The Pilgrim Chronicles

by Rod Gragg

  Cape Cod Bay and offshore waters provided an abundant food source for the Pilgrims during much of the year. “For fish and fowl, we have great abundance,” Edward Winslow reported, “fresh cod in the summer is but coarse meat with us [and] our bay is full of lobsters all the summer. . ..”

  HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

  “God be praised, we had a good increase of Indian corn”

  You shall understand that in this little time that a few of us have been here, we have built seven dwelling-houses, and four for the use of the plantation, and have made preparation for [numerous] others. We set the last spring some twenty acres of Indian corn, and sowed some six acres of barley and peas, and according of the Indians, we manured our ground with herrings, or rather shad, which we have in great abundance, and take with great ease at our doors. Our corn did prove well, and God be praised, we had a good increase of Indian corn, and our barley indifferent good, but our peas [were] not worth the gathering, for we feared they were too late sown. They came up very well, and blossomed, but the sun parched them in the blossom. . . .

  We have found the Indians very faithful in their covenant of peace with us, very loving and ready to pleasure us. We often go to them, and them come to us; some of us have been fifty miles by land in the country with them. . . . Yea, it has pleased God so to possess the Indians with a fear of us, and love unto us, that not only the greatest king amongst them, called Massasoit, but also all the princes and peoples round about us, have either made suit unto us, or been glad of any occasion to make peace with us . . . and we for our parts walk as peaceably ad safely in the wood as in the highways of England. We entertain them familiarly in our houses, and they as friendly bestowing their venison on us. They are a people without any religion or knowledge of any God, yet very trusty, quick of apprehension, ripe-witted, just. The men and women go naked, only a skin about their middles.

  The peaceful relations that the Pilgrims nurtured with the area’s Native Americans spared the colony the violence that beset other Europeans. “We entertain them familiarly in our houses,” Winslow said of the Indians.

  GENERAL SOCIETY OF MAYFLOWER DESCENDANTS

  For the temper of the air, here it agrees well with that in England, and if there be any difference at all, this is somewhat hotter in summer. Some think it to be colder in the winter, but I cannot out of experience so say; the air is very clear and not foggy, as has been reported. I never in my life remember a more seasonable year than we have here enjoyed, and if we have once but [cows], horses, and sheep, I make no question but that men might live as contented here as in any part of the world. For fish and fowl, we have great abundance; fresh cod in the summer is but coarse meat with us; our bay is full of lobsters all the summer and affords variety of other fish; in September we can take a hogshead of eels in a night, with small labor, and can dig them out of their beds all the winter. We have mussels and [others] at our doors. Oysters we have none near, but we can have them brought by the Indians when we will; all the springtime the earth sends forth naturally very good [salad greens]. Here are grapes, white and red, and very sweet and strong also. Strawberries, gooseberries, raspberries, etc. Plums of three sorts, with black and red, being almost as good as a damson; abundance of roses, white, red, and damask; single, but very sweet indeed.

  “The country [needs] only industrious men”

  The country [needs] only industrious men to employ, for it would grieve your hearts if, as I, you had seen so many miles together by goodly rivers uninhabited, and withal, to consider those parts of the world wherein you live to be even greatly burdened with abundance of people. These things I thought good to let you understand, being the truth of things as near as I could experimentally take knowledge of, and that you might on our behalf give God thanks who has dealt so favorably with us.2

  “Three Days We Entertained and Feasted”

  The Pilgrims Celebrate Their First Thanksgiving in America

  In gratitude for the Pilgrims’ plentiful 1621 harvest, Governor Bradford called for a thanksgiving observance—the event that would inspire the American tradition of Thanksgiving. The Pilgrims were not the first Europeans to hold a thanksgiving event in the New World—although they appear to have been the first to do so in New England. In New Spain, Catholic colonists had assembled to give thanks to God for their survival, and so had the Anglican settlers at Jamestown. It was the Pilgrims of Plymouth, however, who would be credited with establishing America’s distinctive Thanksgiving holiday—thanks to a joyful observance some time in the autumn of 1621.

  After their brutal first winter at Plymouth, the Pilgrims were grateful to enjoy a bountiful harvest from the growing season of 1621. “Such was the bounty and goodness of our God,” noted Edward Winslow.

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  The Christian tradition of observing a time of thanksgiving was based on the Jewish feast days recorded in the Old Testament. The Feast of Harvest—also called Firstfruits—and the Feast of Tabernacles—also known as Ingathering—celebrated God’s grace and provision at harvest time. It was a time of rejoicing when all work ceased as on the Sabbath, and the people gathered in worship, offered the firstfruits of their labors to the Lord, extended mercy to the poor, and gave thanks to God. The New Testament called on believers to personally maintain an attitude of thanksgiving, and the early Church observed times of thanksgiving. Later, on Lammas Day in Medieval England, churchgoers brought a loaf of bread or a lamb to Mass in thanksgiving for harvest time.

