The Right Angle

THE NEW CRITERION, June 2021

The Right Angle

On Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler

After the Bible and Shakespeare, one of the most reproduced books in the English language is Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler. No surprise there: the seventeenth-century fishing how-to is as alluring today as when it was written. Walton’s understanding of the behavior of freshwater fish remains remarkable for the depth of his acuity and the intimacy of his language. No one else could describe a trout or a pike or a perch in such living terms as Walton. Published amid the turmoil of the Interregnum, the book also offers an escape from the failings of man into a more companionable world of fish and freedom, a particularly English freedom revealed in Walton’s observations and candor. Whether as a “Brother of the Angle” or mere “Pretender,” rare is the reader not hooked by this “Compleat” discourse on, as its subtitle suggests, the “Contemplative Man’s Recreation.”

Walton sets Angler as an extended “Conference betwixt” a fisherman (Piscator), a hunter (Venator), and a falconer (Auceps): “You are well overtaken, Gentlemen!,” Piscator begins. “A good morning to you both! I have stretched my legs up Tottenham-hill to overtake you, hoping your business may occasion you towards Ware, whither I am going this fine fresh May morning.”

The three become confiding friends who soon reveal that complaints about fishing are nothing new. Venator says that he has “heard many merry Huntsmen make sport and scoff at Anglers.” Auceps admits that he too has “heard many grave, serious men pity them, ’tis such a heavy, contemptible, dull recreation.” As each sportsman proceeds in “commending his recreation,” Piscator sets the hook for reeling in his audience to the joys of angling:

O, Sir, doubt not but that Angling is an Art; is it not an Art to deceive a Trout with an artificial Flie? a Trout! that is more sharp-sighted than any Hawk you have nam’d, and more watchful and timorous than your high mettled Marlin is bold?

A Trout! For most, a fish is a fish, but Walton makes a friend of his forage as great fishermen do. He respects the mind and manners of his creel as he would a visitor and guest.

Piscator goes into an extended consideration of the connections between fishiness and Godliness, one that should leave the reader with little doubt that the one true church is waterside and the one mode of veneration is angling. Of the twelve Apostles, Jesus “chose four that were simple fishermen,” as Walton writes. Not only that, but “when our blessed Saviour went up into the mount, when he left the rest of his disciples, and chose only three to bear him company at his Transfiguration, that those three were all Fishermen.” Why fishermen? Because “he found that the hearts of such men, by nature, were fitted for contemplation and quietnesse; men of mild, and sweet, and peaceable spirits, as indeed most Anglers are.”

The hook is clearly set. As if there were any lingering doubt of a fisherman’s divine favor, “I might tell you that Almighty God is said to have spoken to a Fish, but never to a Beast; that he hath made a Whale a Ship, to carry and set his Prophet Jonah safe on the appointed shore.” In this extensive dialogue on the life aquatic, Walton’s discourse suggests that Melville’s latter-day fish tale may have been another product of The Compleat Angler’s influence.

Mixed in with many discussions of flies and worms, of just where to set the hook and when to reel it in, are Walton’s affecting chapters on fish species: The salmon is “accounted the King of freshwater fish”; the tench is the “Physician of Fishes”; the perch is a “very good, and very bold biting fish”; the eel is the “most daintie fish . . . The Queen of palat pleasure”; and the carp is the “Queen of Rivers; a stately, a good, and a very subtil fish.” We learn such details that “in Italy they make great profit of the spawn of Carps, by selling it to the Jews, who make it into red Caviare; the Jews not being by their Law admitted to eat of Caviare made of the Sturgeon, that being a Fish that wants scales, and (as may appear in Levit. 11.) by them reputed to be unclean.” As for the trout, “He may be justly said, as the old poet said of wine, and we English say of venison, to be a generous fish.” Pikes, meanwhile, are “maintained by the death of so many other Fish, even those of their own kind.” This apex predator is the “Tyrant of the rivers, or the Fresh-water wolf, by reason of his bold, greedy, devouring, disposition; which is so keen.” As for just what to do with such a “solitary, melancholy and a bold Fish,” Walton offers up a recipe:

