What Were The Pilgrims
And Their Thanksgiving Like?By Edward M. Eveld
21 November, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Nathaniel Philbrick had these two fuzzy, competing and faulty impressions of the Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving.There was the sweet, childhood image, a bountiful table in a bucolic setting with feasting Englishmen in the foreground and American Indians looking on.
And there was the grown-up, cynical perspective: the Pilgrims as 17th-century English conquerors, and the Plymouth feast little more than a myth.
Philbrick, author of 'Mayflower', spent three years researching the Pilgrims' voyage and what came after, including the complex and evolving relationships between settlers and American Indians. He found not the caricatures of his fuzzy impressions but real humans capable of kindness and murder, of lasting conciliation and sudden treachery, of charity and the ugliest of greed.
Philbrick, 51, will be in Kansas City on Thursday to discuss his book, which was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in history. He lives on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts.
Q. The journey itself was undertaken by fairly ordinary, working people with a religious purpose. Did they know much about sailing across the ocean?
A. They knew nothing about what they were getting themselves into. This was an absolutely outrageous proposition. Up to this point the only successful colony in America had been Jamestown. And that was hardly a success. They really felt that God wanted them to go. They decided to transport the congregation wholesale to America. But these people had spent more than a decade in Leiden in Holland, many of them working in the cloth industry. They didn't know anything about voyaging across the ocean or creating a new settlement.
They went about planning the voyage in a haphazard way. They knew each other well and were bonded in a spiritual way. But in dealing with people outside their circle, they were at risk of being separated from their money. Thomas Weston was a London merchant and representative of their investors, and told them everything they wanted to hear. He told them he had deep sympathies for their religious beliefs.
When the Mayflower finally left, after months of delays, about half the passengers were Puritan separatists from Leiden, and the other half were what they called the Strangers, passengers recruited in London.
It was woefully late, September of 1620. The plan had been to sail to the New World early in the summer, time to build before winter. But they didn't want to pull the plug on it. They already had spent most of their money. Their relationship with their investors was going from bad to worse, and they just went for it. The trip was long, 10 weeks. And slow, about 1.5 to 2 miles an hour. They were in bad shape by the time they arrived in America.
They originally were destined not for New England but for the Hudson River. The plans were to set up on a large navigable river and to set up fur trading with the Indians. But they were more than 200 miles off course to the north.
Q. What were you able to learn about the feast that has become our Thanksgiving celebration?
It's kind of an intimidating thing to write about. If there's anything that's encrusted with legend and myth, it's the first Thanksgiving.
It turns out everything we know about the first Thanksgiving came from a letter from Edward Winslow. It's just a paragraph in that letter. They never called it Thanksgiving. That was a term applied in the 19th century. This was more in keeping with a harvest festival, typical of any English town. It would have occurred in late September, early October. Winslow said they had ducks and geese in abundance. He makes no mention of turkeys, although they could have had turkeys. There were plenty of turkeys around.
We also know they had five deer provided by the Indians, the Wampanoags. This is where the story gets interesting. We think of it as a predominantly Pilgrim affair. But by this time half the Pilgrims had died. There were just over 50 of them left. They would have been outnumbered by the Indians 2-to-1.
There were too many people to have the feast indoors. And there would have been outdoor fires for cooking, very different from the sort of domesticated dinner we all try to re-create in our homes. If you want to really have a first Thanksgiving, go camping. Shoot something and eat it.
Many of us learn about the first Thanksgiving in elementary school, and it is a wonderful vehicle for educating our young people. This was a bicultural celebration, which is distressingly rare in our history.
The Pilgrims never would have survived if the Indians hadn't made an alliance with them. The Wampanoags' health had been devastated by European diseases. They saw the alliance with the English as a way to maintain their integrity as a people. So the alliance was in both peoples' best interest. It was a calculated, pragmatic decision. And still, we have them all standing around, celebrating together with a feast. It's something I think is worthy of remembering every year.
Q. In exploring who the Pilgrims were, did you come to like them?
I'm very ambivalent. I have great respect for William Bradford, who became governor of the colony. He provided guidance and judgment that was absolutely essential. Then you have Miles Standish, the military officer, a combustible sort. Three years after the arrival of the Mayflower, he led a commando hit just north of Plymouth and returned with the head of a warrior. The raid would throw the whole region into chaos and turmoil.
They weren't all on the same page at the same time. And they were making it up as they went along.
Q. Describe what you learned about those first 50 years after the Mayflower landing.
It was an unusual time, given the subsequent course of American history. There was peaceful coexistence between the Wampanoag and the Pilgrims, although it was not a beneficent embrace between two cultures. There were flare-ups. When tensions would increase or something happened to precipitate conflict, what you see are William Bradford and Edward Winslow and Massasoit making conscious efforts to work things out. They owed a debt to each other, and that was understood in that generation.
Q. But then came King Philip's War, when things fell apart. What went wrong?
What I saw in doing this book was how much the personal commitment of the leaders matters. Diplomacy is hard work, especially when there are such cultural differences. The tragedy of the story is that with the second generation, they lose that appreciation so quickly.
King Philip's War is the war that American history has forgotten. We start with the Pilgrims and in most histories leapfrog to the American Revolution. New England had changed radically in 55 years. As more and more English survived, land became a big part of this. Land had gone into English hands in a huge way. From the native perspective, they said, "What good was this alliance? We've lost our birthright." And with the leaders not liking each other much, it leads to war.
This was an extraordinarily brutal conflict when you look at the percentage of the populations killed, more than twice as bloody as the Civil War.
You can say the English won, but one-third of the towns in New England were burned and abandoned, and they would pay for the war for decades. Until then, they had remarkable independence from the mother country, but afterward they had to throw themselves on the mercy of England. You could say this created the tensions that would erupt 100 years later in the American Revolution.
For Indians who were not killed or forced to leave the region, many were captured and crowded on ships, sent to the West Indies and sold as slaves.
And for me, this is how the story of the Pilgrims becomes ultimately relevant to us as Americans. We think of the Indian wars as 19th century, the winning of the West. But it all happened in the Plymouth colony.
© 2007 The Kansas City Star
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