Published November 13, 2020

Being thus arrived in a good harbor, and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees and blessed God of Heaven who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean, and delivered them from all the perils and miseries thereof again to set their feet on the firm and stable earth.
 William Bradford, Of Plimouth Plantation, 1620-1647

Early Pilgrims gather to thank their God. (Courtesy Photo)

By ARNOLD KOCH

According to Lisa Wolfinger, director of The History Channel’s “Desparate Crossing: The Untold Story of the Mayflower,” “the event that we call Thanksgiving and the people we call the Pilgrims (have) been so mythologized that there are few facts left. We were able to go back to the original source material and look at what really happened from the words of the people who participated.”

 “There was something about the Pilgrims that made them succeed against all odds. They were young, energetic and smart. They were the radical intelligentsia of their day. They defied everything they had known and grown up with.”

They were religious separatists believing it was God’s will that they complete the voyage to the New World and start a new church and build a society where they could worship their God as God needed to be worshiped.

But they paid a heavy price. Half the colony died that first winter.

If you were one of the 102 passengers on the Mayflower, along with chickens and goats, you lived for 65 days on a 90-foot-long ship in a space that was 5 feet high. Faced with westerly winds and many storms, most were seasick.

For the Pilgrims, Thanksgiving was a day to pray and thank the Lord. “It wasn’t a day when you would eat a lot and carouse with your buddies,” says Wolfinger. To her, it’s somewhat of a mystery how this one three-day event, the first harvest feast, between the Wampanoag Indians and the English settlers turned into the myth we have today about the first Thanksgiving.

“Putting the myth aside, it was a peaceful gathering of two cultures.

There are so few instances in American history where that happened. That in itself makes it remarkable.”

For many years, there was no regular Thanksgiving Day in the U.S.

It was a woman, Mrs. Sarah Josipha Hale, editor of Gody’s Lady’s Book, who campaigned for 30 years to make it a national holiday. In 1863, President Lincoln declared it “a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father.”

The landing on Plymouth Rock is another enigma. In 1741, 95-year-old Thomas Faunce was carried to the waterfront, where a pier was about to be built over an undistinguished rock. With great emotion, he said he had been told by his father, who had arrived in Plymouth in 1623, that it was where the Pilgrims first landed. Maybe so.

The Rock itself has had a tortuous life. In 1774, it was decided to dig it up. While being loaded into a wagon, it broke in half. Half of it was taken to the town square. In 1834, what remained had been significantly downsized by hammer-wielding souvenir hunters. While being moved to a safer location at the newly built Pilgrim Hall, it fell off the vehicle and broke again. It was finally pieced together with cement and mounted in front of the hall.

The story of the Pilgrims and their colony did not end with the first Thanksgiving. In his best-seller, and winner of the National Book Award, Nathaniel Philbrick described in “Mayflower” the 55-year tragic and heroic epic that followed, including the terrible fury and cost of King Philip’s War, “one of the deadliest wars ever fought on American soil.”

Philbrick says it is unclear what triggered Philip (son of Massasoit, the Pilgrims’ friend) to start a war. He had had a long series of reversals as a leader. He had been selling off large amounts of Indian land between 1665 and 1675, which, in effect, had removed the Indians from their territory as if at gunpoint. And, as the Pilgrims no longer had a daily struggle for survival, they had begun to take the Indians for granted. For the Indians, it had become “there goes the neighborhood.”

Christianity was also a threat to sachems like Philip. It threatened to cut off the steady supply of tribute he had come to depend on. His father had distrusted Christianity so much that he tried to stipulate in his final land sales that the missionaries stop converting his people. The original Pilgrims had done little to convert the Indians to Christianity, but for the Puritans, it was a priority. Missionary John Eliot developed Praying Town communities to indoctrinate Indians in Christianity.

King Philip’s war lasted three years, pitting the English settlers and their Indian allies against King Philip and his Indian allies. At one time, as many as 1,500 of Philip’s Indians attacked Rehoboth, burning 40 houses, 30 barns and two mills. In Springfield, only 13 of more than 75 houses and barns remained after a raid. March of 1676 was the worst as Indians banded together for raids that reached from the Connecticut River Valley to Maine and into Connecticut. Close to 1,000 Indians attacked a British force near the Blackstone River, killing 55. Nine captured English were tortured to death at a place still known today as Nine Men’s Misery. Earlier, in what was known as the Great Swamp Fight, the English had double the casualty rate of the American forces at D-Day.

King Philip was eventually killed in a swamp near present-day Mt. Hope, R.I. His head was placed on a fence at the town fort in Plymouth, where it was a fixture for more than two decades. As early as 1675, there were slave ships with captured Indians sailing from New England. It was determined that “no male captive above the age of 14 years should reside in the colony.”

Sending them to almost certain death on a Caribbean sugar plantation was felt to be better than execution. Also, selling slaves helped pay for the war. For the Plymouth magistrates, enslaving a rebellious population was nothing new. It had been going on in Ireland for decades. Cromwell had sent large numbers of Irish, Welsh and Scottish slaves to the West Indies.

John Eliot was one of the few to object. “To sell souls for money seems a dangerous merchandise. To sell the Indians away from all means of grace…is the way for us to be active in destroying…their souls.”

It’s been estimated that at least 1,000 Indians were sold into slavery. Fifty-six years after the sailing of the Mayflower, the Pilgrims’ children had defeated their Indian opponents in a devastating war and had taken measures to purge the land of them.

During the war, the English had a higher percentage of casualties among their male population (8 percent) than we did in either the Civil War or WWII. The Indian population fared even worse. Philbrick writes that “0verall, the Native American population of southern New England had sustained a loss (from battle, sickness, starvation, and slavery of somewhere between 60 and 80 percent. Philip’s local squabble with Plymouth Colony had mutated into a region-wide war that had done nearly as much damage to the Native population as the plagues of 1616-1618.”

Native New Englanders, including tribes that participated in King Philip’s War, were eventually granted federal recognition, which led to their highly profitable gambling casinos. They finally came out winners.

P. S. Allow me a humorous personal aside. When I was a child and the turkey was laid out on the dinner table, I really believed that it was fed on bread that was still inside…the logic of a child.