First, open your Pike at the gills, and if need be, cut also a little slit towards the belly; out of these, take his guts, and keep his liver, which you are to shred very small with Time, Sweet-Marjoram, and a little Winter-savoury; to these put some pickled Oysters, and some Anchovies, two or three; both these last whole (for the Anchovies will melt, and the Oysters should not) to these, you must add also a pound of sweet butter, which you are to mix with the herbs that are shred, and let them all be well salted.

The recipe continues on from there. Walton truly set out to make his Angler “Compleat,” resulting in an amiable book that is a tackle box of information.

The title page to the first edition of The Compleat Angler.

Born around 1593, in the town of Stafford in the English West Midlands, Walton was a staunch Royalist whose works and deeds looked back to the pastoral age of his Jacobean youth. He published the first edition of The Compleat Angler in 1653, “in the most troubled years of the early Commonwealth,” writes John Buchan, who edited a 1901 edition of the work, in his introduction. Through 1676, Walton revised and updated his treatise in five editions. In addition to Angler, he also wrote several “Lives,” such as the one of his friend John Donne. Buchan describes these biographies as “all with this old-world, Jacobean flavour, churchmen all, members of the church quiescent, devout, learned.”

As a young tradesman, Walton ran a small shop in London’s Fleet Street, but Royalist losses pushed him back out to the countryside—as it happens, to a small plot by a stream. Here, “few long lives have been so free from conspicuous misfortune,” Buchan observed. “He had sorrow in his own family, and to one of his peculiar temperament the Royalist reverses must have come as real afflictions. But in the main he lived his easy life of books and angling undisturbed.”

In one episode, Walton was entrusted with a royal jewel known as the “lesser George,” which he secreted away from Cromwell’s London until the Restoration. Otherwise he was a “man of letters pure and simple,” Buchan notes, “the main incidents in his career are the dates of his book, and any attempt at biography is a monotonous chronicle.” In writing his introduction, as the author of spy thrillers, Buchan might have wanted a little more out of his subject. Instead Walton lived out ninety years surrounded by friends of “quietistic temperament,” for which the “strong rude wind of the outer world rarely disturbed those peaceful dovecotes; gentle meditation, mild and sincere devotion, innocent pleasures—such was the order of their days.” Upon his death in 1683, Walton left his cottage, now a museum, to the benefit of his Stafford neighbors so that it might generate income “to buy coals for some poor people that should have most need thereof in the said town.”

Walton wrote as impeccably as he lived. His Angler was not the first fishing book, but it was the one to breathe that “very spirit of innocence, purity, and simplicity of heart,” commented Charles Lamb: “It would sweeten a man’s temper at any time to read it.” Wordsworth dedicated two sonnets to “Walton, sage benign.” Walter Scott wrote that Walton “had so true an eye for nature,” but only wishes he had “made this northern tour” to Scotland. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica stated, “There is hardly a name in English literature, even of the first rank, whose immortality is more secure, or whose personality is the subject of a more devoted cult.” Buchan concurred, noting that “The Angler has been so praised for centuries that a modern writer must refrain from eulogy and seek only the bare phrases of justice.”

In the sixteenth century, the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner published his 4,500-page, four-volume encyclopedia of the animal world to which Walton often refers. A 1577 book called The Arte of Angling, which was only rediscovered in partial text in the 1950s, carries more than a few similarities to Walton’s own, signaling likely source material. Yet no other nature writer quite “seems always to speak with the living voice,” as Buchan notes, “and it is the living voice that is wanted in a country book.”

