Thanksgivings
As we Americans recover from our annual celebration of shameless gluttony, it’s a good time to bring up some of the facts and fictions about Thanksgiving. First, the holiday as we celebrate it has little to do with the Pilgrims. On Thursday, November 26th, 1863, Abraham Lincoln declared a day of thanksgiving in gratitude for the Union victory at Gettyburg, which turned the tide of the Civil War. Sarah Josepha Hale, a crusader for women’s education who helped to found Vassar College, and a noted journalist and writer (she penned “Mary Had A Little Lamb”) wrote a letter to Lincoln asking him to make the fourth Thursday of every November Thanksgiving Day. Hale’s letter reminded the President that by late November, the harvest had been reaped in both the North and the South, and her argument was persuasive. To “heal the wounds of the Nation,” therefore, Lincoln made Thanksgiving Day an annual event.
As for the Pilgrims, the term for the first English colonizers of what became Massachusetts was coined by their governor, William Bradford, in his account of the first years of the settlement, Of Plimoth Plantation, completed in 1651. They were pilgrims, he said, because their arduous voyage to the New World on the Mayflower resembled those of earlier religious travelers to the Holy Land. However, their journey was a flight, not a voluntary trip:
by 1620, the Church of England had begun persecuting dissenters severely, often hanging them if they did not abjure their heretical beliefs.
Bradford and his people called themselves Separatists, to underline their opposition not only to the Anglicans, but also to other Protestant subsects, such as the Anabaptists, the Arians, and the Puritans. The latter, led by John Winthrop, left England in 1629 and founded Boston. In time, the Puritans would become as intolerant and cruel as the Church of England or even the Roman Catholics, executing heretics and people suspected of practising witchcraft, as happened in Salem at the end of the century. But Elder William Brewster, the Separatists’ minister, preached, if not tolerance, at least moderation, and people who did not subscribe to Separatist tenets were simply asked to leave the colony – unless they were indispensible, like the doughty soldier-of-fortune Myles Standish, a nominal Anglican who became Plimoth Plantation’s military leader.
The Separatists of Plimoth held thanksgivings every time there was something to be thankful for: a member’s recovery from an illness, the safe delivery of a baby, and, in particular, a bounteous harvest. Starvation was a looming threat in the early years, for although they had brought seeds with them, the climate of Massachusetts was far harsher than that of their native Nottinghamshire, and the growing season was shorter. It was God’s “wonder-working Providence,” they believed, that as they explored today’s Provincetown on Cape Cod, the site of the Mayflower’s first landing, they met Tisquanto, the last survivor of the Nauset tribe that had been wiped out by smallpox introduced by English cod fishermen. He led them to Massasoit Ousemequin, the sachem of the Wampanoags, who, in turn, impressed by the cannons aboard the ship and the muskets, swords, and halberts carried by Standish and all the younger men of the colony, took the settlers under his wing, hoping to enlist their aid and their weapons in his war against the Mohawks, the most aggressive of the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy.
The Mohawks, originally from what is now upper New York State and southern Québec, were a force to be reckoned with. Unlike most Native American tribes, who raided one another continually, but haphazardly, the Mohawks organized their fighters into disciplined bands that slaughtered all the men and children of the tribes they conquered, and enslaved their women as breeding stock. They were armed with bows, arrows, tomahawks, and spears, and they had already begun to obtain muskets from the French settlers in Canada, who had their own territorial designs on the northeastern area of North America, and were determined to drive out the English.
Samoset was an Abanaki, a tribe allied with the Wampanoags in the war with the Mohawks, and he became Massasoit’s envoy to the fledgling Plymouth colony. He shared his knowledge of fish and plants with them, showing them how to catch mehaden in seines and use them as fertilizer for corn seeds (“Indian corn,” or maize; it was unrelated to English barleycorn, but equally versatile and nutritious). By 1627, Plimoth Plantation was on a firm footing.
For eight successive Octobers during the 1980s, I traveled from New York to the reconstruction of the Pilgrims’ settlement on the coast of Massachusetts Bay, where it is always 1627. The little village, just outside modern Plymouth, was staffed by interpreters who played some of the men and women kmown to have lived there at the time, such as Governor Bradford, Captain Standish, and the indentured servant John Howland (one of my wife Patsy’s ancestors). My character was Isaak de Rasieres (or de Razier – the spelling varies in Bradford’s later account of the colony’s early years). De Rasieres was the chief trading officer of the fledgling Dutch colony at the tip of Manhattan Island, Nieu Nederland op den Mannahatoes), and its second in command, under Pieter Minuit. Minuit sent him to the better-established English settlement to discuss settlement rights along the northeastern seaboard, trade with the local Indians, and cooperation in the event of aggression by Spanish and French colonies in North America. His mission also included a bit of spying: the Anglo-Dutch alliance was of recent vintage, since the Dutch and the English were fierce, often bloody competitors as they sought to expand their colonies on the islands of the South China Sea and those of the Caribbean. It was only the greater threat of attack from the south by the Spanish, or an incursion from the north by the French that prompted a truce, and it was fragile, more a détente than a pact. Secretly, de Rasieres had been enjoined to evaluate the quality and quantity of Plimoth Plantation’s weaponry, how many of its men were of fighting age, and how well trained they were.
