Opening paragraphs......................

From the Prologue:


     The Pilgrims landed the Mayflower at Cape Cod, Massachusetts on a cold November day in 1620 because they were running out of beer.  Their legal charter from King James was for a grant of land in Northern Virginia, but instead they anchored illegally and carved their first community from the sand, laying the foundation of the American character:  flinty, rebellious, and inspired by adversity.


From Chapter 1:


     Even before the supporting beam at the front of the main mast was shattered by a powerful wave in the middle of the stormy North Atlantic, the voyage of the creaky old Mayflower seemed cursed.  She was a sweet ship, so called because she smelled of her previous cargo of wine, which she had carried from Spain to England up the Atlantic Coast of Europe for decades.  When a group of exiled English separatists living in Holland stepped in to buy her, the sweetness evaporated.  The voyage to the New World was a bitter version of Calvinist Hell.  When the Pilgrims finally arrived at their destination, their leader, historian William Bradford, who loved biblical parallels, wrote that what they found was far from a new Eden but "a hideous and desolate wilderness full of wild beasts and wild men."


-Susan Cheever,  Drinking In America:  Our Secret History