as the location for the Pilgrims’ permanent settlement. Susanna and William chose a name for their son consistent with the circumstances of his birth. The name derives from the Latin word peregrinus, which means wanderer or foreigner, and is the source of the English word pilgrim. Like his fellow Pilgrims, little Peregrine was a stranger in a strange land. By the time of the First Thanksgiving in the late summer or early autumn of 1621, he would have been old enough to crawl.
Susanna White was one of eighteen Pilgrim wives who accompanied their husbands on the Mayflower. Several men left wives behind, planning to send for their families after they were established in America. Only four of the eighteen Mayflower wives survived to the time of the First Thanksgiving. Susanna lived, but her husband, William, died three months after Peregrine’s birth, during the wretched first winter in Plymouth.
All together, only half of the men, women, and children who had sailed on the Mayflower were still alive a year after landing in the New World. Many fell victim to an illness that scholars theorize was a virulent form of influenza. The Pilgrims called it “the great sickness.” Whatever it was, the weak, poorly nourished settlers started falling ill about two weeks after arriving in Plymouth. Most of the sick were crowded into the small common house that the settlers had managed to construct quickly. But not everyone could fit into it, so others were kept aboard the Mayflower, anchored in Plymouth Harbor. Both the ship and the common house were overcrowded, and the illness spread rapidly. The few people who stayed well had to prepare the food, get the water, and care for the sick.
As I examine the artifacts Patrick shows me, I wonder what role they might have played in the First Thanksgiving. Did Susanna set the cradle under the shade of a tree with baby Peregrine asleep inside, while she prepared food for the outdoor feasting? In The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth, Brownscombe paints Peregrine in his cradle, with Susanna seated nearby.
What of the cooking pot that belonged to Myles Standish and his late wife, Rose, who had died in January? Did the four surviving wives press the Standish cooking pot into service when they set about feeding the Pilgrims and their many Wampanoag guests? Constance Hopkins, then fourteen years old, surely lent a hand as the women worked. I can picture her wearing that wide-brimmed beaver hat with the peaked top. And what of Governor Bradford himself? Did he read aloud from his Bible to the assembled Pilgrims? Did he take a break from the hubbub and seek a quiet corner to read the Scriptures by himself?
Many of the Pilgrim artifacts have sorrowful stories associated with them—the cradle that rocked a fatherless child, the cooking pot that often would have been empty for lack of food to put in it, the sword whose owner was prepared to use it against the “savages” he expected to encounter. In the face of such sadness, deprivation, and terror, how is it that in the late summer or early autumn of 1621, the Pilgrims came together with grateful hearts to celebrate their first harvest in the New World and give thanks?
There are two eyewitness accounts of the First Thanksgiving. William Bradford, Plymouth’s longtime governor, penned one.2 Edward Winslow is the author of the other. Both accounts are brief but vivid. Bradford’s weighs in at one hundred sixty-seven words. Winslow’s is only one hundred fifty-one words.3 Read them and you find yourself in familiar territory. As described by the two Pilgrim leaders, the event that Americans have come to call the First Thanksgiving was remarkably similar to the holiday we mark today. There was feasting and game playing, and an all-round mood of good cheer.
In their separate accounts, Bradford and Winslow each make much of the bounty on hand in New England, an abundance that presages the dining tables at modern-day Thanksgiving dinners. Bradford tells of the “great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many.” He also notes the “cod and bass and other fish, of which they took good store.” Winslow offers an anecdote about the rich natural resources of the American continent that would have wowed his readers back in England. The governor dispatched a shooting party for the occasion, he writes, and the four Pilgrims killed enough birds in one day to serve the community for almost a week.
It is from Winslow that we learn that a large group of Wampanoag warriors joined the Pilgrim feast. In telling how the Pilgrims welcomed the Wampanoag to their celebration, Winslow homes in on other attributes of the holiday, then and now: hospitality, generosity, neighborliness. He describes, too, how the guests returned the favor. The Wampanoags’ “greatest king Massasoit” and his men “went out and killed five deer,” which they “bestowed on our Governor [Bradford], and upon the Captain [Myles Standish] and others.” So, too, a modern guest, upon accepting an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner, is likely to ask his host: What can I bring?
The central similarity between the First Thanksgiving and today’s holiday is something less tangible: the spirit of thankfulness. From the first, as Bradford and Winslow imply, Thanksgiving has been a time to stop and take stock of the blessings enjoyed by family and community. As the English settlers overcame the trials they faced that first year in Plymouth, qualities that Americans have come to honor as integral to our national identity were on full display: courage, perseverance, diligence, piety. These are the virtues that helped to shape the American character.
The Pilgrims displayed another virtue, one they practiced every day and which stood at the heart of the First Thanksgiving. Cicero called it the greatest of the virtues and the parent of all the rest: gratitude.
And yet, here is an odd thing—odd, at least, for the modern-day reader of the Pilgrims’ accounts. The word “thanksgiving” does not appear in either description. Neither Bradford nor Winslow referred to the feast as Thanksgiving.
If you could travel back in time to 1621, tap a Pilgrim on the shoulder, and ask him to define “Thanksgiving Day,” his answer might surprise you. For the Pilgrims, a “day of thanksgiving” was not marked by feasting, family, and fellowship—the happy hallmarks of the holiday we now celebrate. It was a different matter altogether.
The Pilgrims brought with them from England a religious custom of marking days of thanksgiving, along with their counterpart, days of fasting and humiliation. Days of thanksgiving, usually including a communal meal, were called in response to specific beneficences such as a successful harvest, propitious weather, or a military victory.4 Fast days were called to pray for God’s help and guidance in time of trouble or difficulty. For the Pilgrims, then, a “thanksgiving day” was imbued with religious meaning, and set aside for prayer and worship.
Some contemporary observers like to stress this historical usage, arguing that the event known today as the First Thanksgiving was therefore not a true “thanksgiving day.” These naysayers aren’t just being Thanksgiving Scrooges. They are right that the Pilgrims would not have viewed the harvest feast of 1621 as a thanksgiving in their understanding of the word. But it is also true that the spirit of gratitude was very much present on that occasion. The Pilgrims may not have called it a thanksgiving, but there is no reason we shouldn’t do so.
William DeLoss Love, a nineteenth-century scholar of the religious days of thanksgiving in New England, eloquently expressed this point of view when, in 1895, he wrote about the First Thanksgiving: “It was not a thanksgiving at all, judged by their Puritan customs, which they kept in 1621; but as we look back upon it after nearly three centuries, it seems so wonderfully like the day we love that we claim it as the progenitor of our harvest feasts.”5
The day we love, to use Love’s affectionate words, owes a debt to both of these traditions—the harvest feast of 1621 and the New England colonies’ religious days of thanksgiving.
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