Through its “deftness of phrase, the use of mellifluous words, the pleasant cadence of the sentences,” Buchan writes, The Compleat Angler “remains a model of ease and charm.” The “beginning of true angling literature,” the book was the “first to give the sport a halo of letters which it has never lost.” More than a “quaint medley,” Angler in its own day was the “most valuable treatise on the practice of the art, and that still it is not wholly superseded.” But Walton also offers fishing as philosophy and meditation. For Part II of The Compleat Angler, which appeared with the fifth edition,Walton’s friend Charles Cotton extended the franchise by writing a longer discourse on fly fishing: “Here’s a Trout has taken my Flie,” a newbie fisherman laments at one point. “I had rather have lost a Crown. What luck’s this! He was a lovely Fish, and turn’d up a side like a Salmon.” To which Piscator responds: “O Sir, this is a War where you sometimes win, and must sometimes expect to loose. Never concern your self for the loss of your Flie; for ten to one I teach you to make a better.” After all, as Walton writes,

he that hopes to be a good Angler must not only bring an inquiring, searching, observing wit; but he must bring a large measure of hope and patience, and a love and propensity to the Art it self; but having once got and practis’d it, then doubt not but Angling will prove to be so pleasant, that it will prove to be, like Vertue, a reward to it self.

In our own time of troubles, Walton continues to unfold, as Buchan wrote, the “heart and soul of the angler—not necessarily the sportsman, but the angler—a man who loves books as well as his art, who sees nature through the glass of culture, the townsman and the gentleman.” I have not been alone in taking up a renewed interest in fishing over this pandemic year. My Connecticut bait shop still speaks of the “great minnow shortage” of 2020 as more of us became a “Brother”—and Sister—“of the Angle.” Walton is therefore a writer for our age, a needed addition to the pockets of fishermen and non-fishermen alike. “We may say of angling, as Dr. Boteler said of Strawberries, Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did,” Walton concludes, “and so (if I might be judge) God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than Angling”—just as no other writer made such a book about the angle.

Man & Beast

James Panero, the Executive Editor of The New Criterion, reads the essay “Man & beast,” his reflections on the zoo from the May issue of The New Criterion.

THE NEW CRITERION, May 2021

Man & Beast

On the un-zooing of the zoo 

What is so wild about If I Ran the Zoo? Don’t ask young Gerald McGrew. It was hard to escape the news when, on March 2, the zoo-loving protagonist of Dr. Seuss’s 1950 children’s book was captured and caged along with five other titles. The author’s own estate threw away the key to what quickly became the endangered species of its archive. The confinement not only ended the publication and licensing of six books. The move also cut into our ability to buy used copies of the books online. eBay announced it was “sweeping our marketplace” to remove these titles that now violated the company’s “offensive material policy.” The street price for ragged copies shot up a hundred fold. Overnight, Mein Kampf became more available than the anapestic tetrameters of that “New Zoo, McGrew Zoo.”

Somewhere between “Pasternak, Boris” and “Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr,” “Seuss, Dr.” might seem like an unexpected addition to the samizdat library. Yet some have long looked to cancel the writer beloved by generations for hitting the funny bones of children while twisting the tongues of parents. This year for “Read Across America Day,” the National Education Association declined to acknowledge Seuss at its annual March event that is, in fact, timed to coincide with the author’s birthday (Seuss had been the focus of the event during both the Obama and Trump administrations). Faced with the full loss of its intellectual property’s value, “working with a panel of experts, including educators,” Seuss Enterprises instead used the birthday to announce that six Seuss books were the first things to go—like stockings hung all in a row.

Born in 1904, Theodor Seuss Geisel had the misfortune of beginning his career as a college humorist at a time when nothing was funny, at least by today’s standards. Some of Seuss’s sophomoric efforts were indeed cringe-making by anyone’s standards. As his early work has been unearthed, activists have painted Seuss as an unregenerate racist who encoded hate into everything from The Cat in the Hat’s supposed minstrelry to Horton’s unwanted paternalism in hearing that Who.

