Nathaniel Philbrick arrived on the literary scene with the National Book Award—winner In the Heart of the Sea the way he arrived on the island of Nantucket. No one knew for sure if he had staying power. "The locals on Nantucket wait three to four years to see if you're a keeper," Philbrick says. With the publication this month of Philbrick's third book with Viking, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War, readers and critics should be as convinced as the Nantucket neighbors that Nathaniel Philbrick is a keeper.

With Mayflower, Philbrick again tackles an American story of adventure and courage: the Pilgrims' daring voyage across the Atlantic and their settlement in Massachusetts. "I guess the traditional thing is to end the Pilgrims' story with the first Thanksgiving," Philbrick says. "But that rang false to me, not only because of what I knew about the Pilgrims but for what I knew about the country." If Thanksgiving is what comes to mind when you think of the Pilgrims, get ready to learn some history.

For most Americans, the Pilgrims land the Mayflower on Plymouth Rock, have the first Thanksgiving and then, well, nothing much happens until powdered wigs and the Declaration of Independence. But a century before the founding fathers, Philbrick notes, the first Americans struggled against nature and each other, and fought a brutal war that took 5,000 lives—when the population of New England was only 70,000.

At first, the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians co-existed. Without the help of the Wampanoag Chief Massasoit, the settlers would not have survived their first winter. But Philbrick makes clear, "It was not by any means a utopian bicultural society. It wasn't brother to brother, it was negotiation." As long as both sides saw the value of the other, there was peace. But Massasoit's son, Metacomet (called King Philip by the British), would come to see things differently. In 1675, 55 years after the Pilgrims' arrival, as the British grew stronger and the Indians declined, Philip's warriors attacked, and set in motion a violent reprisal that rippled through the nation's push west.

"It's a daunting topic," Philbrick says. "I wanted to start on the Mayflower. But the question was: Where do you take it?" With painstaking research, Philbrick traced the Pilgrims back to their English roots, their flight to the Netherlands to avoid persecution and, finally, their hiring of the Mayflower to bring them to the new world. Then, at Plymouth, after living peacefully with the native Americans for decades, mistrust and confusion led to King Philip's War.

How could such a war be so unknown? Was Philbrick surprised at what he found out? "Oh, absolutely," he says. "I too grew up thinking there was the Mayflower and Thanksgiving. What got lost in there was the Indians. The Native American experience then became part of the winning of the west. Learning about King Philip's War was shocking."

This is what Philbrick does. He takes a familiar story and finds the unfamiliar. He never really planned to take on the story of the Pilgrims—or the story of the Essex, which he calls "that old chestnut"—but then, he never expected to be living on Nantucket or to win the National Book Award in 2000.

In the 1980s, Philbrick, a champion sailor, was at Duke University, planning to become a teacher like his parents. "But I was getting restless in academia," Philbrick says. "I wanted to write more." So he left Duke with a master's degree and began writing for Sailing World magazine, a job he loved and where, he says, "I learned how to write."

He was living in Boston in the late '80s with his wife, Melissa, a lawyer, who one day found an ad for a job on Nantucket. "Moby-Dick was my bible," Philbrick says, "and Nantucket was ground zero for everything." Knowing no one on the island but intrigued, they packed up and moved.

On Nantucket, Philbrick was a stay-at-home dad. "Anyone at home with two young kids knows that not a lot of coherent thought goes on," he says. "So I was getting more and more interested in the island, hanging out at the Nantucket Historical Association, at the Athenaeum [the local library] and at this wonderful bookstore, Mitchell's Corner Bookshop." Working with the library and historical society, he began writing scholarly articles that caught the attention of other "year-rounders," including Bud Egan, with whom Philbrick would establish the Egan Institute of Maritime Studies. "That's when I heard the story of the Whaleship Essex," he says—which would become the basis for In the Heart of the Sea.

It took him years to even realize that there was a book in the story of the Essex. He wrote two classic books of Nantucket history for the Egan Institute's Mill Hill Press: Away Off Shore: Nantucket Island and Its People, 1602—1890 (1994) and Abram's Eyes: The Native American Legend of Nantucket Island (1998).

Then, in 1998, as the Egan Institute's first director, Philbrick called agent Stuart Krichevsky to see about getting his client, The Perfect Stormauthor Sebastian Junger, to give a lecture at the Institute.

From that conversation, a proposal for what would become In the Heart of the Sea was sent out. Soon after, Philbrick had a deal with Wendy Wolf at Viking—and yes, Junger did make it to the island for a lecture. "It was a big success," Philbrick recalls.

The same could be said for Philbrick's first book. In the Heart of the Sea earned universal raves. The New York Times called it the "year's best historical thriller and a riveting traveler's adventure," and called Philbrick an "uncommonly talented nonacademic historian with a storyteller's flair."

As for the National Book Award, Philbrick was thrilled just to be nominated. Winning "was a total surprise," he says. "The whole experience was just incredible. The nomination came out of the blue, so to win it was all the more astonishing." In the Heart of the Sea spent 40 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and still enjoys strong sales in the Penguin paperback edition.

Philbrick's next book, Sea of Glory: The U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838—1842 (Viking, 2003), was also critically acclaimed and won the Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt Naval History Prize for maritime writing, but sold modestly.

With Mayflower, Philbrick appears poised once again for bestsellerdom. The book has gotten strong early reviews, and the author has more than 30 reading dates scheduled coast-to-coast from May through July.

While Mayflower begins with a harrowing ocean crossing in a leaky, rented Dutch boat, it is not a maritime story. "I call this book "Nathaniel Philbrick Makes Landfall," quips his editor, Wendy Wolf.

For Philbrick, the sea is never far away. But is it fair to label Philbrick a maritime author? Is he concerned about being typecast? "I don't know," he says. "I don't see myself as pigeonholed with the sea or colonial America. The theme I keep returning to is what we are as Americans. If we are going to revere the Founding Fathers, it is vital to put this war in context. It's messy. It doesn't fit easily into a survey course on colonial America. And the context is 150 years of dynamic struggle, a process that had a profound effect on where we'd go as a nation."