Book review: Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World

Published on Friday 18 June 2010 20:20

By Nick Bunker The Bodley Head, 496pp, £25

WHO were the Pilgrim Fathers?

What was their life like in England before they set sail for the New World? How were they persecuted? Where did they flourish? And how, one might add, could this new information alter the Pilgrims' legacy?

These questions are at the heart of Nick Bunker's book about the religious radicals – Separatists, as they were known at the time – who founded the new colony in Massachusetts.

They didn't just want to purify the Church of England, as the Puritans wanted, but to break away altogether. Separatism, however, was rooted not simply in the Bible. It was, Bunker shows, a form of Christianity blended "with ideas about gentility and good government, and seasoned with Greek and Roman ideals of republican virtue".

And the Pilgrims were also businessmen. Unlike many other populist religious movements, Separatism, Bunker tells us, "was never the creed of the penniless." Its founders were of the gentry. But what did that mean? The leaders of the American Pilgrims hailed from Nottinghamshire. It was a troubled land – not a place of mythic sentimentality, Bunker says, but "the old, feral England". Unyielding forests, soggy fields, poor harvests and epidemics created a situation in which landowning gentlemen, desperate to maintain honour, could slip into debt, despair, sin, ruin. In such a vortex, Bunker argues, some people got religion and began pointing moralistic fingers at their neighbours.

The decision to flee thus had both religious and financial motivations. The Pilgrims' voyage to America was a business venture whose backers – few of them especially religious – expected a return on their investment. This centred on the North American beaver. In the 1620s, a single beaver pelt fetched the same money required to rent nine acres of English farmland for a year. For a time, the Pilgrims capitalised on that: in the 1630s, they shipped 2,000 pelts to England.

Bunker, a former investment banker, also shows the Pilgrims as pawns in a larger geopolitical game. James I despised both them and the Puritans ("very pestes in the Churche & common-weale," he called them). The king might well have forbidden the Mayflower from sailing, but his secretary of state, Sir Robert Naunton, spoke to him on behalf of the religious radicals and their colonising mission. "Without bases in America, England could not challenge Spanish control of the western ocean," Bunker writes. "And without the supplies New England might provide, the Royal Navy could not put to sea. For Naunton, most likely it was all a matter of politics and naval doctrine, with Calvinism adding the impetus of zeal." Bunker's research reveals that the Pilgrim leaders were quite connected to events in England, and also that Separatism had a broader geographic scope than has long been thought.

It is difficult, however, to follow some of this book's flow of facts and arguments. Bunker is better at digging in archives than in steering a narrative. He has many directions he wants to go in, and a great deal of information at his disposal, but he does not help the reader much. As an example, early in his book he describes the Mayflower leaving Plymouth Harbour on 6 September 1620, for its voyage to America, only to abandon it at this momentous point to spend several pages discussing other ships that came into and out of the harbour around that time. Then he returns to the Mayflower, but promptly leaves it again to mention a fishing boat called the Covenant that was in the harbour as the Mayflower departed. This ship was returning from Newfoundland, which leads Bunker into discussions about the types of ships that fished for cod; the uses of cod, walrus and whale oil; and Captain John Smith and his efforts to promote New England. Having twice set up the historic voyage and twice distracted us from it, Bunker then takes yet another detour, yanking the Pilgrims off the deck of their ship and putting them back on dry ground in Plymouth to engage in conversations about where they should settle, so leaving the reader truly at sea.

Having set himself the task of discovering who the real Pilgrims were, Bunker leaves it to others to square his findings against the Pilgrims of legend. So how do they measure up? Bunker shows them to be heartfelt Christians, but at the same time sectarians, as small-minded as any others, intent on getting their way within the petty struggles that split villages dotting the English countryside. Pinned to the canvas of history by the points of so many archival records, they come across as relevant, certainly. But mythic? Not so much.