The indictment of If I Ran the Zoo speaks not only to a modern problem with Seuss but also to a modern problem with zoos. Katie Ishizuka and Ramón Stephens are the married academics behind an organization called The Conscious Kid that has led the prosecution against the book. With over two million followers, their Instagram account is the kind that promises to reveal “Childhood nursery rhymes you didn’t realize were racist.” In their 2019 study called The Cat Is Out of the Bag: Orientalism, Anti-Blackness, and White Supremacy in Dr. Seuss’s Children’s Books, the two make a diversity audit of Seuss and particularly target If I Ran the Zoo.

By scouring the world, or at least the world of his dreams, for unusual animals “to be put on display in the White male’s zoo,” according to the authors of the study, Gerald McGrew traffics in Orientalism, subservience, “exotification, stereotypes, and dominance”:

In addition to White males dominating the presence and speaking roles of characters, their violence is used as a tool of White masculinity to support dominance and White supremacy over additional forms of masculinity. An example of how White supremacy, specifically White masculinity, uses violence to support dominance is mentioned in the findings where we see a White male holding a gun while standing on top of the heads of three Asian men.

It is true that McGrew enlists “helpers who all wear their eyes at a slant” from “countries no one can spell.” He also goes “to the African island of Yerka” and employs local aid to return with a “tizzle-topped Tufted Mazurka.” Yet the study’s authors conveniently ignore that McGrew’s exoticizing gaze was an equal opportunity offender, extending to the “Far Western part of south-east North Dakota,” where one can find a “very fine animal called the Iota.” McGrew also tasks local blue bloods in the “Wilds of Nantucket” to “capture a family of Lunks in a bucket.”

For some, the history of America’s zoological parks is not so unlike the one imagined by young Gerald McGrew—and just as damning. For those who run today’s zoos, their cultural position may be just as tenuous as the publication of If I Ran the Zoo. As far back as 1985, Dale Jamieson was writing “Against Zoos” for a chapter in Peter Singer’s In Defense of Animals. In 2018, a group called the The Non-human Rights Project sued the Bronx Zoo, New York’s flagship zoological institution, demanding legal personhood for Happy, the elephant who has lived “wrongfully imprisoned” at the zoo, the suit maintained, for forty-two years. While a Bronx County Supreme Court judge ruled against the motion in February, the zoo nonetheless announced it would soon end its elephant exhibit.

The un-zooing of the zoo should come as no surprise. Since 1993, the Bronx Zoo has officially not been known as a zoo at all, but the “Wildlife Conservation Society.” At the time of the renaming, zoo guides complained that they must now be known as stuffy “docents” in a “wildlife conservation center.” “The society is no longer simply a keeper of zoos and an aquarium, wonderful though those facilities may be,” responded trustee John Elliott, Jr. “The society’s primary mission is to save wildlife. Its new name reflects that mission. Fair enough?”

While the Bronx Zoo has, unofficially at least, now consented to calling itself the Bronx Zoo, a conservation mantra continues to permeate its exhibits. Animals, when they can be seen, are often woefully under-identified, appearing as mere props for a presentation on the dangers of pollution, or deforestation, or some other man-made calamity. At the conclusion of many exhibits, we are given opportunities to atone for our own culpability in this Malthusian world through the contribution of funds.

The zoo’s mission creep reflects a growing discomfort over the dynamics of its founding, a time when elite (and, yes, white) collectors indeed filled cages with game nearly as exotic and far-flung as those specimens for McGrew’s zoo. At the Bronx Zoo, the animals are now dispersed across the park, but what remains of its turn-of-the-century art and architecture, often overlooked by visitors, still speaks to the zoo’s original ambitions.

