In September 1620, a small Mayflower ship left Plymouth, England, carrying 102 passengers. After a treacherous crossing that lasted 66 days, they dropped anchor near the tip of Cape Cod, far north of their intended destination at the mouth of the Hudson River. One month later, the Mayflower crossed Massachusetts Bay, where the Pilgrims, as they are now commonly known, began to establish a village at Plymouth.
The first winter was brutal, and most of the colonists remained on board the ship, where they suffered from exposure, scurvy, and outbreaks of contagious disease. As a result, only half of the Mayflower’s original passengers and crew lived to see their first spring in New England. Then, in March, the remaining settlers moved ashore, where they received a great visit from an Abenaki Indian who greeted them in English. Several days later, he returned with another Native American, Squanto, a member of the Pawtuxet tribe who had been kidnapped by an English sea captain and sold into slavery before escaping to London and returning to his homeland on an exploratory expedition. Squanto taught the Pilgrims, weakened by malnutrition and illness, how to cultivate corn, extract sap from maple trees, catch fish in the rivers, and avoid poisonous plants.
Governor William Bradford organized a celebratory feast and invited a group of the fledgling colony’s Native American allies, including the Wampanoag chief Massasoit. Now remembered as America’s “first Thanksgiving” — although the Pilgrims may not have used the term then — the festival lasted three days. While no record exists of the historic banquet’s exact menu, the Pilgrim chronicler Edward Winslow wrote in his journal that Governor Bradford sent four men on a “fowling” mission in preparation for the event. The Wampanoag guests arrived bearing five deer. Historians have suggested that many dishes were likely prepared using traditional Native American spices and cooking methods. Because the Pilgrims had no oven and the Mayflower’s sugar supply had dwindled by the fall of 1621, the meal did not feature pies, cakes, or other desserts, which have become a hallmark of today’s celebrations. Additionally, surprising to many, turkey cannot be confirmed as the actual fowl that was part of the first Thanksgiving dinner.
Pilgrims Before the Mayflower
In 1608, a congregation of disgruntled English Protestants from Scrooby, Nottinghamshire, left England and moved to Leyden, a town in Holland. These “Separatists” did not want to pledge allegiance to the Church of England, which they believed was nearly as corrupt and idolatrous as the Catholic Church it had replaced. (They were not the same as the Puritans, who had many of the same objections to the English Church but wanted to reform it from within.) The Separatists hoped that in Holland, they would be free to worship as
they liked.
The Separatists (they called themselves “Saints”) did find religious freedom in Holland, but they also found a secular life that was more difficult to navigate than they’d anticipated. For one thing, Dutch craft guilds excluded the migrants, so they were relegated to menial, low-paying jobs. Even worse was Holland’s easygoing, cosmopolitan atmosphere, which proved alarmingly seductive to some of the Saints’ children. (These young people were “drawn away,” Separatist leader William Bradford wrote, “by evil example into extravagance and dangerous courses.”) For the strict, devout Separatists, this was the last straw. They decided to move again, this time to a place without government interference or worldly distraction: the “New World” across the Atlantic Ocean.
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