followed the Mass was provided largely by the Timucua. The Timucua were excellent hunters, according to the Jacksonville Historical Society, and they also maintained large granaries in which they stored food they had grown, such as corn, beans, and squash. Their diet was rich in seafood, including oysters, shrimp, and mullet, along with the occasional alligator, which they preferred to eat smoked.14
The year after the Huguenots gave thanks in Florida, their colony was wiped out by Spanish raiders sent by Philip II. These were the same men, led by General Menéndez, who celebrated a thanksgiving upon their arrival in Florida in 1565. The king had issued orders to “hang and burn the Lutherans,” the word “Lutheran” being a catchall Spanish term for Protestants. Menéndez obliged.
Popham Colony, Maine. New England has just one rival to Plymouth for the title of First Thanksgiving. That event took place in 1607, at an English settlement founded where the Kennebec River meets the Atlantic Ocean—about twenty-five miles northeast of what is now the city of Portland. Arriving there in late summer, the Popham Colony settlers built Fort St. George and joined with local Abenaki Indians that autumn for a prayer meeting and feast of local seafood.
The colony of about one hundred Englishmen was named after its main financial backer, Sir John Popham, and his nephew, Captain George Popham, who served as the colony’s president. Half the settlers returned to England in December when it became clear that their winter provisions were inadequate. The others followed suit the next year. No one knows why the remaining colonists gave up and went home. Perhaps they didn’t want to face another harsh New England winter, or maybe relations with the Indians had soured. There also appears to have been a leadership vacuum after George Popham died in February 1608, and then, several months later, his successor decided to return to England upon learning that he had inherited an estate.
Popham Colony has been called the early American settlement that history forgot. Archeologists found the remnants of the settlement, including Fort St. George, only in 1994, working from a map that had been discovered in a library in Madrid in 1888.15
Jamestown, Virginia. In June 1610, the starving colonists of Jamestown held a Thanksgiving prayer service to give thanks for the arrival of an English supply ship carrying desperately needed food. The winter of 1609–1610 had been so severe that most of the colonists died. Fewer than one hundred of the five hundred original colonists survived.
There is one more thanksgiving celebrated by Europeans in the New World that bears mention as one of the earliest recorded in North America. It happened in Canada. The year was 1578, during the third voyage of Martin Frobisher, an English explorer who was seeking the fabled Northwest Passage to the Pacific Ocean. The location of the event was just off the southeast corner of Baffin Island, now part of the province of Nunavut, in the area that would be named Frobisher Bay.
It was summer, but the subarctic weather was fierce, and Frobisher’s fleet of fifteen ships had been scattered. On July 31, 1578, after safely sailing past “a great island of ice” at the entrance to the harbor, Frobisher encountered two ships that he feared had been lost. The men “greatly rejoiced” at their “happy meeting.” Then they “highly praised God” and, falling to their knees, “gave Him due, humble and hearty thanks.” The minister traveling with them “made unto them a godly sermon, exhorting them especially to be thankful to God for their strange and miraculous deliverance in those so dangerous places” and “willed them to enjoy and accept thankfully whatsoever adventure his divine Providence should appoint.”16
In assessing the challengers for the title of First Thanksgiving, it is important to remember the obvious: The true First Thanksgivings in what became the United States were celebrated not by new arrivals from Europe, but by the indigenous people who had resided in North America for thousands of years. There is no written record of such events, but tribal traditions and ethnological research indicate that Native American tribes practiced thanksgiving rituals at the harvest season as well as at other times of the year. The Green Corn Festival still celebrated by a number of tribes is one example. One Indian authority describes it as a religious ceremony in which the early corn is presented as a sacred offering to the Great Spirit.
Pilgrim Edward Winslow provides an intriguing look at the spiritual beliefs of the Wampanoag and how they gave thanks in his book Good Newes from New England, first published in 1624. On his way home to Plymouth after caring for the Wampanoag sachem Massasoit while he was gravely ill, Winslow stopped overnight at the home of another Indian leader, Conbatant, whom he described as a “notable politician, yet full of merry jests.”
Winslow and Conbatant hit it off. They enjoyed each other’s company and their discussions ranged widely, facilitated by Hobbamock, the Wampanoag who served as the Pilgrims’ chief interpreter. At dinner, Conbatant, observing that Winslow bowed his head and spoke some words before and after the meal, asked what he was doing. He was praying, Winslow explained. A theological conversation ensued. Winslow described his Christian beliefs, which, he told Conbatant, dictated how he and his fellow Pilgrims at Plymouth lived their lives. He spoke of the Ten Commandments, of which Conbatant and his men expressed approval—all, that is, except the Seventh, the commandment against adultery, to which they objected on the ground of “too many inconveniences” in a man being tied to one woman.
“Whatsoever good things we had, we received from God,” who nourishes and strengthens our bodies, Winslow told Conbatant. That is the reason for bowing our heads and offering prayers of thanks before and after we eat, he explained. Conbatant and his men nodded their heads in agreement, saying they believed the same things. “The same power that we called God,” Winslow records, “they called Kiehtan.”17
These pre-Plymouth thanksgivings—Spanish, English, Huguenot, Native American—are all historically noteworthy, although none influenced the holiday that Americans celebrate today, except, perhaps, in the sense that they encouraged an attitude of gratitude and reinforced the custom of giving thanks to God. None of the early thanksgivings will supplant our familiar holiday either on the national calendar or in the hearts of Americans. Their significance lies in reminding us of our varied origins, the diversity of religious traditions in our pluralistic history, and the universality of the human wish to give thanks. They, too, are part of the American experience. The common thread among them is a desire to express gratitude to God even in the midst of hardship or misfortune.
Al Borrego of San Elizario could have been speaking for the partisans of all the competing First Thanksgivings when he said, “Our national Thanksgiving is not determined by when it happened. It’s based on what it’s about.”
America Discovers the Pilgrims
They knew they were pilgrims.
—William Bradford
It is impossible today to imagine Thanksgiving without the Pilgrims. The two are linked inextricably in the modern imagination. But this wasn’t always the case. The Pilgrims didn’t take their place at the Thanksgiving table until the nineteenth century.
The holiday we celebrate in late November