The New York Zoological Park, as the Bronx Zoo was originally known, began as an initiative of the Boone and Crockett Club, an association founded in 1887 by ten wealthy big-game hunters, including Theodore Roosevelt. Dedicated to game protection and game preserves, in 1895 the Club seeded the board of a new zoological society that would establish a free park “with North American and exotic animals, for the benefit and enjoyment of the general public, the zoologist, the sportsman and every lover of nature,” the Society wrote in its first annual report of 1897. Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt II, Jacob Schiff, and William C. Whitney were among the first donors as the society took control of 261 acres, an ambitiously large tract of undeveloped land straddling the Bronx River that had been acquired by the New York City Municipal Park Commission in 1884.

These days visitors mainly arrive at the zoo by some back door, as parking lots disgorge them unceremoniously in some odd corner of the park. Yet as conceived, the zoo presented an ordered and elevating classical assembly leading visitors up to nothing less than an acropolis for the animal kingdom. To get some sense of that, today’s visitors must start at the zoo’s original entrance along East Fordham Road, at one time an arboreal boulevard serviced by nearby elevated rail and separating the zoo from the New York Botanical Garden to the north.

Here one of the last monuments of the zoo’s classical period still anticipates the animal wonders within. In 1934, the zoo unveiled the double-arched bronze gates as a memorial to Paul J. Rainey. His sister, Grace Rainey Rogers, commissioned the sculptor Paul Manship to create the fanciful design based on actual animals in the zoo’s collection. Tortoises, cranes, storks, owls, bears, deer, baboons, leopards, and a lion named Sultan perch on the gate’s stylized vines. The menagerie pays tribute to Rainey, the big-game hunter who filled the zoo, as well as nature museums, with the gifts of his exotic specimens. His 1911 report of his arctic adventure to capture “Silver King,” one of the zoo’s first polar bears, reads like a cross between If I Ran the Zoo and King Kong. As Rainey recounts, after much struggle the first bear he roped on an iceberg was mistakenly garroted: “Presently it seemed to me that the bear was choking, and I ordered the rope loosened at once. Too late! His eyes were glassy, and he was stone dead.”

Past the Memorial Gates, the original zoo entrance leads onto a fountain plaza and set of monumental steps that were at one time bursting with floral arrangements, now mainly turned over to parking and denuded lawn. Here the Rockefeller Fountain, of imagined sea creatures, still adds to the stairs’ Italianate design with its unusual provenance: originally from Como, Italy, where it was created by the local sculptor Biagio Catella in 1872, the fountain was purchased by William Rockefeller as a gift for the zoo in 1902.

Up the stairs, the zoo’s Astor Court, originally known as Baird Court, still speaks to the zoo’s original focus, in mineral if no longer in animal or vegetable form. Designed by the architects Heins & La Farge, the Court’s brick and limestone neoclassical buildings once housed the animals at the heart of the zoo. Modeled after the Court of Honor at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago of 1893, Astor Court is symmetrical and longitudinal, with the Primates’ House, Lion House, and Large Bird House leading on to the domed Elephant House. Stone and terracotta animal sculptures by Eli Harvey, Charles R. Knight, and Alexander Phimister Proctor cover the façades as though the buildings have been given over to the natural world. Of this design, only the central sea lion pool still serves its original function. While the Court buildings have been restored and maintained through a gift of the Astor family, they are otherwise closed to the public or greatly altered. The Elephant House now houses the museum’s rhinoceri, while the cages of the Lion House have been removed to create an immersive exhibition called “Madagascar!” Lions, primates, birds, and elephants (for now) appear elsewhere, removed into sprawling and often distant settings.

The Elephant House at the Bronx Zoo. Photo: WCS Archives.

These naturalistic habitats, most likely more salubrious for the animals’ captivity, may be in line with updated zoological practice, but something got lost in the transition. The animals at the zoo are not in a state of nature, despite the artifice of their current surroundings. With their ordered arrangement, the animals as presented in the neoclassical Astor Court were more clearly and honestly in a state of man. The animal heads sculpted onto these buildings at one time even reflected the actual assembly of the National Collection of Heads and Horns, prize trophies that originally occupied a sixth Court building, designed by Henry D. Whitfield in 1922.

