Making Haste from Babylon

The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History

By: Nick Bunker

Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne

At the end of 1618, a blazing green star soared across the night sky over the northern hemisphere. From the Philippines to the Arctic, 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. From mercantile London and the rural England of Queen Elizabeth I and King James I to the mountains and rivers of Maine, he weaves a rich narrative that combines religion, politics, money, science, and the sea.

The Pilgrims were entrepreneurs as well as evangelicals, political radicals as well as Christian idealists. Making Haste from Babylon tells their story in unrivaled depth, from their roots in religious conflict and village strife at home to their final creation of a permanent foothold in America.

©2010 Nick Bunker (P)2010 Random House

Critic reviews

“One opens this book with a weary sense of resignation. More hagiography about national origins? Another group of founders? The Pilgrims? The Mayflower? The Compact? The first Thanksgiving? A ‘new history’? Please! Enough already. And yet…it’s not like that, not at all. To the contrary, Nick Bunker offers a remarkably fresh take on (it’s true) an old and well-worn story… The evidence...adds up to a picture so full and vivid as to constitute a virtual ground-level tour of an otherwise lost world.” ---The Washington Post

“A meticulous exploration of the lives of the Pilgrims before they even set sail…It’s a comprehensive work of genius and a delight to read.” ---GalleyCat.com

“A wonderfully engaging study…There is so much here that is fresh and invigorating that Making Haste from Babylon will seem to some lovers of early American history a real page-turner with new readings and perceptive takes in each chapter. Bunker has written that rarest of books – a scholarly history with all the narrative punch of a novel.” ---The Providence Journal

Excellent

I've read many books on the Mayflower times and this is the most complete and well researched I have come across. It's full of dates and details and still entertaining and an easy listen. Thank you !

Excellent, detailed and eye-opening

This is an amazing book, based on stunning amounts of research, which vividly conjures the background to the Mayflower story. The author's central point is that you need to understand Europe in the 1620s if you want to understand the origins of the USA and he proves this point superbly. My favourite passages were his detailed descriptions of the landscapes of the story's locations, and his brilliant evocation of the 1618 comet that was seen as an omen across the world.

The reader is very clear and listenable. Her only flaw is that she pronounces a lot of English place names wrongly, including Warwick, Norwich, and Southwark, which are central to the story. I was unable to stop getting angry about this, but perhaps I just need to chill out more.

Should have had a British reader

The book was very good but the reader mispronounced many names. This happens, too, when American readers are reading books about America and its history - possibly about other topics, too. Readers should be coached in advance of recording even if they are from the country of the book's or its topic's origin.

Once again, what was really going on

This was not quite as good as Bunker's "Empire on the Edge" but that was VERY good indeed. It had the same quality of setting the main story in a much wider context, and also of looking into reports and documents which earlier historians had for one reason or another, overlooked. The first section which goes into detail about the families of the pilgrims and their part of England is a bit dry, but the book picks up once they get to Holland and of course, beyond, particularly with respect to the political situation under James I. If you are interested in early American history, this is well forth a listen.

Makes the pilgrim period real

Lots of background as to how our pilgrim period got its start. Very interesting and mostly captivating portrayal of the people, the royalty, the vessels and the currencies that ignited this settling of Cape Cod.

Reads Like a Good Novel For History Buffs. A+

The author did a great job making this an easy listen. This book could have been so dry and crusty as to induce coma, but was very much the opposite.
He took great care to be realistic in the fact that there are so many unknowns. Few historical accounts so freely admit that they ( the author and their colleagues) just don't know something. However, he did cover the gaps with several possible and probable guess-timations, admitting he could be off base and what may have influenced a misunderstanding.
I liked that he covered little tidbits about other Mayflower historians through the ages, pointing out where they may be right or wrong and what new evidence or discoveries may put their conclusions into question. He combined modern day topographical references to what would have been seen in the 1600s. I'm a New Englander, so it was especially close to my heart.
I very much enjoyed this book and will look for more from the author. The narrator did a great job, too.
Next time, more pirates and more sex, please. But A+ all around, and a big recommendation for history buffs.

S-L-O-W

Thank God I didn't try to read this one . . . I gave up an hour after starting to listen. And I was a history major in college.

Poorly written, poorly presented

Choppy story, no clear thesis; reads like editors notes. Narration sounds like a computer generated voice.