The Mayflower Pilgrims

'Compelling reading' - Alison Weir

'A fresh and admirably unsentimental account' - Peter Marshall

The voyage of the Mayflower in 1620 has come to typify those qualities that many believe represent the best of America and the values it holds up to the rest of the world. And yet, if they lived today, the courageous men, women and children who made that journey would not recognize themselves in the romantic retelling of their story in popular books and movies of the last century or so.

So what were the motivating forces behind this momentous voyage? Derek Wilson strips away the over-painting from the icon to discover the complex range of religious, political and commercial concerns that led this group of hopeful but fallible human beings to seek a new life on the other side of the world.

“In characteristically lucid and vivid prose, Derek Wilson maps the multiple historical paths leading to one of the most famous embarkations in history. A fresh and admirably unsentimental account of the forces shaping the "Pilgrim Fathers".”

Peter Marshall, FBA, FRHistS, Professor of History, University of Warwick
I cannot praise too highly Derek Wilson's prose style, which is both masterful and lively. He writes with great conviction and a breathtaking attention to the kind of personal detail that makes his books such compelling reading. -- Alison Weir, historian and novelist
Derek Wilson does a superb job of separating fact from fiction to provide a very readable account of what actually happened. He does justice to the range of competing religious, commercial and political motives that led this group of people to leave England for America. Church of England Newspaper

Popular historian Derek Wilson was the highly acclaimed author of over 50 books and wrote and presented numerous television and radio programmes.

The voyage of the 'Pilgrim Father' from Plymouth, England, and their settlement in Plymouth, New England, is iconic. Unfortunately. Why unfortunately? Because icons both simplify and glamorize. The Mayflower story is a gilded myth, a historical episode seen through the distorting lens of nationalism. Of all the accounts of New World colonization in the 16th/17th centuries this is the one that has come to typify those qualities today's US citizens admire and believe their nation stands for. The 102 men, women and children who made that journey in the autumn of 1620 would not have recognized themselves in the heroes and heroines portrayed in films and romantic novels over the last century or so. In Mayflower Pilgrims Derek Wilson strips away the over-painting from the icon in order to discover who the Pilgrim 'Fathers' (a term not invented until 1840) were, and to explain them against the background of the age in which they lived. He does this by exploring a series of probing questions, each of which narrows the focus until the travelers on the storm-tossed Mayflower stand before us clearly delineated.

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