Nick Bunker says his “Making Haste From Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World” is “A New History” in two ways: It draws on a wealth of neglected primary sources on “the old side of the ocean” and it puts the Pilgrims “within their true setting, in all its Jacobean density.”
Density is the operative word. By the end of the book the reader is left to conclude that it would not have been a great loss if much of the material remained neglected. Too much frame, not enough picture.
Bunker, a former British investment banker and journalist, apparently has never met a fact he didn’t like. “Making Haste From Babylon” resembles nothing so much as a dissertation into which the Ph.D. candidate has dumped all his scavenged facts, regardless of their relevance, to impress a doctoral committee that he did a lot of hard work. Wise committee members see this for what it is.
Do you want to know how many ships left the Thames for Virginia in 1619? Or the names of the ships the Mayflower may (or may not) have passed? Or what it cost per day to keep the recently built lighthouse on the Lizard Peninsula operating? Look no further.
Tangential matters and events are gone into in needless and wearisome detail. Bunker chides earlier historians for paying attention “only in passing” to the importance of the trade in beaver skins. It certainly is not a charge that can be laid at his door, though he might have made his case without explaining the anatomy of the beaver or the process of making hats.
The author graphically describes an autopsy done on King James, all to show that “the language of ill health supplied a rationale for banishment and exile” — i.e., kidney stones, arthritis and other maladies led to theoretical justification for religious tyranny. Talk about the carbuncle on Karl Marx’s neck and the worldwide communist conspiracy!
In more than a few places his exposition rests upon conditional, suppositional or hypothetical constructs, such as “We cannot know for sure, but the mental world of William Bradford had characteristics that we can realistically guess.” Best not to guess, realistically or otherwise.
Similarly with another Pilgrim leader, William Brewster, Bunker states that we have no letters or physical image of Brewster and know nothing of his childhood and “very little about his inner life.” That doesn’t stop the author from building “an understanding of the man.”
This shower-of-information approach is more pertinent to the central issue of religion because it helps explain the Pilgrim mind-set. As he says at the end, “Calvinist zeal was far more important than any other single factor in bringing about the creation of New England.” Portraits of two lesser-known figures, Robert (“Troublechurch”) Browne and the preacher John Preston, are especially useful.
The account of the Pilgrims’ stay in Holland is good, as is that of the struggle to survive in New Plymouth. He makes an excellent case for the Mayflower Compact, whose importance recent scholarship has played down, as an almost revolutionary and republican document.
In his novel “Wickford Point,” John P. Marquand has a character named Allen Southby, a preening Harvard professor who has published a thumping great book about a later generation of New Englanders, the Transcendentalists. “The mass of information which Southby had gathered concerning early American figures was admittedly enormous,” Marquand writes, “but not much of it was calculated to interest a layman.”
So it is with Bunker’s book — ten thousand facts in search of a point. If you want to know what bounty the Crown paid to men to build ships in 1620, read “Making Haste From Babylon.” If you want to understand the Pilgrims and Puritans (and how they differed), read George F. Willison’s “Saints and Strangers,” which, 65 years after publication, remains intellectually and factually sound and definitely calculated to interest a layman.
Roger K. Miller, a former newspaperman, is a novelist and freelance writer, reviewer and editor.
NONFICTION
“Making Haste From Babylon — The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History,”
by Nick Bunker, $30
