic context, and the circumstances and motivations of the people behind it. One theme somewhat tying it together was how the colony finally found a workable economic basis in beaver pelts.

One of the things Bunker was doing here was incorporating lots of archival records that previous historians of the pilgrims have overlooked, which means its good work for a historian and in some ways revises or at least fills out traditional perspectives on it, but also honestly got to be overly detailed for my taste. To me the most interesting parts were the ones dealing with the politics of Puritanism and separatism.

[Ted Haussman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my first Nick Bunker book and what I found most impressive was the overall scholarship. The man rooted out, unearthed, and explored records, facts, and connections that rounded out recent accounts and scholarship (and often challenged them) on the Mayflower pilgrims. He does a masterful job of putting the Leiden pilgrim / Brownist / Puritan movement into the overall global events of the time. If anything, the detail, at times, became a bit overwhelming, but I thoroughly enjoyed the perspective.

I find the tumult and ferment of those days fascinating and will come back to them in the near future.

A great follow-on to Philbrick's more popular Mayflower.

[Jessica Leight · Rating 1 out of 5]

Despite growing up in New England, I realized I didn't actually know very much about the Pilgrims and I thought this book would be a useful introduction. I found it quite disappointing, though. It was excessively detailed and seemed to lose the forest for the trees. There were various digressions into tangentially related subjects, particularly related to the history of England at the time, and not much color about what actually happened to the pilgrims after their arrival.

[Brianna DuMont · Rating 2 out of 5]

Stars for sheer amount of research involved, however organization is severely lacking and tricky to overcome. Also, some sound editing was needed--not all of that research had to make it in the book.

[E.J. Cullen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book, while poetic and informative, jumps all over the place like a kangaroo with a hotfoot.

[Duff · Rating 2 out of 5]

Incredible research, but at too many points it seemed just too much!

[Clay Davis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Too much detail about things that were not very important to the Pilgrims.

[Peter Corrigan · Rating 4 out of 5]

As another discerning reviewer notes about this book, the key is found in the subtitle: "The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World." It is that world that Nick Bunker attempts to unearth and recreate to the extent he can, not focusing as much the particulars of the Mayflower journey and aftermath. A lot of effort went into this book, including extensive archival research into alternative sources and numerous first-hand visits to sites that were important to the Mayflower saga. In America we are given the old story, persecuted for religious reasons, fleeing, arriving and then the story starts. If persecution alone was sufficient to kick off that famous journey, the Catholics of England would have left in far larger numbers as they were under far more pressure in England then the Puritans ever were as the author makes clear. Bunker is interested in the background of these people and what their world was like. Yes, he gets sidetracked at times into details that can be almost maddening, but as often the sidebars are fascinating and informative. So you take the good with the not quite so good.

He makes a valiant effort to describe physical places and made visits to the 'The Pilgrim Quadrilateral' in Nottinghamshire, various ports of embarkation in England, their temporary home in Leiden, the key port of La Rochelle in France and obviously various sites in Massachusetts and into Maine. But the world geopolitical situation is also described at some length and it was a complex and extremely fraught period in Europe. Religious fervor and conflict was intense. The planning and execution of the Mayflower voyage was undertaken as Europe was plunging into the catastrophe of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) and incessant squabbles among England, France and Spain. Equally insightful was his comparison of the ruthless methods employed by England during the so-called 'Ulster Plantation' of 1610 with the subsequent colonization in North America just a few years later. The former served in many ways as the template for conquest. Also quite interesting was his focus on the beaver trade in Maine which basically 'saved' the entire enterprise from failure, according to Bunker. None of these things occurred in a vacuum and he does a pretty remarkable job filling up that space with the people, places, and events that defined one of the great turning points in history. 3.5 stars rounded up.

[John Hamilton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This work provides a great new perspective on the complex motivations behind the settlement of New England. It is full of details I had no idea about which sort of flesh out the somewhat simple history we are usually taught. The business, trade, and financial aspects the author brings into the picture are quite interesting. My only complaint is that the the author tends to run off down rabbit holes into side stories in order to better explain something, but seems to go so far down that you're not sure if he ever got back to his original explanation. But the details are still very fascinating and taken in whole this is a great, and essential, history of early New England.

