PURITANS, PLAGUES, AND PROMISES

Religious persecution, deadly infections, and the lure of a new life drove the Pilgrims to Plymouth, according to this sprawling genealogical history.

Cole investigates the lives of his English forebears in the Cole, Clarke, and Collier families during the late 16th and early 17th centuries, and the forces that propelled them to Massachusetts. He starts with his ancestor Thomas Cole, a farmer in a village in Northamptonshire, England, who was excommunicated from the Church of England for his Puritan convictions. The book’s first section follows the struggle between the two Christian groups, fought with bureaucratic crackdowns, vitriolic pamphlets—one Puritan polemicist called church bishops “vile servile dunghill ministers of damnation”—and the prosecution of vicar William Proudlove and eight other Puritans for sedition in the 1590s. The book’s focus then shifts to the Collier and Clarke families, whose bustling lives as London tradespeople were threatened by plague outbreaks. Cole’s narrative later details the contentious relationship between the Mayflower’s Pilgrim colonists and London’s Merchant Adventurers company—a group of private investors, including grocer William Collier, who financed the Plymouth colony in the expectation that fur trapping would repay the debt. The venture seemed doomed, as half the colonists died the first winter in 1620 and ’21,and French seamen and Barbary pirates stole shipments of beaver pelts. However, the Adventurers kept shipping over supplies and colonists, including Collier and his family and apprentice Job Cole. Overall, this book is very much a genealogist’s work, pegged to birth and death records, wills, and lengthy accounts of legal proceedings. However, Cole effectively fleshes it out with lucid, colorful evocations of Elizabethan life, from period prayers to a scene at the famous Globe Theatre, as well as with dramatic imagined dialogue and ruminations: “Jane [Collier, William’s wife] was gripped by conflicting emotions and started to cry. ‘William, our boy is inquisitive, smart, strong-minded, independent, and strong for his age. But he’s not yet fully grown—he’s only sixteen!’” The result is a captivating exploration of the fervent dreams and harsh realities of the colonial era.

A rich panorama of deeply faithful and daring English colonists.