Description:
The subject of David Lindsay's Mayflower Bastard is Richard More, a distant kinsman of Lindsay's. More, the 5-year-old, illegitimate offspring of a headstrong Shropshire woman and a man of "mean parentage," arrived in the New World on the Mayflower. He would live long enough to witness the hysteria of the Salem witch trials--and see a friend, accused of wizardry, "pressed" to death by stones. More was a sea captain, merchant, and tavern keeper. He was also an adulterer and a bigamist, whose wives lived on both sides of the Atlantic, forcing him to appear a Puritan in one country, and anything but in the other. What emerges is an intimate portrait of a world hardly holy--far more venal, vindictive, complex, and, especially, litigious than is usually believed. Lindsay's account is a stylistic mélange of first-person, second-person, and third-person history sprinkled with a few present-day anecdotes, in which the author retraces some of More's journeys. While this unorthodox approach lends the subject matter a certain gravity, at times it is merely obfuscatory. --H. O'Billovich
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