What he found, as he reported to Samuel Bloemmaert, his immediate superior at the Dutch West India Company, was alarming. The English in Plimoth were more numerous and far better organized that the gaggle of self-interested traders in Manhattan. Their village was surrounded by a stout palisade of heavy logs; their meeting house doubled as a fort, with cannons mounted on its flat roof that commanded the waters offshore, making any approach by a hostile ship perilous. And their young men, all supplied with muskets and swords, were drilled several times a week by the redoubtable Standish. To make matters worse, they were allied with Massasoit’s Wampanoags, some of whom visited frequently, whereas Dutch relations with the Lenni-Lenape were uneasy. During de Rasieres’ visit, he met Hobbamock, a sub-chief of the Wampanoags, and Massasoit’s envoy.
The English, he realized, had started a permanent colony, and were fully prepared to defend themselves. Another shipload of settlers, including women and children, was expected soon, and meanwhile, in their time off from fishing and tending their crops, the men of Plimoth were busily building sturdy frame houses. By contrast, the Dutch at the tip of Manhattan, huddled behind the wooden barricade that later gave its name to Wall Street, were all young bachelors living in wretched hovels, trying to get rich by trading shiny buttons and other cheap knick-knacks from Holland, along with beads made of nacre, the iridescent purple part of oyster shells, which the Lenni-Lenape used as a form of money, in return for beaver skins to make into the hats worn by wealthy people in Europe, men and women alike. De Rasieres advised Bloemmaert that if Holland wanted to compete successfully in the New World with England, the Estates General who governed the country, and the directors of the West India Company, had to start sending married couples, complete with children, who were willing to stay, instead of hastening back to the Netherlands as soon as they’d made some money.
It was sound advice, but Holland would not act upon it until Minuit was replaced by Pieter Stuyvesant, the bluff, ruthless ex-soldier who had lost a leg fighting the Spanish. By that time, relations with the Lenni-Lenape had soured, so Pegleg Pieter did his best to exterminate them, laying down a pattern that European settlers – or invaders – of North America would follow for the next two hundred and fifty years.
But at the time of de Rasieres’ visit in October of 1627, the English in Plimoth Plantation were at peace with the Wampanoags, the crops had been safely gathered home, and Bradford’s people held a harvest festival. Of course there was a solemn ceremony of thanksgiving in the fort-meeting-house, with Elder Brewster delivering a long sermon, but visitors to the reconstructed village are spared that. However, they are subjected to something even more painful: watching other people eat when you’re hungry yourself. I hasten to add that reasonably-priced food which passes FDA standards is available to the tourists in the administration building. Plimoth Plantation is a privately-owned, for-profit organization, and tickets to enter the village are quite pricey. What the interpreters are eating, at their trestle table (set up outdoors, if the weather’s fair, or in the meeting house if it isn’t) is excellently prepared by the women of the staff, but because it’s cooked authentically, meaning by hands that aren’t wearing plastic gloves, using knives, cleavers, pots and pans that haven’t been sterilized to restaurant standards, there would be a feeding-frenzy of legal sharks if a tourist ate some of it and got sick.
I relished the food I ate, as de Rasiers, during those harvest feasts. There were savories such as blueberry and strawberry compotes that I spooned from earthenware jars and spread on cornbread, “sallets” of late-season greens, pease porridge, salt beef thoroughly rinsed in freshwater before being heated, sliced and served, venison steaks allegedly supplied by Hobammock and his Indians, but actually bought from local deer hunters. The roast pork was another subterfuge: the village did indeed have a pig sty, but its boar, sows, and piglets were also interpreters, of a sort, and too valuable to be slaughtered. So the pork came from a local supermarket.
But the pumpkin pies (Bradford called the grand orange gourds “pompions”) were prepared and baked on site, and the cream, whipped by hand, came from the plantation’s two milch cows, who were, like the pigs, teaching aids, too important to killed and eaten – hence the salt beef which visitors were (erroneously) told had come over on the Mayflower.
We drank beer, because in the 17th century, the water in the rivers and streams of England were too polluted by animal and human waste to be potable. One of the first things the Separatists had done after they made safe harbor in Plymouth was to set up a brewery, using the hops and barley malt they had brought with them.
We also “drank” tobacco, as smoking the “Indian weed” was called back then, because it was said to exhilerate the senses and expand the mind like wine. As a Dutchman, I had a short-stemmed clay pipe stuck in the band of my beaver hat, and after supping with Governor Bradford in his house, he pulled down a twist of tobacco that had been drying above his hearth, and filled our pipes. We pulled twigs out of his kindling pile, ignited them in the fire, and lit up. It was a pretty harsh smoke, and Len Travers, playing Bradford, didn’t inhale. I did, because I’m addicted to cigarettes. I coughed like a consumptive, and restricted myself thereafter to cautious sips.
The one thing that was conspicuous by its absence at the harvest festival meal was turkey. Hobbamock’s people ate turkeys when they managed to kill one, but the big birds were fast on their feet and even more elusive when they took to their wings. In addition, wild turkey meat, unlike the Butterballs raised on factory farms today, is stringy and full of bones. The Wampanoags preferred venison, fish, and small quail they trapped with nets, roasted, and ate whole.
Benjamin Franklin admired the resourcefulness and intelligence of turkeys, and proposed them at the first meeting of the Continental Congress as the United States’ national bird. One can only wonder what this country might have become if the predatory, carrion-eating eagle hadn’t been adopted instead.