The Mayflower and the Pilgrims' New World* (18 page)

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An early-twentieth-century depiction of the First Thanksgiving. Note how the myths of the Pilgrims have taken hold: in addition to the inaccuracies of dress, it was the Indians who fed the Pilgrims by providing five freshly killed deer.

 

◆◆◆ We do not know the exact date of the celebration we now call the First Thanksgiving, but it was probably in late september or early October, soon after their corn, squash, beans, barley, and peas had been harvested. It was also a time during which Plymouth Harbor played host to a tremendous number of migrating birds, particularly ducks and geese, and Bradford ordered four men to go out “fowling.” It took only a few hours for Plymouth's hunters to kill enough ducks and geese to feed the settlement for a week. Now that they had “gathered the fruit of our labors,” Bradford declared it time to “rejoice together ... after a more special manner.”

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A cooking pot that may have come to America with Miles and Rose Standish.

The term Thanksgiving was not used by the Pilgrims themselves. Instead of a spiritual ceremony, the gathering had more in common with a traditional English harvest festival—a secular celebration that dated back to the Middle Ages in which villagers ate, drank, and played games.

Despite what many people think today, the Pilgrims did not spend the day sitting around a long table draped with a white linen cloth, clasping each other's hands in prayer as a few curious Indians looked on. Instead of an English affair, the First Thanksgiving soon became an overwhelmingly Native celebration when Massasoit and a hundred Pokanokets (more than twice the entire English population of Plymouth) arrived at the settlement and provided five freshly killed deer. Even if all the Pilgrims' furniture was brought out into the sunshine, most of the celebrants stood, squatted, or sat on the ground as they gathered around outdoor fires, where the deer and birds turned on wooden spits and where pottages—stews into which varieties of meats and vegetables were thrown—cooked invitingly.

In addition to ducks and deer, there was, according to Bradford, a “good store of wild turkeys” in the fall of 1621. Turkeys were not new to the Pilgrims. When the conquistadors arrived in Mexico in the sixteenth century, they discovered that the Indians of Central America possessed turkeys as well as gold. The birds were brought to spain as early as the 1520s, and by the 1540s they had reached England. By 1575, the Central American turkey had become common at English Christmases. The wild turkeys of New England were bigger and much faster than the birds the Pilgrims had known in Europe and were often pursued in winter when they could be tracked in the snow.

The Pilgrims may have also added fish to their meal of birds and deer. In fall, there were plenty of striped bass, bluefish, and cod. Perhaps most important to the Pilgrims was that with a recently harvested barley crop, it was now possible to brew beer. Alas, the Pilgrims were without pumpkin pies or cranberry sauce. There were also no forks, which did not appear at Plymouth until the last decades of the seventeenth century. The Pilgrims ate with their fingers and their knives.

Neither Bradford nor Winslow mention it, but the First Thanksgiving coincided with what was, for the Pilgrims, a new and startling phenomenon: the turning of the green leaves of summer to the yellows, reds, and purples of a New England autumn. In Britain, the cloudy fall days and warm nights cause the autumn colors to be rather dull. In New England, on the other hand, the sunny fall days and cool but not freezing nights unleash brilliant colors within the tree leaves, with oaks turning red, brown, and russet; hickories golden brown; birches yellow; red maples scarlet; sugar maples orange; and black maples glowing yellow. It was a display that must have contributed to the enthusiasm with which the Pilgrims later wrote of the festivities that fall.

 

◆◆◆ The First Thanksgiving marked the conclusion of a remarkable year. Eleven months earlier the Pilgrims had arrived at the tip of Cape Cod, fearful and uninformed. They had spent the next month angering every Native American they happened to come across. By all rights, none of the Pilgrims should have survived the first winter. Like the French sailors before them, they all might have been either killed or taken captive by the Indians.

That it had worked out differently was a testament not only to the Pilgrims' grit, resolve, and faith, but to their ability to take advantage of some extraordinary good fortune. Massasoit's decision to offer them assistance had saved the Pilgrims' lives, but there had already been several instances in which they could have squandered the opportunity the sachem had given them. Placing their faith in God, the Pilgrims might have insisted on isolating themselves. But by becoming an active part of the diplomatic process in southern New England—by sending Winslow and Hopkins to sowams, by paying back the Nausets for the corn, and most important, by making clear their loyalty to Massasoit at the “hurly-burly” in Nemasket—they had taken charge of their own destiny in the region.

