Book description
At the end of 1618, a blazing green star soared across the night sky
over the Northern Hemisphere. From the Philippines to the Great Lakes,
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. Making Haste from
Babylon tells the story of the early pilgrim settlers in
unrivalled depth, from their roots in religious conflict and village
strife at home to their final creation of a permanent foothold in America.
Nick Bunker worked as an investigative reporter for the
Liverpool Echo
, and for six years he wrote for the Financial Times. He
was an Open Scholar at King's College, Cambridge, where he won two
university prizes. He has two graduate degrees from Columbia
University in New York, where he studied under the late Professor
Edward Said. While at Columbia he began his travels around the United
States.
For many years, he served as a board member, treasurer and Chairman
of the Trustees of the Freud Museum in London. He now lives in
Lincoln, near the villages from which the leaders of the Plymouth
Colony came.
