The BBC Radio 4 programme "In Our Time" this week discusses the Pilgrim Fathers. Here is a link to the programme website where you can listen again:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime.shtml
There are some interesting tidbits in the "In Our Time" newsletter which relates to the programme (italics mine):
Squanto, the Indian whom all three contributors thought had literally
saved the Plymouth colony; a proper use of the word ?literally? here.
They would all have been dead had he not taught them how to grow
the crops, use the dead fish, distinguish between trees that were
good for fruit and trees that were good for building, etc, etc. Quite a
life had Squanto. He lived in Cornhill in London for a while and was
imprisoned in Spain for a while. Initially he was kidnapped by English
sailors. This seems to have been a trophy-hunting sport for those
who had been so successful at raiding and looting the Spanish in the
last quarter of the 16th century and, incidentally, building up the first
great British fleet. There was much talk about people who prepared war plans. It seems
that war planners never stop. In 1896 the Republicans declared in
their war plan that if they won the election they would annexe Canada
? ?with their permission!? They seemed to think that Canada was just
waiting to be annexed. In 1912 the Americans had a war plan to
invade Canada. Also in 1912 the English had a magnificent war plan
to mobilise the American Indians to rise up against the Americans,
particularly in the Chicago area, while the navy took over the ports. It
gets more and more wonderful. In 1930 the Americans had war
plans against the British Navy in the Far East.
I could go on, but my pen became unsteady at that point as the three
historians tumbled out these great goodies. They also spoke about
the great war of 1676, perhaps the great defining war in America,
where the colonists destroyed a huge alliance of Indians led by King
Philip (an Indian chief). Ironically, he was the son of Massasoit
who had introduced Squanto to the settlement. The Indians then
pushed west but the destruction on both sides was massive. One of
the historians suggested that there were so many orphans from the
Anglo-American side moving around the place that this could have
been part of the seed of the unrest which led to the Salem trials.
A point that they all made, which I?d like to develop some other time,
is that the Napoleonic War was in fact a world war. The English and
the French were fighting each other in India, in the Caribbean, in
Egypt and the English were also trying to pick off the Dutch colonies.
The two most tantalising comments of all, for me, were first that the
American War of Independence (revolution to us) was a sideshow.
The English were not so worried about losing it and only committed
about 9% of their global forces to fighting it. They figured that if they
lost they would simply form a trading federation with the newly
independent colonies and that?s pretty much what happened.
Links with England continued very powerfully throughout the 18th and
the 19th centuries. The second thing is that the first novel ever
published in America was Richardson?s novel Pamela and it was
published by Benjamin Franklin.
Incidentally, it?s always seemed a bit curious to me that given what
the Americans say they owe to the Separatists and the Pilgrim
Fathers, and indeed it could be proved that they owe a great deal, the
English are so often the villains and while we have people in America
happy to be Afro-Americans and Irish Americans and Hispanic
Americans, I have yet to meet anyone in the United States who has
told me that he was an Anglo-American.
Has anyone else heard of these numerous war plans? So much for the "special relationship"!
Rachel