SAINTS AND STRANGERS

Originally scheduled for March publication -- reported 1/15/4, as follows: This is the sort of book that may well rate a Pulitzer in history, for it certainly opens the door on the whole segment of our historical backgrounds on which we have been either ignorant or misled. A definite history of the Pilgrim Fathers, shorn of the trappings of school textbooks and phal legend and replacing these discarded traditional tales with a stdy record of a small group that managed to keep their identity against fearful odds and a toll exacted by rigours of nature without -- conflict with their fellow-English, their own recalcitrant members, Indians and Dutch. The Pilgrim saga is a creation of the 19th century; this new picture is based on contemporary records, some newly discovered, some reinterpreted material, and it follows their troubled history from the persecutions under Henry VIII, Edward Hary, Elizabeth, James -- through the none-too-rosy Amsterdam and Leyden years, across the ocean in frail barks -- ""saints and strangers"" together --to the Cape and eventually to plymouth. Then the struggle to become self-sustaining, the reversals year after year, the failure to secure from English overlords their rights and charter; the evidence of greed without, staunch faith within; the growing religious and moral intolerances; splits in the ranks; relations with Indians; expansion to the West and the personalities that dominated the whole. A tangled tale clarified for moderns -- exceedingly interesting as illumination on those of our forefathers too often confused with the Puritans to the North of them. But slow reading because of liberal quotation from ancient records. An important work.