A Thanksgiving story

Wishing all of you in this incredible community a happy Thanksgiving! I am so very grateful for your continue support. Thank you.

I hope you enjoy this Thanksgiving story…

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Illustration depicting Squanto, serving as guide and interpreter for the English Pilgrims at the Plymouth colony, circa 1621. (Kean Collection/Archive Photos/Getty Images)

They knew the waters were filled with cod, but they caught none. The seamen among the slightly more than 100 passengers – a mix of religious seekers, adventurers and entrepreneurs – dreamed aloud about the riches to be obtained from the astounding number of breaching whales.

Land had been sighted two days earlier. The passengers noted the forested shores as their badly damaged ship inched forward and dropped anchor in a shallow and circular bay 500 miles off course. They had sailed to the edge of history and the beginning of a new age, but the occasion lacked the grandeur of later commemorations.

They were not at Plymouth Rock. Like all stories, there is more.

They arrived on November 11th.

The temperature had turned towards winter when the Mayflower dropped anchor and swung on the thick creaking rope and casings; at rest and close to land. The ocean waters were already freezing, and the shallowness of the bay imposed a long walk to shore for the apprehensive, ambitious, and anxious passengers.

Only half of them were pilgrims seeking religious freedom from the persecutions of King Charles II, and they had little in common with their shipmates.

They were not coming ashore in the Virginia colony established 13 years earlier at Jamestown. They were unaware that the first Black slaves had arrived there aboard Dutch merchant vessels the year before.

They were also likely unaware that the Indigenous population of Wampanoag Indians was terrified of them. Six years earlier 20 men from Patuxet had been lured onto a ship by an evil man named Thomas Hunt who kidnapped them, chained them in the bowels of the ship, and took them to Spain to be sold into slavery.

The 102 passengers would also have been unaware of what the Wampanoag called the “Great Dying.” Between 1616 and 1619, a great plague devastated the tribal population by killing tens of thousands of people from the present-day Maine coast to Cape Cod.

They were also unaware that among the naive Wampanoag that there was a single man who had been to London and spoke English. His name was Tisquantum, and he was the only kidnapped Wampanoag to ever return to Patuxet from across the Atlantic Ocean.

When Squanto, as he came to be known, approached the pilgrims in 1621, his ability to speak English was described by William Bradford in his book “Of Plymoth Plantation,” as a “special instrument sent of God.”

Similarly, when the starving English sailors foraged for food and found the buried winter food stores of the Wampanoag, it was attributed to God’s providence. It then led to the first shootout and exchange of arrows with the Indigenous population, but that came later.

Before anyone left the ship, 41 male passengers gathered and signed an agreement. It was called a ‘compact.’ It obligated all of them towards the general good, majority rule and a rule of law.

They were not part of a military expedition, or bound to each other in any manner beyond a mutuality of shared interest, which could only be protected by common agreement and a shared conviction that, together, they were stronger than apart.

They smashed the feudal age with a pen stroke. Before spring, half of them would be dead. The first baby came soon after their arrival. He was named Peregrine.

This is how the 19th century American historian Benson John Lossing described the condition of the 102 passengers within months of their arrival and ultimate perseverance:

After many hardships ... the Pilgrim Fathers first set foot December, 1620 upon a bare rock on the bleak coast of Massachusetts Bay, while all around the earth was covered with deep snow ... Dreary, indeed, was the prospect before them. Exposure and privations had prostrated one half of the men before the first blow of the ax had been struck to build a habitation. ... One by one perished. The governor and his wife died in April 1621; and on the first of that month, forty-six of the one hundred emigrants were in their graves, nineteen of whom were signers of the Mayflower Compact.

The simple truth is that none would have survived but for the grace of the kidnapped Tisquantum, who did not seek revenge, but relationship and understanding.

He was the negotiator, interpreter and teacher between two alien cultures who could not comprehend one another. In the end, he aligned himself with the English against his people, who were the first of many tribes to be manipulated and abused by English common law. The pilgrims survived with fortitude, perseverance and grace from a kidnapped Indian.

The Wampanoag were devastated and manipulated by the English they saved and the ambitions of humans between them to improve their situation.

