Five months after landing its disease-ravaged party of English settlers in the bleak and empty coast of what is now Plymouth, Mass., the Mayflower headed back to England on Dec. 21, 1620.

		"MAYFLOWER: A STORY OF COURAGE, COMMUNITY AND WAR" By Nathaniel Philbrick Viking ($29.95) Related interview Pittsburgh author describes '100 years of hell'

Its passengers, a mix of religious separatists calling themselves Pilgrims, and "strangers," or nonbelievers recruited by backers of the voyage, were left on their own with meager supplies in the dead of winter.

Half of the 102 passengers survived that first winter; another ship arrived in the spring with more settlers, bringing their number, briefly to 82. Sometime later in 1621, the community, reduced by disease again to 50, held its legendary meal with 100 members of Pokanoket tribe and chief Massosoit.

Historian Nathaniel Philbrick devotes less than half of his new history of this period to the Plymouth settlement. While its survival was remarkable, the larger story, in Philbrick's telling, is the eventual creation of New England and the near extermination of its native peoples.

Today, much of this story is forgotten, including the turning point in the fate of the native peoples of America.

Realizing that their survival depended on help from the New England tribes, the Pilgrims maintained a truce for 55 years.

One of the merits of Philbrick's book is his careful retelling of this significant effort by both sides to cooperate. He suggests that it might have become the blueprint for other agreements as America grew.

"For a nation that has come to recognize that one of its greatest strengths is its diversity, the first fifty years of Plymouth Colony stand as a model of what America might have been from the very beginning," Philbrick believes.

"The moment any of them gave up on the difficult work of living with their neighbors ... they risked losing everything," he adds. "That [the lesson] could be forgotten by their children remains a lesson for us today."

The failure to learn that lesson resulted in King Philip's War (1675-76), a bloody conflict with a terrible toll on native and settler alike and with long-reaching implications for the settlers of New England.

The drain on resources broke the economy and forced them to seek aid from England after nearly 100 years of independence. The Pilgrims lost their autonomy and were soon absorbed into the larger Puritan community.

Native Americans, including those who became Christians, were rounded up and sold into slavery, adding to the enduring distrust between the cultures. For their part, Indians continued to attack outlying settlements for years.

Philbrick's tightly focused account of this critical time in the beginning of the United States confirms that its origins are tinged with blood, darkness, ignorance and betrayal with shafts of light here and there.

He offers a new way of looking at our modern Thanksgiving feast. We might best view it as a tribute to those flashes of our better instincts, brief as they were.