In this special Thanksgiving Episode, Host Julian G. Simmons lets Director Rob Wilson break his vow of silence to share a bit of family genealogy about the first Thanksgiving in 1621.  Rob had eight ancestors on the Mayflower.  His grandmother, Carol Green Wilson, meticulously catalogued that history, and passed it on to her 12 grandchildren.  As a ten year-old boy, Rob actually helped decipher the  tiny print to discover one of those connections.

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The Pilgrims were a distinct group from the Puritans, and people often confuse the two.  The word "Pilgrim" wasn't even known to this group, except as a generic term for a person who journeys to a sacred place for religious reasons.  What we call The Pilgrims were  known as "Separatists" and broke from the Church of England, (the  "Anglicans") , The Separatists chose to worship in secret, and came into increasing conflict with their neighbors, were ostracized, lost their land and homes.  Under King James I, Separatists were given huge fines and imprisoned for refusing to join the official church.  King James once declared "I will make them conform or I will harry them out of the land, or else worse—hang them.”  

This increasing persecution drove the Separatists out of England.  They fled to Holland, a more liberal religious haven.  But there they feared they children were being drawn into the looser morals and drifting away from their English ways.  They were treated as laborers and underlings by wealthy Dutch merchants.  So, they made plans to emigrate to the New World.  After a few false starts, and incurring a large debt to backers, they crossed the Atlantic on the Mayflower at the worst time of year -- sailing into wild, stormy seas, veering 200 miles off-course to land in a forbidding and freezing wilderness for which they were utterly unprepared.

 

The 102 passengers on the Mayflower were not, as myth suggests, a tight-knit congregation of God-fearing Christians, but a fractious assembly of 37 Separatists, their 21 servants (the oldest being 21, down to the youngest at 4 years old); 26 paying passengers recruited by the "London Merchant Adventurers " who funded the voyage; 6 of their servants, and a crew of ten.  Relentlessly rough seas and the unexpected brutality of the harsh winter killed almost half of those in their first year.  Besides that awful hardship, the Separatists were unable to send goods back to England to settle their debts.

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Julian gives a glimpse into the lives of the assembled community with a dramatic reading of a letter written written by Edward Winslow, one of the Separatists who was an emissary to the Wampanoag.  It reflects that idealistic time when Natives and whites depended on each other for survival, and in some cases became friends.  The Wampanoag Chief Massasoit and the Plymouth Colony leader John Carver signed Peace Treaty in 1621, which lasted for forty years.  Despite the myth of conflict between those first white settlers and the centuries-old Native tribes, we can view this brief moment in history as what could have been.  Tragically, the rapacious hunger for land and the grasping expansionism that infects our national character shattered this hope of peaceful co-existence with the Native people who had welcomed us as guests.  

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That devastating effect of European's "invasion" of Native lands began decades earlier,  when early European settlers brought viruses to which the Native people had no immunity.  Within years of European settlers arriving, terrible plagues of smallpox, chickenpox, syphilis, malaria, influenza, measles, the bubonic plague, and a rare disease called leptospirosis, decimated the tribes by up to 90 percent.  And when the Mayflower arrived in 1620, they found nothing but empty villages. and skeletal remains littered the landscape.

The Puritans (who arrived 1in 1630), blinded by their faith in the Divine Providence that brought them to this New World,  deemed that devastation an Act of God preparing the land for their arrival. Typical of the murderous arrogance of the English aristocracy, which viewed Natives as savages to be cleared like forests, England's King James I declared:

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So the few remaining Wampanoag did have something in common with the struggling Plymouth colony.   In this episode, we focus on the arduous struggle of man against
Nature and the perseverance of those early settlers.  With the help of the Wampanoag and especially their sympathetic  representative Squanto, who had been taken to England as a slave and escaped, the remaining settlers survived.  By that next fall, Natives and Settlers did have a common reason to give thanks.  That feast, which 243 years later in 1863 Abraham Lincoln officially named Thanksgiving, was truly an occasion to be proud of, and a tradition to be honored. And so we do.

In this episode, Julian and Rob  discuss the origins of this holiday in a very personal way.

Join us!