The voyage of the Mayflower and the men and women who sailed with her takes on a new and exciting dimension in The Plymouth Adventure.

The story opens in Southampton, England, with John Alden, a young carpenter, joining the Mayflower expedition not because of religious convictions but because he was jobless and penniless—and had caught a glimpse of Priscilla. Through John's experiences on the long voyage and in the New World, all the principals in the Mayflower adventure, and the lesser figures—the debtors and jailbirds, the artisans and hired hands who shipped on the voyage, as well as the indians, Massasoit and Squanto—reenact the noble or villainous parts they actually played.

Out of five years of careful and imaginative research, and in a fresh and dramatic style, Ernest Gebler, noted Irish playwright, short-story writer, and novelist, wrote this absorbing story of suspense, of young love, of personal conflict, and of villainy overcome—a tribute to what courage and faith can accomplish.

From the dust jacket

 

One of my first introductions to the subject, five long years ago, was a certain American writer named George B. Cheever, whose dear classic, The Pilgrim Fathers, sent one long shiver up my back and made me want to run as far away from the Mayflower as I could get! True, I said to myself, 'These people can't have been like that.' But it was only by accident that I came upon some of the original letters written by the settlers themselves. Even then I wasn't interested in the least as far as a book went, but went on reading out of interest, as one reads many things, until it became apparent that these people, if you got at their original records, were real, human, good people, with a simple and terrific story. Not the distorted story to be found in rhe long line of religious axe grinders and puritan historians or the ignorant romancing of the Hemans and Longfellows, but a true, simple and moving story lying beneath the self-preening of centuries. The writings of the men themselves were the thing, and fortunately they had left a great deal of letters, notebooks, journals and histories. I discovered that the truth was to be found in their own words. And in their own words, here, there, and everywhere, they gradually told me their own story....

From the back of the book