Harvest Festival
In the early 1980s, every October I traveled from New York City to Plymouth, Massachusetts, to play a Dutchman. To be specific, I went from Nieuw Nederland op den Mannahatoes to Plimoth Plantation, where it’s always 1627, to impersonate the Opper Koopman, or Chief Trader, of the Nederlands West-Indische Kompagnie, who was also Gouvernor Pieter Minuit’s second-in-command. My character’s name was Isaack de Rasier, and his mission was to cement the alliance between the Dutch and the English in the New World against the French and the Spanish. But he was also supposed to take careful note of the general state of the English colony at Plimoth: the Dutch-English alliance was really a truce in a trade war which had been going on between the two countries since the reign of Queen Elizabeth. And that trade war could turn into a fighting war very quickly, if the balance of power in Europe shifted.
So Isaack de Rasier (his last name means “Razor”), with a retinue which included a senior representative of the Dutch Staaten-General who governed Holland, a military captain in a helmet and upper-body armor, armed with a rapier and a pistol, and two servants, both with muskets, and one also carrying a trumpet, showed up at the main gate in the log palisade which surrounded the village. The trumpeter sounded a salute, and the gate swung open.
All very impressive, to be sure, and the visitors to the reconstructed Pilgrim village loved the pageantry. But Governor Bradford, Elder Brewster, and the other Pilgrim leaders made it clear that the vainglorious display did not impress them, and Myles Standish, a professional soldier who was not a “Separatist Protestant,” but a member of the Church of England, met the Dutch contingent wearing full armor and carrying a musket on his shoulder. He matched de Rasier’s retinue with his own small armed band, and the negotiations, which would last for three days, began in a somewhat tense atmosphere. In fact, as de Rasier, I got into an argument over the right to trade with the Indians with Len Travers, who played Bradford, and when it turned out that the representative of the Staaten-General, played by a historian named Jeremy Bangs (who was fluent in Dutch, luckily for me), had written in his notebook a list of the arms available to the English, including the cannon on the roof of the fort-meeting-house, and the extra muskets stockpiled in a redoubt located at the intersection of the village’s two streets, Bradford and de Rasier lost their tempers and began shouting at each other. I drew my knife, Standish pulled his sword halfway out of its scabbard, and we might have started the Anglo-Dutch War of 1627, were it not for the man Thomas Prence. He stepped between us and said, “Oh, this is a brave thing, indeed! How it would please the Pope at Rome to see two Covenanted Christians at daggers drawn!” Shamed, the two of us sheathed our weapons and apologized. However, I learned later that the interpreter playing Thomas Prence was holding a knife behind his back, and under the table in Bradford’s house, Standish was aiming a charged pistol at my belly.
But peace prevailed, luckily for the course of history, and later that day I addressed the assembled villagers outside, presenting them with gifts I had brought, which included bolts of good Holland linen, and belts of wampumpeag, beads of different colors, which the Mannahatoes of Nieuw Nederland used for money. The Wampanoags, represented by their sachem, Massasoit, had heard of it, but had never tried to make it; Massasoit was grateful. Of particular interest to me, as de Rasier, were the beaver pelts presented by the Indians, which had been made into fashionable hats by the Dutch and English since the Elizabethan era. King James I wears one in one of his portraits.
A note on the Native Americans involved in the so-called First Thanksgiving story: “Massasoit” is a title meaning Great Sachem; the sachem’s name was Ousamequin. And his tribe was the Pokanoket, not the Wampanoag – that name wasn’t used until King Philip, or Metacom, united the present-day Massachusetts and Rhode Island Indians and went to war against the English interlopers in 1675. Squanto, or Tisquanto, was a Pawtucket captured by Captain John Smith, who planned to sell him as a slave to the Jamaican sugar-cane planters. He escaped and made his way to Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod, and met the Pilgrims there. He guided them to Plimoth, and discovered on the way that almost everyone in his tribe had died of smallpox introduced by Basque fishermen several years before.
