Was There a Murder on the Mayflower?

Fiction When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. BEHELDTaraShea Nesbit Often it isn’t the main events of history that ask to be novelized, but the footnotes, the things mentioned in passing. TaraShea Nesbit has given her second novel, “Beheld,” to one such thing. Most people know something about the Mayflower and the English Puritans who founded the Plymouth Colony in 1620.

Some know about the governor of that colony, William Bradford, who wrote “Of Plymouth Plantation. ” But a detail lost to history, the detail that gave rise to “Beheld,” is that Bradford’s first wife, Dorothy, fell overboard from the Mayflower while it was docked in Cape Cod Harbor and drowned. Overboard how? And why?

Isn’t it strange that a woman should fall from a docked ship, and strange that history has almost nothing to say about it, even in Bradford’s own accounts? That said, this is not a mystery; the questions around Dorothy are more subtext than plot. Dorothy is the novel’s absent presence; she nags at the pages, appearing in the thoughts and memories of one of the key narrators, Bradford’s second wife, Alice. The two women have history, their friendship going back to their childhood.

It’s only after Dorothy’s death that William brings Alice to the Plymouth Colony and marries her. “Our grief brought us closer,” Alice says, and it’s for the reader to see around that comment, to see that William and Alice’s closeness had begun long before. At its heart this is a novel about women. While we hear from several characters, male and female, the only first-person sections belong to Alice, a young woman named Eleanor Billington and, much later, Dorothy herself.

The tensions lie in the rancor between the colony’s Puritan community and the Anglican couple Eleanor and John Billington, who until recently were indentured servants. “I had not anticipated,” Alice says, “that to be among our Anglican servants — most of whom were commoners from England — was to be again among those who hated us. ” Perhaps my being English distorts my reading here, but I see something else at the novel’s core, a critique of Englishness itself. There is a contradiction underpinning the whole project of English imperialism, and Nesbit flags it perfectly.