If the weather were bad, they could have wintered at that sorry excuse for a harbor and then sailed around the neighborhood come springtime.

Or maybe the natives were a problem, and they had to settle for a place where the natives were too weak and demoralized to put up a fuss, rather than face the ones who had beaten the Plymouth locals. But a few years later, those natives were weak, too. Plymouth by all rights should have been a temporary stop.

Well, at least they didn’t settle at P-town.

But most arguments about history are really about ideology. And ideology needs to idolize and demonize. Shades of gray just don’t work for rhetorical purposes.

I believe Salem was a much better spot for a colony than Plymouth. It had a better harbor and better soil. The whole Plymouth area just never had much potential.

Though if in any given scenario you are the Greeks, offer gifts. It works with less genre-savvy adversaries.

Massasoit realized instantaneously that the advanced firepower of the Pilgrims could be put to good use and signed a mutual defense treaty, English and American Indian.

Massasoit wanted his best lands back and who cares he gets them.

Salem would probably be the same, if not for the witches.

I never visited Plymouth, but I took the train from Boston to Salem 20 years ago.

I learned quite a bit more about Salem than the witches: the Hawthorne connection, the maritime history, the sheer geographic scope of its ships’ reach and the town’s wealth into the 19th century. Compared to that, the town was lovely and well appointed, but there was SFA sign of its once world-spanning commercial prominence. You really would have to squint to see the ghostly images in the empty harbour. That was an education in and of itself.

I recommend the trip, though. The town really was nice, even in December.

The colony never amounted to anything at all. In a way, that’s sadder than a clean, honest failure.

There was a show about the witch trials a couple of years ago [Salem?] that confusingly portrayed the witches as real and actually in league with dark powers, and yet the trials and inquisition as [now inexplicably] also evil, tyrannical, and vaguely satanic. The entire colony was rife with magic and conspiracy.

Naturally, one of the queen witches had an African slave-girl who also had gnarly magic powers redolent of the jungle, and who was at once portrayed as the avatar of all innocent slaves and a dark sorceress whose powers were the root of all evil in the New World. It was quite a melange of racist caricature and typical anti-slavery tropes of modern fantasy fiction.

The whole thing more or less served to set up the entire history of America as a primal battle between good and evil, or two kinds of evil.

And over all, the dark forests of New England looming and brooding in solid Lovecraftian fashion. It was tiresome, but visually evocative.

I would also recommend the first couple of episodes of the otherwise tedious American Gods as illustration of this cultural take on the early colonial era, though only in fragments of what is otherwise a story set in modern times.

I mean, Jesus, who unless wholly disinterested hadn’t heard of the diseases wiping out Indians? Indian wars, even disease among settlers usually get namechecked in the most rudimentary history.

It was the 17th century.

As for the Pilgrims’ beliefs, they were and have always been identified as religious radicals even by the standard of their time. I’ve never heard otherwise except perhaps in A Child’s Big book of Thanksgiving level stuff. Granted, they seem even more radical by the standards of today.

Sorry. This sort of pop history gives me a huge Aaaargh reaction.