From McGrew Zoo to Bronx Zoo, zoological parks as originally conceived served to reveal not white supremacy but human supremacy, and therefore human responsibility, over the animal kingdom. The big-game hunters who founded the Bronx Zoo maintained such a deep respect for animal behavior and animal habitat that they created this shrine to animals. In the modern age, the animals of the world are the captives of man with no chance of release. Let’s at least give us unwitting jailers a direct engagement with the wonders of creation in our charge. If I ran the zoo, that’s just what I’d do.

Like a Rock

James Panero reads “Like a Rock,” his Letter from Plymouth in the November 2020 issue of The New Criterion.

THE NEW CRITERION, November 2020

Like a rock

On the four-hundredth anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth Rock.

There is nothing particularly impressive about Plymouth Rock. As far as famous rocks go, the seaside boulder on which the Pilgrims may have first set foot in the New World is notably underwhelming. It has not helped that this ten-ton glacial errant, an Ice Age deposit of granite on the morainal coastline of Cape Cod Bay, has been moved and abused, venerated and desecrated many times since the storied passengers of Mayflower set down roots here four hundred years ago, in December 1620. And yet it is precisely the Rock’s humble appearance that can still evoke the greatest awe. The pilgrims’ arrival at Plymouth proved to be the moonshot of the seventeenth century—odds-breaking, death-defying, and ultimately world-shattering. The Rock remains the manifestation of the first step of these spiritual wanderers, not just from ship to shore but also heaven to earth. For the nation’s celestial origins, Plymouth Rock is our moonstone.

It took over a century for the Rock to be recognized for its historical relevance, after a Plymouth elder recalled a folktale of the landing. Its importance then grew alongside a burgeoning sense of the central role of the Pilgrims in our national story. In the War of Independence, the stone came to symbolize the endurance of the Pilgrims’ separatist faith crystallized in the cause of national liberty. In 1775, the people of Plymouth joined Colonel Theophilus Cotton to “consecrate the rock . . . to the shrine of liberty.” In attempting to move the stone from the shoreline, however, the townspeople split it in two, a portent of the coming Revolutionary break. Leaving one half behind in the sand, they relocated the other to “liberty pole square” by the Plymouth meetinghouse. On July 4, 1834, that part of the rock was moved again, this time to the front of Plymouth Hall. Other pieces went farther astray. Two chunks came to reside in Brooklyn, one at the abolitionist Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims and the other at the Brooklyn Historical Society. Smaller fragments went the way of the souvenir hunters. Meanwhile the original seaside stone came to be buried in sand and port development.

Hammat Billings’s baldachin, which housed Plymouth Rock from 1867–1920.

In 1867, an elegant Beaux-Arts baldachin designed by Hammatt Billings resurrected the beach half, which was soon rejoined by the other Plymouth rock of Plymouth Rock as “1620” was etched in the stone. Finally, in 1920, for the tercentenary of the Pilgrims’ landing, McKim, Mead & White designed the portico that stands over Plymouth Rock today. The understated design, built into an esplanade and replacing the Billings monument, invites viewers to look down onto the Rock, now again on the sandy beach. At spring tide, through iron grilles in the pavilion’s open foundation, the waters of the cold Atlantic can once again lap over the worn stone.

The present portico over Plymouth Rock, built by McKim, Mead & White in 1920.

The treatment of Plymouth Rock has reflected the ebbs and flows of our own national conscience. In 1820, at the bicentennial of the Pilgrim landing, Daniel Webster proclaimed, “We have come to this Rock to record here our homage for our Pilgrim Fathers; our sympathy in their sufferings; our gratitude for their labors; our admiration of their virtues; our veneration for their piety; and our attachment to those principles of civil and religious liberty.” Pledging “upon the Rock of Plymouth,” he also called on Americans to “extirpate and destroy” the slave trade.

