The first Thanksgiving

The American Thanksgiving holiday paints an idyllic picture of the first Thanksgiving, the Pilgrim fathers and the Indians sitting down to a feast of brotherhood. Lucky for the Pilgrims. Against thousands of Indian warriors, Captain Miles Standish could barely muster a dozen men of military age after the first disastrous winter of 1620 had killed off half of the original 102 settlers.

The amazing thing is that, even as thousands of English religious dissidents flooded into the new states of Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island, the general peace between Indians and whites lasted 55 years. It would end calamitously with King Philip's War in 1675-76.

Nathaniel Philbrick's "Mayflower" illuminates this era. Subtitled "A Story of Courage, Community, and War", this history is a fresh look at a familiar story with a focus on William Bradford, the first governor, whose friendship with the Pokanoket chief Masssasoit saved the infant colony, and Benjamin Church, the wily Indian fighter who would triumph over Massasoit's cowardly son Philip.

"Mayflower" is Philbrick's seventh book. He won the National Book Award for "In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex" which was the true story of a Nantucket whale ship sunk in the Pacific by a right whale - the tale that inspired Herman Melville to write "Moby Dick".

Philbrick has a knack for presenting familiar material with an original slant. His focus here is the interactions between English and Indians.

The Indians along the rocky coast of Plymouth Colony were familiar enough with white people. The oldest among them could recall their first sight of a European sailing ship, which they took to be "a walking island, the mast to be a tree, the sail white clouds, and the discharging of ordnance for lighting and thunder".

Over the years, various adventurers and freebooters had raided the coast and taken away slaves.

In turn, Indians routinely massacred or enslaved shipwrecked crews. They were also devastated by waves of black plague, smallpox and influenza. The site of Plymouth Colony, for example, had been abandoned the year before by villagers nearly wiped out by plague.

So there were the Pilgrims huddled in their stockade on the edge of a continental wilderness. Imagine their surprise when a tall nearly naked Indian named Samoset strode up to the gates and shouted "Welcome, Englishmen!" He had spent time with English fishermen in Maine.

Even more conversant with English ways was the famous Squanto, who had been enslaved and taken to England. By adapting to Indian ways of farming and hunting, the English managed to survive and live in peace with their neighbours, both prospering through a brisk fur trade.

"An intimacy existed between the English and Indians that would have been almost unimaginable to subsequent generations of Americans," Philbrick writes. "The English hired their Indian neighbours as farm hands; they traded with them for fish and game. Inevitably, a pidgin of English-Indian languages developed, and it became second nature for an Englishman to greet a Native acquaintance as netop , or "friend".

"But Plymouth Colony was, by no means, a utopia of cross-cultural exchange and cooperation. Intermarriage between the two races was virtually non-existent, and without children to provide them with a genetic and cultural common ground, the Indians and English would always have difficulty understanding each other's point of view. In the end, the two peoples remained enigmas to one another."

The Pequot tribe rose in revolt in 1637. Led by veterans of the Thirty Years War in Europe, the English fell upon a Pequot fortress on the Mystic River in Connecticut. "After setting the Indians' wigwams ablaze, the soldiers proceeded to shoot and hack in pieces anyone who attempted to escape the inferno. By the end of the day, approximately four hundred Pequot men, women, and children were dead."

The settlers' Mohegan allies were horrified. Indian wars were about ritual and honour, not mass murder. The pious Governor William Bradford wrote: "It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God."

With King Philip's War, the conflagration was general. Entire white townships were wiped out and columns of soldiers ambushed. Benjamin Church, who had long lived among the Sekonet tribe, brought in Indian tactics and Indian allies to finally quell the rebellion and capture its leaders. Like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett and Natty Bumppo, Church was a new kind of man: the frontiersman.

"As a roughneck intermediary between civilisation and savagery, the frontiersman had a natural distrust of authority and relied on his own instincts, bravery and skill to survive. What makes Church unique is that he was one of the first New Englanders to embrace the wilderness his forefathers had shunned. When war erupted in June 1675, he was the right man in the right place to become a truly archetypal American."

For the Indians, the war was a disaster. Out of a population of 20,000, 2,000 were killed, 3,000 died of disease or starvation, 1,000 were shipped to the West Indies as slaves, and 3,000 more fled for shelter among the Mohawks of New York. They were now a minority in their own country. The frontiersmen's march to the West had begun.

James Eckardt's eighth book, "Singapore Girl: a Memoir" has been published by Monsoon Books and is on sale at Kinokuniya and Bookazine bookstores.