Thoughts From Craig Lambert

Dear Friends,

As one who grew up just about an hour from Plymouth, Massachusetts, and one who was raised in a Congregational Church (tracing our spiritual roots back to Christ through the Pilgrims) Thanksgiving is one of my favorite days of the year. Therefore, since Thanksgiving is just two days away, I offer you this selection. It's the last one-third of an article entitled, “Who Were the Pilgrims Who Celebrated the First Thanksgiving?” by Craig Lambert.

I have added what I consider to be some helpful or necessary explanatory notes of my own into his text! His words are a good reminder of the life-and-death-struggle that preceded the celebration of what we have come to call, “the first Thanksgiving.” Enjoy.

Who Were the Pilgrims Who Celebrated the First Thanksgiving?
“The Mayflower’s manifest made an unlikely expeditionary force. [Of the 102 people onboard] Fewer than fifty were adult men, many of mature years, while at least thirty were children, and nearly twenty women, three of them pregnant. They did not sail [from England’s Plymouth harbor] until the disastrously late date of September 6, assuring that they would arrive in America after the growing season and at the onset of winter. Two had died by the time the crew sighted Cape Cod—two hundred miles off course, with no reliable charts—on November 9, 1620…

Right from the start, the death rate was awful… Ferrying in supplies from the ship meant wading through ice-cold water, at one point with sleet glazing their bodies with ice. The first winter, people died from dysentery, pneumonia, tuberculosis, scurvy, and exposure, at rates as high as two or three per day. “It pleased God to visit us then with death daily,” William Bradford wrote.”

“The living were hardly able to bury the dead, let alone care for the sick. By spring, half of them had perished, and “by all rights, they all should have died, given how ill prepared they were,” says Philbrick. [Estimates are that 48-51 died that first winter. Figures do vary a bit, but we know that at least 28 of the 50 men died, as well as 13 of the 18 women, and 8 of the thirty or so children. Most were buried at night in unmarked graves so the Indians would not know how few remained.] Yet they survived, and the Pilgrims’ story is as much one of survival as of origins. They were also inventive enough, as Donegan notes, to prop up sick men against trees outside the settlement, with muskets beside them, as decoys to look like sentinels to the Indians.

…Early on, the settlers repelled an attack by Native American warriors—muskets against arrows, in a skirmish that presaged the continent’s future. Yet, in March, a lone Indian warrior named Samoset appeared and greeted the settlers, improbably, in English. Soon, the Pilgrims formed an alliance with the Wampanoags and their chief, Massasoit. Only a few years before, the tribe had lost 50 to 90 percent of its population to an epidemic borne by European coastal fishermen. Devastated by death, both groups were vulnerable to attack or domination by other Indian tribes. They needed each other.

With spring, under the careful guidance of… Tisquantum the settlers planted corn, squash, and beans, with herring for fertilizer. [We know him as Squanto, the last surviving member of the Patuxet tribe. He had been taken to England as a slave by earlier traders and like Samoset had learned English. He returned to New England (a story in itself) to find his tribe had been wiped out by disease and at that time was captured by the Wampanoags. He died a year after teaching the Pilgrims these skills, while leading them on an exploration of Cape Cod in 1622.] They began building more houses, fishing for cod and bass, and trading with the Native Americans. By October they had erected seven crude houses and four common buildings. As autumn came, the Pilgrims "gathered to rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors,” wrote one of their number, Edward Winslow... That was the first Thanksgiving. There is no record of an invitation to the Wampanoags, but Massasoit appeared at the feast with ninety men. They stayed for three days and went out and bagged five deer to add venison to the menu. They played games together. This was the humble affair that, centuries later, President Abraham Lincoln made an official American holiday, perhaps the most beloved one of all.”

[Since only 5 of the 18 women on the Mayflower survived that first winter, the vast majority of those attending the first Thanksgiving Celebration were men. There would have been somewhere around 24 Englishmen, Massasoit and his 90 Wampanoag warriors, and just over 20 children. The food at the celebration could have included wild turkey, but not mashed potatoes, since potatoes were just making their way from South America to Europe at the time. The Wampanoag brought deer, and there would have been lots of local fish and seafood, in addition to the crops from their first harvest – including corn, squash, beans and pumpkin.]

“We love the story of Thanksgiving because it’s about alliance and abundance,” Donegan says in the film. “But part of the reason that they were grateful was that they had been in such misery; that they had lost so many people—on both sides. So, in some way, that day of thanksgiving is also coming out of mourning; it’s also coming out of grief. And this abundance is a relief from that loss. But we don’t think about the loss—we think about the abundance…”

Just a few reminders of what led to the gratitude offered at that first celebration.

Preparing to, “enter His gates with thanksgiving, and His courts with praise,” Pastor Jeff