“For sixty-five days, the Mayflower had blundered her way through storms and headwinds, her bottom a shaggy pelt of seaweed and barnacles, her leaky decks spewing salt water onto her passengers’ devoted heads. There were 102 of them – 104 if you counted the two dogs…Most of their provisions and equipment were beneath them in the hold, the primary storage area of the vessel. The passengers were in the between…decks – a dank, airless space about seventy-five feet long and not even high five feet h

The Mayflower was a typical merchant vessel of her day: square-rigged and beak bowed, with high, castlelike superstructures fore and aft that protected her cargo and crew in the worst weather, but made beating against the wind a painfully inefficient endeavor. Rated at 180 tons (meaning her hold was capable of accomodating 180 casks or tuns of wine), she was approximately three times the size of the Speedwell and about one hundred feet in length.

Myles Standish was officially designated their captain. A small man with a broad, powerful physique and reddish hair, Standish also had something of a chip on his shoulder. He seems to have been born on the Isle of Man off the west coast of England, and even though he was descended from "the house of Standish of Standish," his rightful claim to ancestral lands had been, according to his own account, "surreptitiously detained from me," forcing him to seek his fortune as a mercenary in Holland. Well educated and well read (he owned a copy of Homer's The Iliad and Caesar's Commentaries), he appears to have conducted himself with a haughty impulsiveness that did not endear him to some of the settlers, one of whom later claimed that the Plymouth captain "looks like a silly boy, as is in utter contempt."

Countless Victorian-era engravings notwithstanding, the Pilgrims did not spend the day sitting around a long table draped with a white linen cloth, clasping each other's hands in prayer as a few curious Indians looked on. Instead of an English affair, the First Thanksgiving soon became an overwhelmingly Native celebration...Most of the celebrants stood, squatted, or sat on the ground as they clustered around outdoor fires, where the deer and birds turned on wooden spits and where pottages - stews into which varieties of meats and vegetables were thrown - simmered invitingly.

