Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World a New History - Couverture rigide

Bunker, Nick

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0307266826 ISBN 13 : 9780307266828

Editeur : Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2010

Synopsis

Book by Bunker Nick

A propos du livre

Extrait :

Prelude

The Beave of Mawooshen

The planters heare aboutes, if they will have any beaver, must go 40 or 50
myles into the country, with their packes on their backes.

—an English settler on the coast of Maine, June 1634
Seventy miles from the Atlantic, in the central lowlands of Maine, if you head west along Route 2 and cross the Sandy River you will see a line of mountains far away upon your right. Built of slate, they rise to more than three thousand feet. They reach their finest color on a winter’s day, when the air is sharp and cold and the sunlight turns their eastern slopes from gray to blue. Above the modern town of Farmington, they form the outlying ramparts of a dark massif.

Here the influence of the ocean ends, and the American interior begins. Behind the blue ridge, the high ground extends for sixty miles, as far as the frontier with Canada. Between hills black and shaggy with spruce but dusted white with snow, the road ascends an esker, a ribbon of gravel, dropped into place by a glacier fourteen thousand years ago.

The esker makes a platform for Highway 27. Along the road, you climb until you reach a narrow pass and a chain of lakes. Beyond them lies a gloomy wetland, called Hathan Bog, where in the dusk moose wander from the swamp across the asphalt. Then, a little farther on, the highway arrives at a plateau, and a liquor store, and a customs post, at a hidden place named Coburn Gore, where day and night the Frenchmen thump back over the border in their logging trucks. Like the valleys of West Virginia, the pass supplies an aperture, an entry into the land beyond the mountains, at the northern end of the Appalachian barrier.

At places such as this, the west begins: but where did America start for new settlers arriving from England in the 1620s or the 1630s? Maybe they saw it first from ten miles out on the ocean, with a glimpse of sandy cliffs along the eastern rim of Cape Cod, or at forty miles, if their first sighting was Cadillac Mountain, above Bar Harbor, visible to any ship bound in from Newfoundland. Or did the New World really begin later? Did its strangeness dawn upon them when they saw ice jamming a river mouth as late as April, or a belt of white wampum beads, or a field of maize, or a man in deerskin breeches, with a shaved head and a torso painted purple? The point at which the alien was glimpsed for what it was, alarming, uncanny, or sublime, might occur at any of these moments, or at none of them. Half of the early migrants simply faded and died.

There was another point when America began. The moment took place when new settlers crossed a different kind of boundary, when for the first time they could be certain that their colony was going to endure. So far as the Mayflower Pilgrims were concerned, this moment occurred in the territory in Maine that lay below Coburn Gore, in the year 1628. Eight years earlier, they had landed at Provincetown, Massachusetts, at the extremity of Cape Cod. Soon afterward they founded their settlement across the bay at New Plymouth. That was another beginning, but it was tenuous and frail. It took far longer for the Plymouth enterprise to make itself permanent, and to open the way for the foundation of Boston to the north, by colonists in far larger numbers.

Fraught with risk, the Mayflower project endured a long period of trial, experiment, and error. Deeply in debt to their backers in London, and chronically short of supplies to keep their feet shod, their muskets loaded, and their small boats afloat, they needed a commodity to send back to England to be swapped for silver coins or used to redeem their IOUs. They eventually found it, in the quantities they needed, up here in Maine. They bought it from the people who lived in the country below the watershed between what we now call Quebec and the United States. This was where the moment of maturity occurred: the place where they passed
across an emotional frontier, the line that separates insecure ambition from likely success.

There was only one way in which the Pilgrims could find the money to pay their debts and finance new supplies from home. They needed the fur of Castor canadensis, the North American beaver. No other colonial product fetched so high a price, in Paris, in London, or in Holland. What made the skins so precious? That will be the subject of a later chapter. All we need know for the time being is that during the 1620s the price of a beaver pelt increased fourfold, to reach a peak of nearly forty shillings. That was enough to rent nine acres of English farmland for a year.

Until they had pelts, the colony at New Plymouth remained a fragile outpost, a tiny corn- growing settlement wedged between the forest and the sea. For it to become something more, the seed or nucleus for a much larger inflow of the English, they had to find beaver skins, and in Maine the valleys and the high ground supplied a vast habitat for the mammal.

As many as fifty beavers may have lived in each square mile, or even more densely in places such as Hathan Bog. Alongside the esker, on every stream beavers built their dams and lodges. Today the animals have left a chain of beaver meadows, dried- up ponds, strung out along the side of Highway 27. Take the surface area of Franklin County, Maine, around and beneath the bog and the highway, and multiply it by fifty. You come to an estimate of ninety thousand of the creatures in that one county alone.

Why did the beavers of Maine become the target of exploitation, and not those of another region? The Pilgrims might have gone elsewhere, and sometimes did. Beavers will live in any setting with the trees they like to gnaw, the quaking aspen or the willow, and streams that flow down gradients a few degrees above the level. As for the date, why did it take so long for the Pilgrims to begin to penetrate the deep interior? Because it was only in 1628, and in Maine, that chance and circumstance combined to make it feasible. Access, demand for the skins, the legal right to settle, the technology of transport, the command of language, a supply of trading goods, and the presence of people able and willing to hunt: these were essential too.

As we shall see, the very early history of New England contains many hidden, forgotten corners, niches quite as remote as Coburn Gore. Most often, these spots of vagueness or omission arise because, in the British Isles, the evidence lies neglected, scattered in odd places in dozens of archive collections.