William Bradford called himself and his followers Pilgrims, but only in a metaphorical sense, since they had traveled far to find religious freedom. In referring to his people, he used the terms “Separatist Protestants” or “Covenanted Christians,” the last referring to the Compact they had drawn up and signed aboard the Mayflower.
The big feast (celebrated in early October when all the crops had been harvested) wasn’t called Thanksgiving. The Separatists had thanksgivings – days of prayer and worship in the fortified meeting-house, led by Elder Brewster – whenever something important to the survival of the colony happened: a good harvest, for example, or the renewal of its charter by the British Crown. The feast was a Harvest Festival of the kind they had celebrated in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire.
Tisquanto wasn’t present; he’d returned to the surviving Pawtuckets in what is now Rhode Island. The Pokanokets far outnumbered the English at the feast, and it was fortunate for the Pilgrims that Ousemaquin was losing a long war with the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, and regarded the heavily-armed Englishmen as potential allies. He was particularly impressed by the cannon mounted on the meeting-house roof.
The Pokanockets brought most of the food: venison, geese, and ducks, but no turkeys. The English contributed roast pork and beef (the Mayflower had been almost as crowded with animals as with people), and fruit pies with cornmeal crusts. They also supplied copious amounts of beer; they had brought hops and barley with them on the voyage from England, and one of the first things they did upon landing at Plimoth was to start brewing. In European cities like London and Leipzig, where the Pilgrims lived for awhile after fleeing England, the water was foul unless it was boiled, and people drank beer instead. The beer at the colony was powerful stuff, and it was usually watered down slightly so that the settlers could maintain their puritanical sobriety during the day. But they drank it full-strength when the day’s work was done. During my first visit as de Rasier, Len Travers (Bradford) played a little trick on me, giving me a large tankard of unwatered beer to drink with my breakfast of bread and cheese. I drained it happily, and found myself a bit snockered when I left his house to meet the other villagers. But back then, I drank beer every day at home, and had the gut to prove it. I got through my prepared speeches and improvised conversations without slurring. I think Len was a little disappointed.
The dialect spoken at Plimoth Plantation was early modern English, and it had an accent very similar to contemporary Boston Irish, which is also prevalent at present-day Plymouth. Hence, many of the regular interpreters as Plimoth’s “Living History Museum” are locals; I was “imported” from New York because of a family connection to the people who ran the place, and as a professional actor, I was paid Equity minimum for the duration of my visits. Unfortunately, shortly after my fourth visit, a fire damaged many of the village’s buildings and killed some of its livestock. The village was rebuilt, but two factors contributed to the board’s decision not to ask me back. First, it was cheaper to cast one of the regular impersonators as de Rasier, rather than paying union wages to an outsider. And second, under pressure from the Native American Movement, the Pockanoket village near the English settlement was greatly expanded, and staffed with Indians in period costume, who actually spoke Wampanoag, which had been originally resurrected using John Winslow’s English-Wampanoag lexicon and later restored as a living language, still spoken (along with English) by members of the tribe.
It’s all to the good that the Native village became more popular with visitors than the English settlement. Despite the ghastly Trump years, when the Mango Mussolini preached white supremacy to his knuckle-walking supporters, Native lives, like Black lives, matter more than ever before, and President-elect Biden has pledged to make amends to those whom Trump persecuted and indirectly killed by sanctioning police brutality.
But as I write, the Covid-19 virus is still raging, and although there is a promising vaccine in the works, it won’t be available until it has been thoroughly tested, which will take months. The number of cases in Massachusetts are diminishing, but that’s because people are wearing masks and practicing social distancing. Plimoth Plantation may open again next spring, but in a very restricted form, with no meetings in closed spaces, and all the interpreters wearing masks, like doctors avoiding the 1667 Great Plague in London.
I was fortunate to have had the privilege of playing Isaack de Rasiers for eight years at the Plantation. It was one of the best acting jobs I ever had. And I hope that when Trump’s Disease, in every sense of the phrase, has finally been conquered, Plimoth Plantation will regain its preeminence among living history museums. Meanwhile, my wife Patsy and I will cook Thanksgiving dinner for ourselves, without turkey. Neither of us like it very much.