'Mayflower' author lectures at UDLA annual dinner
Nathaniel Philbrick
3:54 p.m., May 1, 2007--Nathaniel Philbrick, award-winning author of In the Heart of the Sea, Sea of Glory and, most recently, Mayflower, was the guest speaker at the annual UD Library Associates Dinner, held Monday evening, April 30, at Arsht Hall in Wilmington.

Addressing an audience of more than 200 guests, Philbrick, a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in History for his book Mayflower, made the point that the Plymouth colonists--and their first fumbling century in the New World--influenced the future America and its people.

“There were about 150 years between the first Thanksgiving and the 'shot heard 'round the world,'” Philbrick said, “yet when you read most accounts of American history, this first century and a half is largely absent.”

Philbrick, a native of New England himself, went on to recount the history of the Mayflower voyage and landing, including its dark underpinnings of bad planning, divisiveness, religious rigidity and righteousness, sickness and the graft and swindling of American Indians, before reading passages from the beginning and middle chapters of Mayflower.

“When I moved to Nantucket 20 years ago, I became fascinated with the question of how the island had become the place it had,” Philbrick said. “As I began to think about writing the books, I realized I had to learn about who the pilgrims really were.”


After digging through local archives, Philbrick said that many astonishing facts about the early Plymouth settlers were brought to light for him, and that he was suddenly struck with the very obvious fact that their story did not end with the first Thanksgiving.

Sprinkling his lecture with humorous anecdotes, Philbrick debunked several myths and terminologies that have become entrenched in most casual accounts of American history. Among these, he said, are the facts that pilgrims never called themselves pilgrims, that the Plymouth Rock is largely a myth and that the first Thanksgiving was more likely an uneasy, piecemeal (and even desperately hungry) affair held in late September at an outdoor location where American Indians outnumbered settlers two to one.

Philbrick also made the point that the first settlers were, in a word, marauders who took very little account of American Indians and their way of life.

“When we look at the pilgrims as inspirational,” Philbrick said, “it's really our responsibility to look at the entire picture. They arrived near Provincetown not knowing a thing about where they were and they did everything wrong with the Native Americans, from stealing their corn to ransacking their gravesites.

“With Mayflower, I tell a story that addresses the question of 'What is history?' and 'What is the past?'”

Philbrick closed his lecture by taking questions from the audience and signing copies of his books. He also thanked those present--UD library staff, especially--for choosing the work they did.

“What you are pursuing is absolutely vital,” Philbrick said. “It may not be glamorous work, but it's how you preserve records and it's how you make history an ongoing part of the present.”

Philbrick was born in 1956 in Boston and received his bachelor's degree in English from Brown University and his master's degree in American literature from Duke University in Durham, N.C. While at Brown, he was the university's first Intercollegiate All-American sailor in 1978, the same year he won the Sunfish North Americans in Barrington, R.I.

Before becoming a full-time freelance author, Philbrick worked for several years on the editorial staff of Sailing World magazine and started the Egan Maritime Foundation on Nantucket Island, where he has lived for more than two decades.

His most recent book, Mayflower, published in 2006, was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in History. Sea of Glory, published in 2003, won the Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt Naval History Prize and the Albion-Monroe Award from the National Maritime Historical Society. In the Heart of the Sea, published in 2000, won the National Book Award for nonfiction.

Philbrick also has received the Byrne Waterman Award from the Kendall Whaling Museum, the Samuel Eliot Morison Award for distinguished service from the USS Constitution Museum, the Nathaniel Bowditch Award from the American Merchant Marine Museum and the William Bradford Award from the Pilgrim Society.

Article by Becca Hutchinson