The Mayflower-The Families, the Voyage, and the Founding of America

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.].1Fraser 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, kindness and strength of belief of the community he joined.” Living in a “haze of religious excitement” and “[i]ntoxicated by the intense atmosphere,” Edward married “a devout, gentle young woman named Elizabeth Barker. His parents might have dreamed of their eldest son marrying a daughter of one of Mr Winslow’s wealthy patrons, but Edward insisted on being joined to an unknown woman he barely knew” (23–24). Edward’s brothers Gilbert and John, “probably lived in the same boarding house” in Leiden with Edward and Elizabeth (24). Edward had a “tendency to grandiosity” and a “need for a father figure” (128, 132). Despite his intensive education in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew at the King’s School and his years in London and Leiden, Edward showed himself in the colony to be an “autodidact who was thirsty for knowledge, and slightly in awe of the more sophisticated colonists” of Boston (6–7, 153).What Edward’s clothes were in 1617 is unknown, but Fraser’s guess might be correct. The common bear logo was proven in 1987 not to have any significance with respect to Brewster’s publications.2 The siege inspired at least two paintings and one tapestry (not hundreds). Edward’s psychological response to his surroundings is nowhere recorded. Whether he or his family were acquainted previously with Elizabeth Barker, whose will shows her to have been wealthy, is currently unknown. Where Edward and Elizabeth lived after their marriage is unrecorded; boarding houses did not exist. Notes from Winslow’s psychiatrist have gone missing.Fraser equivocates and/or speculates about multiple points: Brewster “may have had misgivings” about Isaac Allerton. Elizabeth Barker Winslow “may have had concerns” about not being pregnant. Mary Brewster “barely concealed her poor spirits at this voyage to the unknown,” accompanied by, among others, “the outrageous Mrs Chilton” (32–33). During the crossing, the “absence of Dorothy and William Bradford’s three-year-old son left behind in Leiden may have contributed to Dorothy’s increasingly desperate mood” (49). “[O]n board there was a passenger who was sinking into a depression under the cold snowy light and the mysterious backdrop of the new continent. She could not find a way back from her despair and she could not talk about it.... William Bradford’s wife Dorothy was becoming unreachable.... Was it thoughts of her own young son, left behind? All we can guess is that the thought of the isolation of America terrified her.... Perhaps the frightening atmosphere—God was not reaching out His arms to save them—and the tragic deaths were the last straw that tipped Dorothy into preferring to die rather than to live. On 7 December, ... her body was found floating beside the ship.... There is no evidence to show she committed suicide, but equally no evidence to say that she did not. It is hard to believe she did not plan her death” (60–61).Fraser’s unsupported psychological characterizations and her frequent use of “may have” and “perhaps” reach a climax in those sentences. A historian providing footnotes might at least have mentioned that Austin first floated the idea of Dorothy Bradford committing suicide in her story, “William Bradford’s Love Life,” published in 1869.3 Austin acknowledged the suicide as her own invention to advance her romantic plot. Repeating and accepting this spurious myth serves as one simple gauge for the quality of any Pilgrim history.But what is Fraser’s story? It is not about the Mayflower or “the Families” etc. Fraser does not retell what has been known since 1904 about the early career of the ship.4 Nor does she offer much information about many of the most important families in Plymouth Colony’s history—the Bradfords, the Hatherlys, the Allertons, or the Prences, to mention only a few. For a history of Plymouth Colony that focuses on the families, Eugene Aubrey Stratton’s Plymouth Colony: Its History People, 1620–1691 (Lehi, Utah, 1986) is far more comprehensive. Fraser’s commentary on the “founding of America” lacks any discussion of the development of democracy and law in Plymouth colony, or the growth and structure of churches there. Nor does Fraser explore agriculture, infrastructure, town development, or households and furnishing.Fraser is probably not responsible for the misleading title. In England, the same book is called The Mayflower Generation—The Winslow Family and the Fight for the New World. But if the Winslow family is at the center of the story, Fraser should have made a place for Edward’s brother Kenelm, and the supposition that as a cabinetmaker, he was responsible for designs characteristic of Plymouth Colony furniture. Fraser’s bibliography shows extensive research in published sources. Samuel Deane’s History of Scituate: From Its First Settlement to 1831 (Boston, 1831), however, is not the best discussion of William Vassall and the second church in Scituate. The Winslows settled in Marshfield in Plymouth Colony. More than 300 documents refer to them in the Marshfield town records, publication (2015) of which is missing in Fraser’s bibliography.Fraser’s book recurrently attempts to explain actions as arising from psychological characteristics that are fictitious; the result in this conjunction of historiography and creative writing goes beyond what might be expected in a book of history

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