  Pilgrim women prepare for a feast. In gratitude for the Pilgrims’ plentiful 1621 harvest, Governor Bradford called for a thanksgiving observance—the event that would inspire the American tradition of Thanksgiving.

  STORIES OF THE PILGRIMS

  Following the Reformation, Protestants replaced the annual Catholic festivals with days of prayer, fasting, and thanksgiving. A typical seventeenth-century thanksgiving was described by Puritan theologian Thomas Wilson, an English pastor at Canterbury, in an influential work entitled A Christian Dictionarie. Published less than a decade before the Pilgrims established Plymouth Colony, the book recorded the meaning of a thanksgiving observance in the early 1600s. An authentic thanksgiving observance, it noted, included an “acknowledging and confessing, with gladness, of the benefits and deliverances of God, both toward ourselves and others to the praise of his Name.” It also included “Remembrance of the good done to us . . . Confessing God to be the Author and giver of it . . . being glad of an occasion to praise him, and doing it gladly, with joy.”

  Although the famous 1621 celebration at Plymouth was the first of its kind for the Pilgrims in America, it was not their first thanksgiving observance. During their years in Holland, the Separatist Pilgrims had repeatedly witnessed Leiden’s annual October third day of thanksgiving, when the city’s Protestants gave thanks to God for Leiden’s deliverance from a brutal 1574 siege by the Spanish army. The Separatists also celebrated their own thanksgiving observances in Holland, beginning soon after their arrival with an event designed to thank God for their escape from English persecution. They carried the practice to the New World, where they held thanksgiving observances in obedience to Scripture, such as Psalm 107:

  O give thanks unto the LORD, for he is good: for his mercy endureth forever. Let the redeemed of the LORD say so, whom he hath redeemed from the hand of the enemy; and gathered them out of the lands. . . . They wandered in the wilderness in a solitary way; they found no city to dwell in. Hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted in them. Then they cried unto the LORD in their trouble, and he delivered them out of their distresses. And he led them forth by the right way, that they might go to a city of habitation. Oh that men would praise the LORD for his goodness, and for his wonderful works to the children of men!

  “O give thanks unto the LORD, for he is good”

  To prepare for the colony’s autumn thanksgiving observance, Governor Bradford dispatched a four-man hunting party to obtain game for the celebration. The hunters returned wit
h a week’s supply of “waterfowl” and “wild Turkeys.” Added to the event’s menu was a supply of venison, which was contributed by Pokanoket Indians. Chief Massasoit and more than ninety members of the tribe attended the celebration. Although they outnumbered the Pilgrims two to one, the Indians were “entertained and feasted” as honored guests by the Pilgrims, who now viewed the Pokanokets with little fear. Hosting the Pokanokets may have been more than simple friendship and diplomacy: the Pilgrims may also have felt biblically bound to extend hospitality to non-believers or “strangers”—as directed by the book of Deuteronomy: “And thou shalt rejoice in thy feast, thou, and thy son, and thy daughter, and thy servant, and thy maid, and the Levite and the stranger. . . .” If the celebration featured other foods normally consumed by the Plymouth colonists, it would have also included beaver, baked clams, lobster, cod, bass and other fish, Indian corn, peas, beans, cabbage, onions, parsnips, English cheese, porridge, biscuits, and corn-based hasty pudding. Typical beverages would have been ale and spring water.

  Thanksgiving, Pilgrim-style, was more than a simple meal—it was a three-day event. Like most seventeenth-century English people, Separatists and Puritans loved field sports, and the 1621 thanksgiving celebration featured sports activities—or “recreations,” as Edward Winslow called them. If the festivities followed the usual Puritan pattern, they included wrestling, foot-races, and jumping contests. The festival’s entertainment also included the use of firearms. Winslow reported that “we exercised our arms,” which may have referred to target-shooting or a firing demonstration for Massasoit and his Pokanokets. The event’s three-day length was unique: typical Puritan thanksgiving observances could go for a day or an entire week. It was normally preceded by a worship service, although Winslow made no reference to a service in his account of the 1621 event. It was very unlikely that his omission meant that the devout Pilgrims failed to worship; more likely, Winslow simply assumed that his readers understood Separatist practices. With their pastor, John Robinson, still in England, the thanksgiving worship service very likely would have been conducted by the Pilgrims’ spiritual leader, Elder William Brewster.

