Myles Standish

Myles Standish was an English military officer who travelled on the Mayflower and became the principal military commander of Plymouth Colony. He organised its defences, led expeditions and negotiations with neighbouring communities, and later helped establish the settlement of Duxbury.

Standish was not one of the Separatist religious leaders of the Plymouth settlement but a professional soldier hired to provide military expertise. During the colony’s precarious early years he supervised fortifications, organised the militia and took part in expeditions undertaken in response to perceived threats. He repeatedly held civic office as an assistant to the colony’s governor and later settled at Duxbury, where he remained an important figure in Plymouth affairs until his death in 1656.

Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower follows Myles Standish as Plymouth Colony’s principal military officer, placing his readiness to use force beside William Bradford’s political leadership and the colony’s fragile dependence on Wampanoag diplomacy. Jeanne Blanchet’s Rite of Passage brings Standish into the Mayflower community seen through a child’s experience of migration, showing the soldier as one of the adults responsible for order and security as the passengers cross the Atlantic and establish themselves at Plymouth.