The pilgrims were far from tolerant, and did not land in North America to evangelize political liberty. They did, however, accomplish something extraordinary. They built a new civilization from the wilderness that would become the United States.

Time and time again, American leaders would return to the spot where America’s first sins and hopes could be traced back towards. When they came it was to talk about what had been endured, learned, and the accumulated wisdom to discern where next to go. The pilgrims did not find paradise or build utopia. They struggled, murdered, stole, loved, died and built. The survivors had children, and those children married and had families.

They spread out and built a colony that built schools and churches and meeting rooms for discussion about mutual interests and disputes. They built a foundation that has been passed down and one that gives license to daring, dreaming and adventure.

Fortitude, courage, determination and their achievements should never be obscured because of the frailties of human beings. The greatness of their achievements is ratified by the endurance of both the legacy of the pilgrims and Wampanoag people through 400 years. What more decisive proof could there be.

Two hundred years passed from 1620 to 1820, but what happened in that bay was remembered and celebrated because a new civilization had taken root there. It was unique in the annals of human history. It deserved both commemoration and castigation.

Daniel Webster was a modern man. He felt no confusion or indifference towards the evil of American slavery.

He understood its incompatibility with freedom, and that is why he spoke of slavery from the place where American freedom was born.

The United States was nearly 50 years old in 1820 when Webster asked his audience to imagine and journey 100 years into the future with him for a conversation with our ancestors. Think about that. His future was an imagination. You will read it as history.

George Washington had been dead for a generation, and Adams and Jefferson were nearing the ends of their long lives when Webster said:

And when from the long distance of a hundred years, they shall look back upon us, they shall know, at least, that we possessed affections, which running backward and warming with GRATITUDE for what our ancestors have done for our happiness, run forward also to our posterity and meet them with cordial salutation, ere yet they have arrived on the shore of being.

Advance, then, ye future generations.

We would hail you, as you rise in your long succession, to fill the places we now fill, and to taste the blessings of existence where we are passing, and soon shall have passed, our own human duration.

My friends, do you see? He was welcoming you, not yet born, to your inheritance. He was proclaiming your most important gift. You are an American. He was talking about the father of the man who would lead American soldiers onto Utah Beach, while that man’s son fought on Omaha Beach, but all of that was to come.

In 1907, the 47-year-old president of the United States of America arrived in the shallow circular bay from his home at Oyster Point aboard the presidential yacht Mayflower.

His name was Teddy Roosevelt.

News reports said the thunder from the guns of eight American battleships could be heard 60 miles away. They saluted the president who had ordered their hulls painted white before sending them on a global circumnavigation to demonstrate the power and reach of the sprawling republic that was being transformed daily by the greatest wave of immigration in human history.

Today, the Pilgrim Monument dominates the skyline in Provincetown, Massachusetts. It is the place from which a great tide of human progress and freedom arose.

John Winthrop’s “City on a Hill,” 1630

Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God.

For this end, wee must be knit together, in this work, as one man.

We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of other’s necessities.

Wee must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make other’s conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labour and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body.

So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. The Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as his own people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways.

So that we shall see much more of his wisdom, power, goodness and truth, then formerly we have been acquainted with. We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when he shall make us a prayer and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, “the Lord make it like that of New England.”

For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill.

The eyes of all people are upon us.

So that if wee shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.

We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God, and all professors for God’s sake. We shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land where we are going.

I shall shut up this discourse with that exhortation of Moses, that faithful servant of the Lord, in his last farewell to Israel, Deut. 30.

Beloved there is now set before us life and good, Death and evil, in that we are commanded this day to love the Lord our God, and to love one another, to walk in his ways and to keep his Commandments and his Ordinance and his laws, and the articles of our Covenant with him, that we may live and be multiplied, and that the Lord our God may bless us in the land where we go to possess it.

But if our hearts shall turn away, so that wee will not obey, but shall be seduced, and worship and serve other Gods, our pleasure and profits and serve them; it is propounded unto us this day, we shall surely perish out of the good land where we pass over this vast sea to posses. Therefore let us choose life that we, and our seed may live, by obeying His voice and cleaving to Him, for He is our life and our prosperity.

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