By 1835, Tocqueville came to observe how “this Rock has become an object of veneration in the United States. I have seen bits of it carefully preserved in several towns of the Union. Does not this sufficiently show that all human power and greatness is in the soul of man? Here is a stone which the feet of a few outcasts pressed for an instant, and this stone becomes famous; it is treasured by a great nation, its very dust is shared as a relic.”

The pilgrims John Alden and Mary Chilton landing at Plymouth.

This year’s quadricentenary of the Pilgrim landing has not been so felicitous for Plymouth or its Rock. The pandemic has destroyed the town’s tourist trade and canceled many festivities on what should have been its most eventful year. A million visitors a year usually come to Plymouth Rock. This year that number may be less than half. Chinese, British, and German tourists, all precluded from international travel, are otherwise particularly drawn to the attraction. As I am told, the Chinese come for the American history, the British for the English, and the Germans for the indigenous. In other years, faith-based visitors are also regulars here, making their own pilgrimage to a site of America’s Christian origins. This year, even at the height of tourist season, the glasses at the Pillory Pub are half empty, the John Alden curio shop is in want of the curious, and the on-street parking is abundant.

Beyond just the closures, the Pilgrims’ progress, like the American project itself, has been cast in doubt. For most of our history, the Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving meal of 1621 has represented the Providence of America and the amity of its native peoples—after Samoset, Tisquantum (Squanto), and Massasoit’s tribe of Wampanoag saved the new arrivals from starvation. In giving thanks for their salvation, George Washington codified the Pilgrims’ holiday into civic religion.

Until recently, the story of this first Thanksgiving was central to our civic education, from elementary-school assemblies to Peanuts television specials. Now, a “National Day of Mourning,” a protest march against Thanksgiving first organized by Native American activists, can draw crowds larger than the Mayflower Society’s own Pilgrim Progress procession held in town the same day. The Plymouth Rock monument has also been the site of attacks and desecrations. So far this year, the Rock has been splattered and sprayed with paint on two separate occasions. Meanwhile, the Pilgrims have been castigated along with Christopher Columbus for the usurpation of native lands and the murder of native peoples. If children are now taught anything about the Pilgrims, the settlers are more than likely to be denounced as a colonizing force—one that never really originated Thanksgiving, never conveyed the spirit of liberty as represented in their “Mayflower Compact,” and never even landed at Plymouth Rock.

The evidence at Plymouth suggests a more nuanced understanding. In Europe, the Pilgrims had drifted around as the backwash of the Reformation. Since taxation also meant supporting the ministers to a false faith, the Pilgrims’ separatist beliefs put them at odds with the monarch and the inseparable church of England. “The king is a mortal man, and not God,” declared the Puritan Thomas Helwys in his challenge to King James I, and “therefore hath no power over the immortal souls of his subjects.” Like others, Helwys was imprisoned and died for his beliefs. From England to Amsterdam, and then to Leiden, the Pilgrims attempted to resettle. In Holland, they found the labors unforgiving and the temptations undermining. Here was a faith that knew more what it stood against than for. A group of Pilgrims struck a deal with the London Company to resettle their families around what became New York. They eventually hired Mayflower, a reconfigured merchant ship, for the late fall passage. Their decision to leave the land of Rembrandt—who was then a student just a block from their Leiden church—for lands unknown was propelled by a desperation for religious liberty. “England hath seen her best days,” Thomas Hooker, the Puritan founder of Connecticut, later preached, “and now evil days are befalling us: God is packing up his gospel.”

Plimoth Plantation today.