They contain a wealth of overlooked material about the origins of the Mayflower project and its place in the wider history of England under King James and his son the future Charles I. For the most part, British scholars have either left these very early sources untouched or failed to see their significance. They have done what the Pilgrims did not do, and left America to the Americans. This is why so much of the Pilgrim narrative remains in shadowy monochrome, like a photograph in sepia or a silent film, deprived
of color, light, and sound.

Among the gaps in the story, one of the most serious concerns the trade in beaver pelts, shipped back in their thousands by way of the ports of Barnstaple, Bristol, and Plymouth in the west of England. That is why we start in Franklin County. We might begin by imagining its character, not by way of fantasy, but with the aid of available resources, scientific and archaeological, and verbal too. To help us, we might imitate the native people of the region. We might invoke the spirit of a bird to function as an
airborne guide.

Today more than four hundred pairs of bald eagles breed in the state of Maine. When Charles I sat on the throne, doubtless their numbers were far greater. What might she have seen, an eagle, if in the spring of 1628 she swung her head around through three- quarters of a circle and scanned the country below Coburn Gore? She saw the land of Mawooshen. That was the name given then to the region: mountain, river, valley, plain, and coast, and among them the Eastern Abenaki, who lived between the blue ridge and the ocean.

The Bald Eagle’s Nest
From her zenith, at four thousand feet, she sees the Sandy River bending back and forth. Fed by streams cascading down off the massif, the river swings around and doubles back but never ceases to drop toward the sea. Beyond its broad, flat valley, to the south the ground rolls out to form a plain covered by birch woods and pine, with strewn on the earth beneath them hundreds of pale gray boulders. They were abandoned, like elliptical cannonballs, by the same retreating glaciers that formed the esker.

As the ice melted and the Atlantic rose, the sea reached this far inland, laying down thick beds of silt and sand. Even now, the ocean is far closer than it seems. In the seventeenth century, long before men dammed the rivers of Maine, salmon swam all the way up from the sea to Farmington to spawn.

If our eagle of 1628 leaves her nest at the top of a tall white pine, and goes looking for game along the valley, she comes to a spot where the Sandy meets another river, deeper and wider. Before it begins its own final descent toward the sea, it flows in a sequence of long, quiet reaches between sets of falls and rapids. Each one marks a geological division, ten or fifteen miles apart, where the river suddenly alters course. For this reason, the river bears the name Kennebec. In the native language of the country the word gwena means “long,” while the syllable bague refers to a placid
stretch of water.

Hovering above the Kennebec, the eagle probes with her eyes for a leaping fish or a squirrel breaking cover. When she finds one, she swoops down at the spot where the Sandy River meanders in from the west, near the site of the modern town of Madison. Beneath a bluff, the water forms a calm, deep pool, tinted in spring by a drifting haze of pollen from the pines. As she skims the amber surface and then swings back up into the sky with a fish in her talo...

Revue de presse :

“One opens this book with a weary sense of resignation. More hagiography about national origins? Another group of founders? The Pilgrims? The Mayflower? The Compact? The first Thanksgiving? A ‘new history’? Please! Enough already. And yet...it’s not like that, not at all. To the contrary, Nick Bunker offers a remarkably fresh take on (it’s true) an old and well-worn story... The evidence...adds up to a picture so full and vivid as to constitute a virtual ground-level tour of an otherwise lost world.” ---The Washington Post
 
“A meticulous exploration of the lives of the Pilgrims before they even set sail...It’s a comprehensive work of genius and a delight to read.” ---GalleyCat.com
 
“A wonderfully engaging study...There is so much here that is fresh and invigorating that Making Haste from Babylon will seem to some lovers of early American history a real page-turner with new readings and perceptive takes in each chapter. Bunker has written that rarest of books – a scholarly history with all the narrative punch of a novel.” ---The Providence Journal
“Bunker...is simply a marvelous writer with a nose for the fascinating anecdote...There’s some intriguing fact or story on every page...so much of Making Haste from Babylon [is] rich in the thrill of brushing up against the past and its fathomless mysteries.” ---Salon.com
 
“A bold work of revisionism.” ---Harper’s Magazine
 
“Making Haste from Babylon is essential reading for those who think they know the story of the Pilgrims...All this and more Bunker relates with enviable concision and verve.” ---BBC History Magazine
“Prodigious...[Bunker’s] vivid style and bold analysis infuse this book with colour and pace, and the result is an indispensable contribution to understanding how it all began.” –Literary Review

"This superb book secures for the Pilgrims their iconic perch among the earliest founders of colonial America. Bunker...has succeeded in writing a major history, unprecedented in its sweep, of the Plymouth Colony...Never before has such a comprehensive and thoroughly researched study of the subject appeared.... The results are stunning. Certain to be the dominating work on the Pilgrims for decades." – Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
 
"Nick Bunker has done the seemingly impossible: he has shed new light on the oldest of stories, the epic of the Pilgrims' experience in the Old and New Worlds.  With graceful writing and diligent scholarship, he has given us an engaging and original book." -- Jon Meacham

 
"I have rarely read a book which combines such a breadth of canvas...with such penetrating and detailed research."
–Patrick Collinson, Professor of Modern History, Cambridge University (emeritus)
 
 
"In this beautifully written and imagined book, impeccably researched, and full of  so many fresh insights and  discoveries,  Nick Bunker has given us the most grounded and convincing portrait  yet achieved of what drove the Pilgrim Fathers to seek their faith and fortune in the New World...Combining intensive archive research with a time traveler’s eye  he conjures  a wonderfully evocative  sense of place... It is a fabulous tale of our ancestors, but also the true founding moment of America." –Michael Wood, British historian, documentary filmmaker, and broadcaster

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Date d'édition: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0307266826
• ISBN 13: 9780307266828
• Reliure: Relié
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 489