Making Haste From Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History

Description

A vivid and strikingly original account of the Mayflower project as well as the Pilgrims' first decade in the New Plymouth colony. At the end of 1618, a blazing green star soared across the night sky over the Northern Hemisphere. From the Philippines to the Great Lakes, the comet became a sensation and a symbol, a warning of doom or a promise of salvation. Two years later, as the Pilgrims prepared to sail across the Atlantic on board the Mayflower, the atmosphere remained charged with fear and expectation. Men and women readied themselves for war, pestilence or divine retribution. Against this background, and amid deep economic depression, the Pilgrims conceived their enterprise of exile. Within a decade, despite crisis and catastrophe, they built a thriving settlement at New Plymouth, based on beaver fur, corn and cattle. In doing so, they laid the foundations for Massachusetts, New England and a new nation. Using a wealth of new evidence - from landscape, archaeology and hundreds of overlooked or neglected documents - Nick Bunker gives a vivid and strikingly original account of the Mayflower project and the first decade of the Plymouth Colony. Making Haste from Babylon tells the story of the early pilgrim settlers in unrivalled depth, from their roots in religious conflict and village strife at home to their final creation of a permanent foothold in America.

Nick Bunker worked as an investigative reporter for the Liverpool Echo, and for six years he wrote for the Financial Times. He was an Open Scholar at King's College, Cambridge, where he won two university prizes. He has two graduate degrees from Columbia University in New York, where he studied under the late Professor Edward Said. While at Columbia he began his travels around the United States. For many years, he served as a board member, treasurer and Chairman of the Trustees of the Freud Museum in London. He now lives in Lincoln, near the villages from which the leaders of the Plymouth Colony came.

His spirit, zeal and flair put most historians of his subject to shame -- Felipe Fernandez-Armesto * The Times * [Nick Bunker's] vivid style and bold analysis infuse this book with colour and pace, and the result is an indispensible contribution to understanding how it all began -- Raymond Seitz * Literary Review * Even beyond its indefatigable scholarship and fine style, this book's sensitivity to the meaning of landscape should influence travel writers and historians for years to come -- James McConnachie * The Sunday Times * Making Haste from Babylon is essential reading for those who think they know the story of the Pilgrims. It will be pure pleasure for those who are new to the subject -- Simon Middleton * BBC History Magazine * This new history has made those supposedly dull Puritans crackle with narrative energy and fizz with vibrant colour as never before -- Christopher Silvester * Daily Express *