Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower is well written, carefully researched, critically acclaimed and enormously popular, a New York Times bestseller that’s helped Americans understand the real story of the Pilgrims.
But from where I sit, here on our rocky side of the Gulf of Maine, it’s hard not to be upset by Philbrick’s egregious error of omission: the not inconsequential role that Maine, Mainers and Maine’s then-ruler, Ferdinando Gorges, played in the Pilgrims’ story. Indeed, were it not for fishermen living on Damariscove, the Plymouth colony might well have failed.
For Americans brought up on stories of Plymouth Rock and the First Thanksgiving, Mayflower has been revelatory, presenting the Pilgrims’ story, warts and all. History buffs have long been aware of the Pilgrims’ less flattering side — Myles Standish accepting a dinner invitation from friendly Indians and then murdering them all as they sat down to eat, for instance — and Philbrick has brought those events to the wider public.
Many might well wonder why they didn’t hear about some of this before. That’s because America’s historical myths were largely created by 19th century Massachusetts historians, blueblood Harvard dons like Francis Parkman, Henry Adams and George Bancroft who sought to create a celebratory tale of American history, with their own ancestors as the protagonists. These historians were excellent researchers, but they intentionally chose to suppress unflattering information, and even changed quotes or made up sources to put the Puritans and Pilgrims in the best possible light — or demonize the Indians, French, or Virginians.
These “fathers of American history” wrote their greatest works in the aftermath of the Civil War and, not surprisingly, they minimized the role of Jamestown, the Virginia settlement that predated Plymouth by 13 years. Maine’s role in early New England was systematically ignored, including the presence of year-round fishing stations years before the Mayflower voyage. To dwell on the existence of a separate colonial government in Maine that predated the Puritan Migration would undermine the Boston Brahmins’ historical claim to be the rightful leaders of the nation.
Unfortunately, when it comes to Maine, Philbrick has followed in the Brahmins’ footsteps. Mayflower explains the genesis of Rhode Island and Connecticut and the evolution of the relationship between the Pilgrims at Plymouth and the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay. But read it cover to cover and you’d never know that the Pilgrims were squatting on lands owned by Ferdinando Gorges, leader of what would soon become the Province of Maine, and the man to whom they had to apply for a land grant. (They did so after the fact, having landed in the wrong place and, realizing their error, applied to Gorges’ Council of New England for retroactive permission.)
In fact, although Gorges is a central figure in the history of early New England and one of the principal forces shaping the Pilgrims’ world, he’s never once mentioned in the book.
Nor will readers learn that when the Pilgrims were starving in the spring of 1622, they sailed to Damariscove Island to seek help from Gorges’ fishing station. There, three miles off what is now Boothbay, they found 13 year-around employees working in a fortified compound near the top of the island’s long, narrow harbor.
Thirty fishing vessels were working Midcoast Maine waters that year, loading fish to bring back to England. The Pilgrims had discovered hundreds of Englishmen living and working just 120 miles across the Gulf from their beleaguered settlement.
“I found kind entertainment and good respect,” the Pilgrims’ emissary, Edward Winslow, recalled, adding that the fishermen “gave what they could freely” to help save the Saints of Plymouth. He returned with a boatload of provisions, which “recovered and preserved our strength” until crops were ready for harvest.
It’s a well-documented and well-known account, and yet Philbrick never mentions it. That fishing stations were there at all is mentioned only obliquely, when one of the fishing captains there writes to the Pilgrims, informing them of an Indian attack on Jamestown. That there had been fishing stations there since at least 1614 — when John Smith visited Monhegan — goes unmentioned, as does the failed Popham Colony of 1607, Gorges’ first attempt to settle his vast colonial domain.
An indication of Gorges’ importance to the Pilgrims’ world: Plymouth itself was named for the Gorges’ Plymouth Company, which presided over the failed Popham colony and, in turn, was named for the western English town where Gorges lived. After landing on his land, the Pilgrims, Gorges later recalled, “hastened away their ship [to England] with [an] order to their solicitor to deal with me [so] they might have a grant”¦to settle in the place”¦[which] was after called New Plymouth, where they have continued ever since…”
Gorges was a disorganized and sometimes delusional leader (he micromanaged his settlements without ever once visiting the New World) and in the 1650s his struggling Province of Maine was forcibly annexed by the more successful societies to the south. But Gorges and Maine played a not inconsequential role in the Pilgrims’ colony. It’s a pity Philbrick, like so many Massachusetters before him, chose to airbrush both right out of the story.