The Mayflower–The Families, the Voyage, and the Founding of America by Rebecca Fraser (review)

Fraser re-tells the story of the Pilgrims, giving special attention to the Winslow family, and expanding her view beyond the history of the Pilgrims and their colony. In addition to considerable detail about Winslow family connections in England, she includes much about the Massachusetts Bay Colony's involvement with politcal upheavals in England, as well as anecdotal discussions aboiut many aspects of ordinary daily life. Unlike Nick Bunker's Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History (New York, 2011), which overwhelms the Pilgrim story with interesting but extraneous contemporary topics, Fraser keeps either the Pilgrims generally or the Winslows and their political or family connections as her focus.

Beginning with Edward Winslow's upbringing in a Worcestershire family on the edge of the gentry—farmers investing in a variety of commercial enterprises—she rapidly surveys his participation in Pilgrim activities in Leiden, where Winslow, who had left his unfinished apprenticeship to a London printer, assisted William Brewster and Thomas Brewer in the Pilgrims'clandestine publishing activities. After ten pages about the voyage of the Mayflower (which gives the book its title), she discusses the beginning of Massachusetts Bay Colony and the Pequot War of 1637. The book's strength is twofold: (1) Fraser's exploration of the currently popular topic of networking, as exemplified in Winslow's career and his family's marriages, and (2) her analysis of tribal rivalries and interactions in chapters about Massasoit Ousamequen (whose friendship with Winslow and other colonists was essential to the uneasy peace that lasted about thirty-five years), about the Pequot War, about the attempt by Miantonomo to inspire other sachems to unite against the English during the 1640s, and about the tensions leading to King Philip's War in 1675. After Edward Winslow's death in 1655, Fraser's attention shifts to Edward's son, Josiah, who became Plymouth Colony's governor from 1673 to 1680, and to the complicated careers, politics, and legal history of the family of his wife and widow, Penelope Pelham Winslow, who died at the end of 1703.

As a boy, Edward Winslow studied at the King's School, Worcester, where, according to Fraser, his headmaster Henry Bright instilled him with a fervent Protestantism. Fervently or not, the Winslows were already Protestant. To explain Winslow's premature departure from his apprenticeship and arrival in Leiden, Fraser asserts that Winslow's "faith was a matter of such urgency he was willing to throw away his professional career" (8). A scholarly history might have mentioned the alternative suggestion that Winslow might have been induced to leave for the Continent by the last book that his master produced while Winslow was working in London, An Itinerary written by Fynes Morison, Gent . . . containing his Ten Yeeres Travell Through the Twelve Dominions of Germany, Bohmerland, Switzerland, Netherland, [etc.].¹

Fraser has neither footnotes nor endnotes. Instead, a brief and unspecific general source note is provided at the end of the book, chapter by chapter. Curious readers will not be able to link sources to particular statements. This approach may be sufficient for a general readership unfamiliar with the story; Fraser, however, nowhere clarifies why she chose her various sources and opinions. Why, for example, does she ignore the fact that Plymouth Colony did not participate in the Pequot War, to which she devotes a chapter?

Fraser makes a number of statements that warrant further scrutiny: In her account, Edward, in his journey from London to Leiden, was "wrapped in the sort of thick serge mantle that England and the Netherlands were celebrated for manufacturing" (16). "The Brewster Press had a distinctive logo, a bear with heraldic plumes" (20). Leiden's siege in 1574 "was the city's defining event . . . the subject of hundreds of paintings and tapestries" (20). Edward was "full of energy"; and his "charming qualities" combined enthusiasm and impulsiveness. He was "almost overwhelmed by the warmth...