“Founding a colony was just about the most foolish thing a congregation or any other group of Europeans could do.” So writes John G. Turner in They Knew They Were Pilgrims, his new history of Plymouth.1 What powered these early settlers, especially through the misery of their first winter, was their separatist conviction. “They knew they were pilgrims . . . and quieted their spirits,” explained Plymouth’s Governor William Bradford. Blown off course, and after exploring the area of what became Provincetown (where there is now another Pilgrim monument), the settlers arrived in the protected natural harbor of Plymouth Bay. Regardless of where they took their first actual steps, the Pilgrims “walked into a disaster,” Turner writes. “The poor nutrition during the crossing left their health fragile, and they lacked sufficient food for the months ahead. Exposure to bitter-cold weather and wading in water did not help matters.” Barely half of Mayflower’s passengers survived the crossing and the first winter. “The living were scarce able to bury the dead,” Bradford wrote the next fall.

Just down the road from Plymouth Rock, Plimoth Plantation recreates some of these privations. In the 1940s, the museum’s founder, a gentleman archaeologist named Henry (Harry) Hornblower II, announced that “we had by-passed the era of putting a fence and canopy above a rock or some artifacts in a glass case . . . my idea was to create a living museum.” He tore down his family’s estate and converted it into a life-size diorama of the Pilgrims’ first village. Later on, the staff in period costume began to take on period roles. Now as soon as you set foot out of the reconstructed fort and walk down the village road, the Plantation offers its visitors an immersive experience. This year as you come upon Governor Bradford reading English law in his home with Mistress Winslow, the face masks are the only concessions to our present moment.

Yet even this quaint settlement does not fully convey the true extremis of the Pilgrims’ first year, as husbands lost wives and mothers lost children. The Plantation’s research and reconstruction of historic Patuxet, an equally fascinating section of the living museum, goes further in explaining how these privations were overcome. Then as now, a disease had reduced the population passing through Plymouth. An “extraordinary plague,” Samoset informed the new arrivals, had recently killed the people who had lived there. The Pilgrims arrived in the land of the Wampanoag just as the weakened tribe faced off against the neighboring and untouched Narragansetts. By the 1620s, Europeans were no strangers to American Indians. Traders had been sailing the New England waters for a century. What was new was the arrival of European families. In the early years, the Pilgrim and native populations gave thanks together for their mutual support. Twice as many Wampanoags as Pilgrims joined the first Thanksgiving dinner. Recent excavations have also suggested that the two peoples chose to live and trade next to each other.

This summer, after completing a three-year rebuilding at Connecticut’s Mystic Seaport, Mayflower II, a faithful 1956 replica of the Pilgrims’ faith-conveying ship, returned to Plymouth under her own sail power. Plimoth Plantation is once again scheduling tours of the ship, tied up within sight of Plymouth Rock. Four hundred years after the original landing, the craft speaks to the hardships, endurance, and desperation of the settlers who have defined America in myth and memory. Entering the open hold of this tiny replica vessel, where 102 passengers would have endured the Atlantic passage together, reveals much about the death and disease they encountered that first winter in Cape Cod Bay.

The Monument to the Forefathers in Plymouth, completed in 1889.

Just up the hill from Plymouth Rock, now buried among the trees and residential development, the Monument to the Forefathers offers a final statement on the combination of forces that came to the Pilgrims’ salvation. Hammatt Billings began designing this eight-story-tall granite carving in the 1850s. His brother, Joseph, working with local carvers, completed it in 1889. The monumental site, which now also includes scalloped fragments from Billings’s original Plymouth Rock pavilion, might appear grandiloquent did it not commemorate such an extraordinary event. In addition to relief images from Pilgrim history, the monument is buttressed by the personifications of Morality, Law, Education, and Liberty. Rising above them, facing England to the east, is the colossus of Faith. “Erected by a grateful people,” reads the front inscription, “in remembrance of their labors, sacrifices and sufferings for the cause of civil and religious liberty.” Stone by stone, the monument recalls the Providence of Plymouth Rock. Through sacrifices and sufferings, its blessings continue to land on the country the Pilgrims helped define.

1They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty, by John G. Turner; Yale University Press, 464 pages, $30.