[Louise Leetch · Rating 5 out of 5]

History, we know, is not an isolated story. It’s affected by an amalgam of social, economic, political, and religious events even the smallest of which can change the world. Take the Stewart kings of England and their love of fashionable beaver hats. Who would think a couple foppish rakes could change the history of the world? But indeed they did with the help of a couple of wars that eliminated trading sources and a small group of religious idealists seeking freedom. Making Haste From Babylon by Nick Bunker is so very much more than a history of those Pilgrims. It transports you to the 16th century England that created them.

The accession of James I and his intolerance for the Puritan Separatists drove them to escape to Holland. Curiously, the punishment for Separatism was banishment, but it was illegal to leave the country. Robert Cecil, Secretary of State, sensed trouble looming regarding the jurisdiction of the Church over civil matters so it was easier to just let them go. Henrys II & VIII had quite enough of that, thank you very much.

The Separatists settled in Leiden and found themselves tied to an urban economy which gave them no social freedom, no education for their children and fears of civil unrest. They worked endlessly in poor conditions with little to eat and exposure to industrial disease. The return of Holland’s war with Papist Spain threatened even the religious freedom they sought. While they worshiped freely in Holland, they had to go into exile beyond the Atlantic to establish their ideal community of economic liberty, social equality, self governance and just a little bit of England.

Nick Bunker’s use of primary resources and his expanded scrutiny of secondary sources make this a truly scholarly work. In turn, his journalistic style makes it so very easy to read. He delivers a meticulous exploration of the lives of the Pilgrims before they ever set sail. The author investigated and explored all the English locations associated with the Pilgrims on foot or on a bike—at least twice! He delved through archives and church records that make your eyes water just thinking of the 400 years of dust he stirred up. Exploration of U.S. locations, Holland, La Rochelle & Ulster exhibit a thoroughness bordering on obsession.

It’s not until the last quarter of this book that we see the life of the Pilgrims in New England. Even then, we pass over the trials and tribulations and focus how they persevered to establish a community capable of producing the return on investment that their investors sought. The Pilgrims in their Calvinist zeal invented the model environment that nurtured the new markets which opened up a mere eight years after they arrived and ensured the survival of those who followed them to America. If you want something to pick up where Mr. Bunker leaves off, I highly recommend Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower. But read this first, it’s a comprehensive work of genius and a delight to read.

[Jeffrey Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

As we shall see, this book is extremely complicated. Nick Bunker does an excellent job tracking down any leads that he could find, on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, that may close the gaps on what the Pilgrims (aka Separatists) omitted during their chronicles in settling Plymouth Colony and New England. It is a hidden gold mine of useful information, mainly about the "back story" that led the Pilgrims to leave Europe for North America.

But it is not very well written. Bunker does have a way with words, so there are times it becomes a great read, actually. However, it lacks a cohesive focus. He wanders too much. He asks too many irrelevant questions in a rambling tirade that takes up space but provides no useful information to the reader. For as long as this book is, it could have been much better edited to leave out the needless words and tighten the focus so we could get to the heart of the matter quicker.

He needs to be commended for the incredible amounts of new facts that he has been able to bring to the Pilgrim story. It is going to be left to someone else to take these facts and properly insert them into the Pilgrim narrative.

[Matthew Griffiths · Rating 2 out of 5]

An interesting story that gets lost in reams and reams of detail that don't really fit the narrative. Granted, some parts of this book were excellent, I particularly enjoyed the segments that discussed the relationship between the growing trade in beaver fur and the success of the Pilgrim colonies as the author worked these into the story well but the endless descriptions of English farmland got to be very tiring very quickly. So many superfluous details are added in here that upon finishing I'm really not sure what lessons I'm supposed to have taken from this book other than some generic message that history is very rarely as simple as we think.

I would recommend this to anyone with a deep interest in the history of the pilgrims but ultimately if you're looking for something light to read then I think you'll probably have better luck elsewhere.

[Amanda · Rating 2 out of 5]

If I hadn't been reading this as a part of a reading challenge, I would have returned it to the library after the first 50 pages. I'm a native New Englander, history enthusiast, and deep Anglophile. This book disappointed on all three of those fronts. Reading it felt like homework - I chose it thinking I'd learn about the Pilgrims' 'world' in Plymouth. Instead easily 80% of the book is focused elsewhere (tedious academic distinctions between different types of Protestantism, royal squabbles in Europe, etc.) and it simply wasn't interesting. I understand what the author was trying to do but I can't help but feel that he glossed over anything that was actually interesting about the Colony. And if Nick Bunker used the phrase "as we shall see" one more time, this book was going across the room.

[James Horgan · Rating 4 out of 5]

As others have noted this is not, as such, a biography of the Mayflower Pilgrims, and you will not get a blow by blow account of their first years in America. What the book provides is a detailed exploration of the economic, geographical, social, political and religious context in which the emigration occurred and, ultimately, flourished. On that level, with some quibbles below, it succeeds very well.

Bunker's essential thesis is that what made the settlement of America viable was the prospect of trading high value beaver pelts. These were already making their way to Europe via early French and British traders, as well as Russia, and sold at very high prices as hats made from their felt were in fashion. I am not entirely convinced that this as Russian trade dried up in 1620 and it may have been the driving economic force for the initial funding of the colony, but it did pay dividends once the colony was refinanced in the mid-1620s, beavers were discovered in abundance in the hinterland of New England, and ships started returning to London laden with pelts.

As a side note a recent article in Evangelicals Now decried the 'dominion theology' that led to the reduction in beavers in New England. Bunker would reply, no beavers, no American haven for persecuted Puritans.

Bunker provides many additional details of factors underlying the emigration. He considers ship technology, only in the late Tudor period did these begin to become big enough to make emigration physically and economically feasible. He considers the geographical, social and religious environment of northern Nottinghamshire, tracing how Puritan ministers flourished here, protected by local nobles, and initially ignored by the Archbishop of York. Bunker is also Chairmen of the Freud Museum which leads to occasional odd and overreaching musings such as whether the open geography of Nottinghamshire led to a particular cast of mind susceptible to Separatism.

The origins of English Separatism are explored from its rise in the 1580s, as a response to Elizabeth's refusal to countenance any reform in the Church of England. In Nottinghamshire non-conforming tendencies led to the suspension of a number of ministers in the 1610s that, in turn, drove separation, underground churches and eventually emigration to The Netherlands. There the looming end of the truce with Spain and economic depression, together with the unsettled political events that were the backdrop to the Synod of Dort, led the Pilgrims to seek an alternative location of safety. Similarly he does not understand the tensions that Arminianism and ritualism under Laud caused in the Church of England.

The search for furs, and the need for trade more widely at this time, eased the willingness of English authorities to grant licences to trading companies in America. In part this was caused by the fall of La Rochelle and the closing of trading routes into France. The Pilgrims were financed by Puritan merchants in the City of London. Once in America building positive relationships with the local native chiefs was essential, eased in part by meeting the famous Squanto who had previously met Englishmen and had travelled and stayed with the same merchant grouping in London. Those merchants, through other connections, also supplied emigrees to make the colony viable, which explains why not all the Pilgrims originated with the Separatists of Nottinghamshire.

The last section of the books considers the consolidation of the colony as additional settlements were founded, further Englishmen emigrated and land was, somewhat duplicitously, seized from local tribes who were decimated by smallpox epidemics. This paved the way for the Great Migration of the 1630s as Charles I ruled without Parliament and Laudian persecution began to bite Puritans.

Each of these topics is described in details. Bunker has clearly spent a lot of time researching genealogies, tax records, ecclesiastical cases and locations. Given his journalistic background some sections in chapters, which are given headings throughout, read like isolated weekend articles and it can be hard to see the wider picture he is trying to paint, especially in the first half of the book.

Where Bunker is weak is partly in his attempt to explain everything about the colony in economic terms and, conversely, in his rather limited understanding of the theology that animated and drove the Pilgrims to emigrate. His repeated references to Calvin's God of wrath grate. Is he aware the gospel is good news? He clearly does not understand the theological issues behind the Reformed/Arminian tensions in the Netherlands, simply saying they were about the doctrine of double predestination, which is not one of the Five Points, and was a parallel intramural debate amongst those who supported Dort.

Thus although Bunker's detail on so many issues is illuminating he never is never able to bring the same warmth, insight and clarity to the theology of Puritanism, without which the setting up of the American colonies would not have happened, whatever the price of beaver fur. Trading posts might have been established but I doubt wives and children would ever have crossed the Atlantic in numbers.

Despite these omissions anyone with background theological knowledge will gain a great deal from reading this articulate book seeing the wider societal picture of the world of the Mayflower Pilgrims.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

An excellent reference on the Pilgrims, on both sides of the Atlantic - the times and events leading up to the sailing of the Mayflower in 1620 and their experiences in the region of Plymouth and the rest of New England.