Maybe the most important point that Bunker highlights concerns the interplay between the Pilgrims’ faith and their education, political standing and financial position. In their day the men and women we refer to as Pilgrims were called Separatists or Brownists, but what was the nature of their separation from the Puritan Protestantism that had rooted itself in England, and who was the Robert Browne who gave rise to the movement? How well known were these religious radicals? What was their role in English society? Exactly how were they persecuted? Where did they flourish? And how, one might add, could this new information alter the Pilgrims’ legacy? His objective is to answer the very good question, Who were these people?

From county record offices and church account books, he teases out traces of William Brewster, William Bradford and the other principals who would later found the colony. His book roams through archives and repositories in the British Isles. Bunker, an Englishman, had what is perhaps a more alluring idea: to devote himself largely to the prehistory of the men and women who founded the colony. Philbrick, a New Englander, concentrated on the settlement of the colony of New Plymouth, and read its meaning through the prism of King Philip’s War of 1675-76, which would set the tone for later relations between settlers and natives. Yet the two books - both admirable - are utterly different, and so to a large extent is their subject matter. Now Nick Bunker has written another history of the Pilgrims, which tries to do more or less the same thing. In 2006, Nathaniel Philbrick wrote “Mayflower,” a history of the Pilgrims that attempted to wipe centuries of mythic buildup from the dour features of America’s European primogenitors.

Making haste from babylon