- Nathaniel Philbrick,When it comes to American history, we have a tendency towards reduction. We cherish the myth over the reality; the bombastic over the subtle; the simple over the complex. In modern media terms, we prefer the soundbite to the whole speech.On the Fourth of July, for example, we aren't thinking about competing mercantile interests, unpaid French-and-Indian War debts, or the Townsend Acts. Not at all. Instead, as we get hot dog-drunk and light off fireworks, we're probably imagining a guy with a wig and a tricorne hat saying something about freedom.History is more comforting that way. It's easier. It leaves more time for drinking and nurturing feelings of superiority towards France.Our earliest history, the first European settlements, can be boiled down to one image: the Pilgrim.Picture the Pilgrims with me: grim, black coated men with stiff white collars and funny hats with buckles. They grip their blunderbusses while their doughy, sexless wives grip their elbows. In the brush, something is skulking. It might be a sly turkey. An Indian. A witch. A lost and disoriented Cotton Mather. It doesn't matter. The Pilgrim has that blunderbuss, and it's full of justice.Nathaniel Philbrick'sis the story of how it really went down. Plymouth Rock and the Pilgrims and Thanksgiving. It's probably not the story you heard in grade school. (Though I give you credit for recognizing that the story you heard in grade school was a lot of mashed potatoes and gravy).Like all works of revisionism, Philbrick's book is both enlightening and a little disappointing. I love history as much as anything, which is accompanied by a secret pleasure at puncturing historical myths. But even I have to admit it's sometimes nice to be left with our illusions. In this case, the illusion being that white men and Indians were able to come together in mutual cooperation. Even though untrue, it's a fine notion. A retroactive ideal to strive for going forward.The reality, of course, is that the white men took the Indian's corn, took their turkey, then shot them (metaphorically) when they turned around. Later, they shot them for real. And kept shooting until Wounded Knee, near the dawn of the 20th century.But back to the Pilgrims.The story starts with the voyage of the titular ship:Philbrick, who wrote the splendid whaling book,, once again tells a fast-paced, informative story, filled with interesting little factoids that make you go, hmm. For the most part, he does the same here.Unfortunately, he is hampered by a dearth of sources. The famous voyage of the Mayflower – which gives the book its title – is told in only a few pages. This is due to the fact that the inveterate diarist William Bradford himself only devoted a couple paragraphs to the subject. Without primary accounts to research, Philbrick has no choice but to move on. It's an instance of source-material driving the narrative.Of course, the lack of primary sources is not Philbrick's fault. He has not – to my knowledge – ever started a fire that burned a library full of Pilgrim diaries. But nonetheless, it hampers any telling of this story. By necessity, he must rely on Bradford a great deal, which gives a one-sided view of what happened. Famous events such as the signing of the Mayflower Compact are told through his eyes, without the benefit of corroboration. We are left to hope that Bradford wasn't totally full of stuffing.Once the Mayflower has dropped anchor and the Pilgrims gone to shore, the story picks up steam, helped by a widening circle of characters. For instance, we get to meet Benjamin Church, who later became a famous chronicler of King Philip's War. We are also introduced to the irascible Myles Standish, one of the livelier actors of this drama:The centerpiece of the book is "the first Thanksgiving." Once upon a time, Thanksgiving was a creation of Abraham Lincoln, building on a proclamation by George Washington, who was looking for a bright side during the Civil War. Today, Thanksgiving is a time of football, overeating, and letting your extended family know how much they have let you down. The original seedling for Thanksgiving was a celebration of the Pilgrims being rescued from the brink with the help of the Wampanoag Indians Massasoit and Squanto.This thanksgiving was the culmination of a great deal of sacrifice, risk, luck, and shrewdness. We often view Massasoit as having saved the Pilgrims from starvation; what we don't often dwell upon is the fact that the Pilgrims chose Massasoit as an ally, and in doing so, became a power player in the region.The First Thanksgiving occurs just over a hundred pages into. There are well over two hundred pages left. After the turkeys are eaten, the wine is drunk, and the drunk uncles are pushed out of the crudely-built log cabins, Philbrick takes the burnished image of interracial cooperation/gluttony and tears it to pieces.What follows is treachery and war. Anyone buying this book to read in preparation of the holiday should know that Philbrick is not interested in holidays. (On the other hand, if you - like me – enjoy horrifying your relatives with cruel historical fact, then get your wallets ready). The Mayflower/Pilgrims/Thanksgiving angle is quickly left behind. The final two thirds of the book are devoted to Pilgrim/Indian politics and King Philip's War.This is certainly interesting stuff. King Philip's War was an incredibly brutal, under-acknowledged affair. Proportionally, it was one of the bloodiest conflicts on American soil (1 out of 65 English and 1 out of 20 Indians were slain). Four of Massasoit's children died in the war (Massasoit himself was already dead). In the end, King Philip was shot, drawn-and-quartered, and beheaded. His head was displayed in Plymouth for 20 years.Happy Thanksgiving! Pass the drumsticks.Philbrick is an extremely talented historian and storyteller. He has become one of those guys whose books I always read, but – for whatever reason – have never entirely loved. Here, as hard as he tries to breathe life into this story, there's a coldness and distance to it.This is a function of the material, more so than the author. So much of the Pilgrim tale is supposition: what might have happened. With a lack of primary accounts, a historian is left with the skeleton of an event. Moreover, even where they exist, contemporary accounts are often of limited value. They are not visceral and immediate; they don't allow us tothe history. Rather, they often had a dual purpose, and being informative was a secondary concern (for a great discussion of Benjamin Church and the literature of this period, see Richard Slotkin's).I was very excited to read this book but I was ultimately disappointed. This is an extremely readable, often entertaining account of a poorly-documented period. With its complex inter-tribal politics and collection of vaguely-known characters, I doubt you can do much better.My disappointment probably has more to do with humanity itself, and its violent nature, than Philbrick’s retelling of it. It is a fine thing to believe in Thanksgiving, to imagine people coming together to help each other, to see cultural divides bridged with food and drink and merriment. The reality is that the mythological Thanksgiving was a brief interlude in a grim tale of death and dismemberment. Thus, when your family starts tearing itself apart over politics this Thanksgiving, you can find a quiet corner, drink a bottle of wine, and rest assured that it is closer to historical reality than is comfortable.