  The faith-based nature of the Pilgrims’ 1621 event was clearly demonstrated by the pattern they would later establish with numerous other thanksgiving observances. Two years later, for example, when a prolonged drought threatened the colony’s crops and survival, Plymouth’s magistrates called for a day of prayer and fasting, which Winslow recorded:

  To that end a day was set apart by public authority, and set apart from all other employments, hoping that the same God who had stirred us up hereunto, would be moved hereby in mercy to look down upon us, and grant the request of our dejected souls. . . . For though in the morning when we assembled together, the heavens were as clear and the drought as like to continue as ever it was; yet (our exercise continuing some eight or nine hours) before our departure the weather was over-cast, the clouds gathered together on all sides, and on the next morning distilled such soft, sweet, and mild showers of rain, continuing some fourteen days, and mixed with such seasonable weather as it was hard to say whither our weathered corn or drooping affections were most quickened or revived. Such was the bounty and goodness of our God.3

  The famous 1621 celebration at Plymouth was not the first thanksgiving in the New World or the Pilgrims’ first thanksgiving observance—but it was the first for the Pilgrims in America.

  STEDELIJK MUSEUM

  With similar sentiment, Winslow concluded his account of the Pilgrims’ original 1621 thanksgiving observance:

  Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, among other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming among us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, for whom three days we entertained and feasted; and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor and upon the captain and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want. . . .4

  “Three days we entertained and feasted”

  Governor Bradford would also later describe that first Thanksgiving in Plymouth Colony:

  They now began to gather in the small harvest they had, and to fit up their houses and dwellings against winter, being all well recovered in health and strength, and had all things in good plenty. For as some were employed in affairs abroad, others were exercised in fishing, about cod and bass and other fish of portion. All the summer there was no want, and now began to come in [a] store of fowl as winter approached, of which this place did about when they came first (but afterward decreased by degrees). And besides waterfowl, there was [a] great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many, besides venison, etc. Besides they had about a peck [of] meal a week to a person, or now since harvest, Indian corn to that proportion. [It] made many afterwards write so largely of their plenty here to their friends in England, which were not feigned but true reports.5

  “The Dawning . . . of This New World”

  New Arrivals Increase the Numbers at Plymouth Colony

  The alarm spread quickly: a ship had appeared in Cape Cod Bay and was sailing straight for Plymouth Harbor. It was mid-November, 1621, and the Pilgrims feared they were under attack by a French warship. At Governor Bradford’s order, an alarm gun was fired from Plymouth’s hilltop artillery battery. In response, Plymouth’s menfolk hurriedly abandoned their work, manned their body armor and took up their firearms. According to Edward Winslow, “every man, yea, boy, who could handle a gun, were ready, with full resolution. . . .” Soon, however, they all stood down—to their joy and relief, the approaching vessel was an English ship. It was, they soon learned, the fifty-five-foot-ton Fortune, and it had been sent from England by the Merchant Adventurers with some thirty-five new settlers for Plymouth Colony, including some of the Separatists who had been unable to sail on the packed Mayflower.

  Just as the Pilgrims had been shocked to see the approaching ship, so were the passengers aboard the Fortune—but for a different reason. Their first impression of the New England coast—as viewed from offshore—was sobering and disappointing: it was “a naked and barren place,” in their estimation. If they felt reassured by the sight of two rows of crude wooden cottages that made up most of Plymouth, their burst of optimism faded quickly when they learned of the many deaths among the Pilgrims and nearby presence of a large Indian population. So dismayed and frightened were some of the newcomers that they considered confiscating the ship’s sails to prevent it from leaving. They were eventually calmed by the Pilgrims’ reassurances—and a promise by the Fortune’s captain to transport them to Virginia if New England failed to satisfy them.

  In November of 1621, the Plymouth colonists were alarmed to see a distant ship approaching across Cape Cod Bay. Their fears soon turned to joy, however, when they realized that the ship—the Fortune—was bringing new colonists from England—along with old friends and relatives.

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  Some two weeks later, the Fortune departed, leaving behind new colonists at Plymouth. They had to be temporarily housed with Pilgrim families, and the additional numbers sorely taxed Plymouth’s winter rations, but their arrival not only added labor to Plymouth’s thin ranks of survivors, it also reunited families. Among those reunited were William Brewster and his thirty-seven-year-old son Jonathan, and Edward Winslow with his younger brother John. Also aboard the Fortune was Robert Cushman, the Pilgrims’ representative to the Merchant Adventurers, who had opted to remain in England the year before when the leaky Speedwell had to be abandoned.

  Cushman would not be staying; he was there to check on the colony, report back to the investors, and to deliver a charge to the Pilgrims to remain true to the
faith that had led them into the wilderness. He did so in a sermon that he personally delivered, and which was apparently received with humble acceptance by the survivors of the epic 1620 pilgrimage to America. It was reminiscent of the Bible-based advice given to them upon their departure for America by their beloved Pastor Robinson. It was entitled “the Sin and Dangers of Self-Love.” In it, Cushman warned the Pilgrims that the “bird of self-love, which was hatched at home, if not looked to, will eat out the life of all grace and goodness. . . .” In an obvious reference to the early Christian church as depicted in the second chapter of the book of Acts, he urged them to put aside self and serve one another: