We cannot escape our history. It dogs us, as nations and as individuals. Slights, external and internal, are saved up, nurtured into hatreds, and used to fuel distrust. Consequently, some among us may want to venture to new frontiers, to begin anew, to leave behind the history, but we've explored, claimed, and populated all the habitable land Earth has to offer us. But while we must live with our history and learn to find a way to resolve our hatreds and our distrust, the Puritans had another option. They could quit 17th century England and come to the new world, to be their own masters, to live their own faith, and to avoid being subject to old Europe and all its endless grudges. And so they came, many fleeing the rule of James I and many more, later, fleeing Charles I. They came believing that no state had the right to claim control of their faith. For them, the new world was a godsend.
Mr. Bunker has taken the oft-told story of the Mayflower and the founding, by European separatists, of America and contextualized it by painting a wider portrait of the state of religion and the politics of the period. For a hundred years, Protestantism had been spreading out from Germany, winning its biggest victory in England where Henry VIII's want of a divorce created an opportunity for him to switch sides and adopt a faith that satisfied his needs. But Catholicism wasn't about to roll over. This clash of faiths culminated in the Thirty Years War, a bloodbath which only served to draw out the deeper truths about centralized religion, that it is about power, not piety; that it is about control, not cleansing. If you can convince a man that the destination of his soul, Heaven or Hell, depends upon adherence to certain rules, and if you are the arbiter of those rules, then you are that man's master. You can compel him to do anything in the name of piety.
This is what the puritans understood. This is why many of them came to the new world, in hopes of being their own masters, the legacy of which provided fuel to the revolution in 1776. But Mr. Bunker confines himself to the earliest settlements in America, chronicling their leaders, their placement, their trading partners, their customs and the Native Indians with whom they traded and skirmished. Though his tale is bloated by a few too many ruminations on the land itself, its varieties, its eccentricities, its settlements, there's a great deal of valuable history here which informs the spirit of what has lifted North America up from the rest of the world for the last 200 years.
The puritans may have believed that they would be better stewards of their own faith than bishops and kings, but they weren't. We all justify our wants, excusing away our crimes as necessities to live in a world free of things we do not like. The Puritans may have shrugged off their masters, but given their aggression towards the native peoples of North America, we know that they were no wiser or more pious for it.
This is a slog, to be sure, but its a thought provoking slog. (3/5 Stars)
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