In 1620, New England was far from paradise. Indeed, the New World was, in many ways, much like the Old—a place where the fertility of the soil was a concern, a place where disease and war were constant threats. There were profound differences between the Pilgrims and Pokanokets to be sure—especially when it came to technology, culture, and spiritual beliefs—but in these early years, when an alliance appeared to be good for both of them, the two peoples had more in common than is generally thought today. For the Pilgrims, some of whom had slept in a wigwam and all of whom had enjoyed eating and drinking with the Indians during that First Thanksgiving, these were not barbarians (even if some of their habits, such as their refusal to wear clothes, struck them as “savage”); these were human beings, much like themselves—“very trust[worth]y, quick of apprehension, ripe witted, just,” according to Edward Winslow.

For his part, Massasoit had managed one of the great comebacks of all time. Once in danger of being forced to pay tribute to the Narragansetts, he had found a way to give the Pokanokets, who were now just a fraction of the Narragansetts in terms of population, a kind of equality with the rival tribe. Massasoit had come to the Pilgrims' rescue when, as his son would remember fifty-four years later, the English were “as a little child.” He could only hope that the Pilgrims would continue to honor their debt to the Pokanokets long after the English settlement had grown into maturity.

PART II

EIGHT

IN MID-NOVEMBER
, Bradford received word from the Indians on Cape Cod that a ship had appeared at Provincetown Harbor. It had been just eight months since the departure of the
Mayflower,
and the Pilgrims were not yet expecting a supply ship from the Adventurers in London. It was immediately feared that the ship was from England's mortal enemy, France.

For more than a week, the ship stayed at the tip of Cape Cod. Then, at the end of November, a lookout atop Fort Hill saw it turn toward Plymouth Harbor. Many of the men were out working in the surrounding countryside and had to be called back immediately. A cannon was fired, and the tiny settlement was filled with excitement as men rushed in from all directions while standish assembled them into a fighting force. soon, in the words of Edward Winslow, “every man, yea, boy that could handle a gun were ready, with full resolution, that if [the ship] were an enemy, we would stand in our just defense.”

To their amazement and delight, it proved to be an English ship: the
Fortune,
about a third the size of the
Mayflower,
sent by the Adventurers with thirty-seven passengers aboard. In an instant, the size of the colony had almost doubled.

Everyone aboard the
Fortune
was in good health, and almost immediately after coming ashore, Martha Ford gave birth to a son, John. But all was not well. Most of the new passengers were single men who must have been upset at the lack of young women among the Pilgrims. With the arrival of the
Fortune,
there was now a total of sixty-six men in the colony and just sixteen women. For every eligible female, there were six eligible men, and for young girls such as fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Tilley, nineteen-year-old Priscilla Mullins, and fourteen-year-old Mary Chilton (all of them orphans), the mounting pressure to marry must have been intense. Plus, there was no place to put all the passengers. Bradford had no choice but to divide them up among the preexisting seven houses and four public buildings.

But the biggest problem created by the arrival of the
Fortune
had to do with food. Weston had failed to provide the passengers aboard the
Fortune
with any provisions for the settlement. Instead of strengthening their situation, the addition of thirty-seven more mouths to feed at the beginning of winter put them in a difficult position. Bradford figured out that even if they cut their daily rations in half, their current store of corn would last only another six months. After a year of relentless toil and hardship, they faced yet another winter without enough food. “[B]ut they bore it patiently,” Bradford wrote, “under hope of [future] supply.”

Happily, there were some familiar faces aboard the
Fortune.
The Brewsters welcomed their eldest son, Jonathan, a thirty-seven-year-old ribbon weaver, whom they hadn't seen in almost a year and a half. Others from Leiden included Philip de la Noye, whose French surname was eventually changed to Delano and whose descendants would include future U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The newly remarried Edward Winslow greeted his twenty-four-year-old brother, John. There was also Thomas Prence, the twenty-one-year-old son of a Gloucestershire carriage maker, who soon became one of the leading members of the settlement.

The most notable new arrival was Robert Cushman, whose chest pains aboard the
Speedwell
during the summer of 1620 had convinced him to remain in England. Cushman was the one who had negotiated the agreement with Thomas Weston that stated how the Pilgrims would pay the Adventurers—the agreement that Bradford and the others had refused to honor in southampton. It was now time, Cushman told them, to sign the controversial agreement. Cushman also presented the Pilgrims with a new patent from the Council for New England making it legal for them to live in Plymouth, rather than by the Hudson River.