Customer Reviews

Mourt's Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is an excellent book. The unknown author ("Mourt") describes in detail the accounts of life during the settlement of the Pilgrims. "He" describes the account in a day-to-day style, accounting for making food, building houses, and encounters with the indigenous peoples. The Pilgrams' travels to find a home and the actual settling are fascinating and well described. I will never think of the Pilgrims or indigenous peoples the same way again. Overall, this book is very insightful.

The language is archaic, I feel I must warn you. But if you can get past that, and you like colonial history, you'll love this one. It will give you a much better idea about the Pilgrams, far beyond the over-dramatized and unrealistically happy Thanksgiving story.

An excellent, easy-to-read account of the explorations made by the Pilgrims after their arrival at Cape Cod in 1620. The book, first published in 1622, describes in a day-by-day format just about everything that occured from the Mayflower's arrival up to and including the First Thanksgiving

This delightful little book describes the first year of the Pilgrims in America. Written to make life in Massachusetts sound like an adventure in a bounteous land, the book ignores the extreme hardship of the first winter and instead focuses on the rich resources of Massachusetts and the relationship the Pilgrims developed with the Indians. Here, the book drives home two points: (1) Europeans had long come to North American to fish and trade. These activities left a mixed legacy that the pilgrims had to overcome. (2) The Indians were everywhere. In fact, the first trip by the Pilgrims to visit chief Massasoit was motivated in part by this fact: Indians families were coming in great numbers to Plymouth to look at the English and interact with them. This was keeping the English from focusing on their farming. A wonderful book!

I've given this a low rating simply to catch attention to the misleading description Amazon gives to this book.

The description of the author and the book describes this as a "novel" written by a woman who chose to be anonymous.

In fact Mourt's Relation is not a novel and is the first description of the 1620 settlement in Plymouth by the Pilgrims. It was written by one of the first settlers in Plymouth.

Read it for history, not for romance fiction.

Fascinating to read a first hand account.

amazon has a faulty description of the author - this is not a novel, and not written by a woman. Here is some info the who wrote it: Caleb Johnson, a member of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants, provides the following comments:

Mourt's Relation was written primarily by Edward Winslow, although William Bradford appears to have written most of the first section. Written between November 1620 and November 1621, it describes in detail what happened from the landing of the Pilgrims at Cape Cod, though their exploring and eventual settling at Plymouth, to their relations with the surrounding Indians, up to the First Thanksgiving and the arrival of the ship Fortune. Mourt's Relation was first published in London in 1622, presumably by George Morton (hence the title, Mourt's Relation).

The book is more detailed about the history of Plimoth Colony from Edward Winslow's and William Bradford's perspective.

First of 2 books that are first hand accounts written about Plymouth Colony that I have read.
Language of 17th Century England, and I was thankful for the Introduction and the footnotes.
Written, I beleive, to help sell the new colony especially after the failure of the Jamestown Colony.
I enjoyed reading it because it gives us the real info about Plymouth Rock and the First Thanksgiving, rather than being filtered by later persons.histor

This is a good historical supplemental account to a great book "Of Plymouth Plantation" by William Bradford who was one of the original "pilgrims" on the Mayflower. Instead of reading an historian's sometimes biased slant, why not read a first hand account for yourself of early American history. Then make your own judgement!

A most interesting book I didn`t have time to read until now - I am reading it these days. The binding and other techn. character. are satisfactory - considering the price, excellent.

In the colonial stage of America's discovery, Europeans' conception of America appeared to be positive because at this stage the subject was the exploration and settlement of America and that was why Europeans received exaggerating accounts of the New World and its manifold opportunities. The colonizers' tracts and the travelers' accounts exaggerated the romantic attractions of the New World. The vast and abundant resources of the New World were admired, in a propagandistic and persuasive discourse. Both the Puritans and the colonizers (which were often one and the same) wrote exaggerating accounts of their adventures to lure Europeans over to the New World. Mourt's Relation (1622) was written to persuade Europeans that life in Massachusetts was a venture in a plentiful land. The book overlooks the calamities of the first winter and overstates the rich resources of Massachusetts. Yet, it is an excellent read.