Histories based on genealogy often suffer from tunnel vision. Lindsay commits the opposite offense in this tale of one Richard More, a Lindsay ancestor who sailed at age five to the Plymouth colony aboard the Mayflower.
In using the story of "the Mayflower Bastard" (so-called because More was the illegitimate son of landed gentry) as a lens through which to view early New England history, Lindsay has created a sprawling tale that exhausts the reader's patience as a cast of thousands parades through dozens of familiar scenes—most extensively treated elsewhere. Lindsay's strategy is understandable. Little documentation on More, a Salem seafarer and tavern keeper, has survived; even his date of death is unknown. In the hands of a deft writer, the resulting fictionalization and speculation can work brilliantly, but this author is, at best, workmanlike. Lindsay, whose previous books explore inventors and inventions, also falters when choosing a narrative voice. At several points, he addresses a mysterious "you"—apparently the accuser who had the elderly More cast out of the church for "lasciviousness." In other places Lindsay lapses into the first person. One of those asides is a gross sexual escapade Lindsay shared with a sailor friend, which the author includes to prove that sailors—then and now—did not share the moral code of the God-fearing Puritans. Aside from questionable historicity of such a comparison, no reader picking up a book about this nation's origins should be exposed to such a gratuitously offensive interjection. Still, some Mayflower buffs may want this volulme. (Nov. 13)
