He survived, as I explain, as part of an intercultural transaction of which Smith himself was probably unaware. Of course I do not believe, as Mann thinks I do, in the myth about Pocahontas saving John Smith’s life. Nor does he pick up the contrast of the Pilgrims’ fate with that of the Dutchman Pieter Plockhoy’s utopia on the Delaware, which was wiped out by the English, but whose highly articulated communitarian concepts lived on to shape reform efforts throughout the 19th century. Concerned about Thanksgiving, Mann sees none of this.

So I discuss at length his desperate lamentations, his strenuous effort to learn Hebrew to approach God directly in his own form of discourse (and I illustrate his Hebrew exercises), and the three-part dialogue he wrote for the next generation in an effort to show where their failing struggles fitted into the whole history of Christianity. Thanksgiving feasts were routine celebrations of good fortune, and in any case they have nothing to do with the point of the chapter on the Pilgrims, which is the despairing belief of their great leader, William Bradford, in his final years, that the Pilgrims’ entire venture had been a failure.

He is upset that I did not mention the Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving. 6), but I cannot let his extended list of supposed errors pass without comment. Mann for his kind words at the beginning of his review of “The Barbarous Years” (Jan.

The Barbarous Years by Bernard Bailyn