Mayflower Bastard: A Stranger Among the Pilgrims [Hardcover]

David Lindsay (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2002

David Lindsay, researching old records to learn details of the life of his ancestor, Richard More, soon found himself in the position of the Sorcerer's Apprentice-wherever he looked for one item, ten more appeared. What he found illuminated not only More's own life but painted a clear and satisfying picture of the way the First Comers, Saints and Strangers alike, set off for the new land, suffered the voyage on the Mayflower, and put down their roots to thrive on our continent's northeastern shore. From the story, Richard emerges as a man of questionable morals, much enterprise, and a good deal of old-fashioned pluck, a combination that could get him into trouble-and often did. He lived to father several children, to see, near the end of his life, a friend executed as a witch in Salem, and to be read out of the church for unseemly behavior. Mayflower Bastard lets readers see history in a new light by turning an important episode into a personal experience.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The subject of David Lindsay's Mayflower Bastard is Richard More, a distant kinsman of Lindsay's. More, the 5-year-old, illegitimate offspring of a headstrong Shropshire woman and a man of "mean parentage," arrived in the New World on the Mayflower. He would live long enough to witness the hysteria of the Salem witch trials--and see a friend, accused of wizardry, "pressed" to death by stones. More was a sea captain, merchant, and tavern keeper. He was also an adulterer and a bigamist, whose wives lived on both sides of the Atlantic, forcing him to appear a Puritan in one country, and anything but in the other. What emerges is an intimate portrait of a world hardly holy--far more venal, vindictive, complex, and, especially, litigious than is usually believed. Lindsay's account is a stylistic mélange of first-person, second-person, and third-person history sprinkled with a few present-day anecdotes, in which the author retraces some of More's journeys. While this unorthodox approach lends the subject matter a certain gravity, at times it is merely obfuscatory. --H. O'Billovich

From Publishers Weekly

Histories based on genealogy often suffer from tunnel vision. Lindsay commits the opposite offense in this tale of one Richard More, a Lindsay ancestor who sailed at age five to the Plymouth colony aboard the Mayflower. In using the story of "the Mayflower Bastard" (so-called because More was the illegitimate son of landed gentry) as a lens through which to view early New England history, Lindsay has created a sprawling tale that exhausts the reader's patience as a cast of thousands parades through dozens of familiar scenes most extensively treated elsewhere. Lindsay's strategy is understandable. Little documentation on More, a Salem seafarer and tavern keeper, has survived; even his date of death is unknown. In the hands of a deft writer, the resulting fictionalization and speculation can work brilliantly, but this author is, at best, workmanlike. Lindsay, whose previous books explore inventors and inventions, also falters when choosing a narrative voice. At several points, he addresses a mysterious "you" apparently the accuser who had the elderly More cast out of the church for "lasciviousness." In other places Lindsay lapses into the first person. One of those asides is a gross sexual escapade Lindsay shared with a sailor friend, which the author includes to prove that sailors then and now did not share the moral code of the God-fearing Puritans. Aside from questionable historicity of such a comparison, no reader picking up a book about this nation's origins should be exposed to such a gratuitously offensive interjection. Still, some Mayflower buffs may want this volulme.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books; 1st edition (November 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312262035
• ISBN-13: 978-0312262037
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,439,621 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Can't tell the facts from the fictions, January 1, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Mayflower Bastard: A Stranger Among the Pilgrims (Hardcover)

What a pity that the author put so much time and effort into the research for this book and then botched it all by making assumptions and jumping to conclusions, some of which may have a basis in fact (we will probably never know) but others which I truly believe are erroneous. Excellent footnotes cite original sources, but the writing style makes it impossible to determine conclusively which of the author's suppositions are backed up by good evidence and which are not. I would have preferred to read a straight chronological presentation of the evidence, more of it in the form of the full text (perhaps presented in appendices), and let the evidence speak for itself. It appears there wasn't enough evidence to fill out a complete biography, so the author padded it by filling in what he thought would make the most interesting and swashbuckling story. The text is further marred by several typographical errors which are unworthy of a publishing house of the stature of St. Martin's Press. Don't they proofread? This was one of the worst books I have read in a long time; it was given to me by a friend and I have no intention of keeping it, but I even hesitate to donate it to my local library.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Real People on the Mayflower, April 16, 2003

By 

John O. Bronson "biography fan" (Arbutus, MD USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mayflower Bastard: A Stranger Among the Pilgrims (Hardcover)

More often than not when people hear the word "Mayflower", a certain attitude surfaces in conversation. To those who bristle with ill disguised anger at the thought of someone else being a descendant of a First Comer, let him or her read this work. If another person gushes with adoration at the same thought, let him or her read the same. The fact is these First Comers were regular people who took a major risk in starting life anew in a place no one knew anything about. One may as well be a First Comer at Mars Colony #1. The major difference being that at present we know more about Mars than these Mayflower ventures knew about any part of the New World let alone the inhospitable coast of 17th century New England.

This is the story of a five year old boy who was all but literally cast into the arms of the pilgrims and lived and grew up in earliest New England.It is an interesting read and throws light on various aspects of life in New England, the Plimoth Colony and the town of Salem in particular. Richard More arrived at Plimoth in 1620 and lived there until very late in the 17th century (1696). He was not only a First Comer but a Long Liver as well. He was regarded as being very ancient and a representative of Ancient Times. The story of the Salem Witch Trials is dealt with and not pawed over in morbid fascination.

This was an interesting and useful read. I recomment it.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Unreadable, June 7, 2003

By 

R. M. Barge (Atlanta, GA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mayflower Bastard: A Stranger Among the Pilgrims (Hardcover)

My review must be tempered by my inability to finish this work. I simply could not bear to keep reading it. The writing style changes constantly but at no point is it good. It is characterized by awkward figures of speech, flowery stylistics, unclear point of view and unfathomable structure. One cannot even tell if, or at what point, the work is historically based. It reads at points like bad James Joyce. I was disappointed, as I was intrigued by the idea of a fictionalized account of an early Plymouth settler.