Thanksgiving. Melanie Kirkpatrick
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occurred near present-day St. Augustine. Michael V. Gannon, a scholar of Florida’s colonial history, quotes Juan Ponce de León in the opening pages of his book The Cross in the Sand:
“Thanks be to Thee, O Lord, Who has permitted me to see something new,” said the Spanish explorer upon sighting the shore of the lush tropical land he would name La Florida. The year was 1513.8 Ponce de León may have been the first European to speak words of thanksgiving in what is now the United States.
Half a century after Ponce de León had “discovered” it, another Spanish fleet set sail for Florida, this time under the command of Captain-General Pedro Menéndez de Avilés. General Menéndez had two mandates from King Philip II. One was missionary, the other military: convert the Indians to Christianity, and secure Florida for Spain. The king was worried about a settlement by French Huguenots in Florida during the previous year. He saw the French settlement as a direct challenge to Spain’s rightful sovereignty over the peninsula and their Protestant religion as a threat to Roman Catholicism.
Menéndez’s fleet reached the coast of Florida in early September 1565, carrying eight hundred colonists. On September 6, he sailed into the harbor at the place he would name St. Augustine, anchoring just off the Timucua Indian village of Seloy. The fleet chaplain, Father Francisco López de Mendoza Grajales, kept notes of the voyage and described the sequence of events leading up to the day of thanksgiving called to express thanks to God for the Spaniards’ safe arrival.
An advance party made up of two companies of infantrymen disembarked and were “well-received by the Indians,” Father López wrote. The Timucua gave the Spanish a large house that belonged to a chief and was well situated alongside the river. Worried that the Indians’ friendliness might not hold, the Spanish went to work fortifying the house and building a trench around it to protect themselves from surprise attack. Two days later, on Saturday, September 8, General Menéndez was ready to come ashore.
The general’s landing was full of pomp and circumstance. The priest recorded how Menéndez stepped onto Florida soil “with many banners spread” and “to the sound of trumpets and salutes of artillery.” Father López, who had gone ashore the evening before, went to meet the general, carrying a cross and singing Te Deum Laudamus, or “Thee, O God, We Praise,” a Latin hymn traditionally sung on occasions of public rejoicing. A makeshift altar was set up in the sand. “The General, followed by all who accompanied him, marched up to the Cross, knelt, and kissed it,” Father López recounted. As a large number of Timucua watched, the newcomers celebrated a thanksgiving Mass. Afterward, the Timucua joined the Spanish for a meal at the invitation of General Menéndez. Professor Gannon describes the event as “the first community act of religion and thanksgiving in the first permanent settlement in the land.”9
Historians who have analyzed the ship’s accounts say the menu was probably the Spaniards’ usual shipboard fare: salted pork, onions, garbanzo beans—possibly assembled in a bean stew called cocido and washed down with red wine. There is no record of what, if anything, the Timucua contributed, though some have conjectured that they would have offered something for the communal meal—maybe local game, possibly including wild turkey, which was plentiful at the time. The Timucua might also have brought seafood, maize, beans, nuts, and fruit.
Two decades passed before Gannon’s research on the St. Augustine Thanksgiving became widely known. In the mid-1980s, an Associated Press reporter, seeking a new angle for an article he was writing on the holiday, stumbled upon Gannon’s work, called him up, and then wrote about what happened in 1565. The AP story was picked up by the national media, and soon Gannon found himself with a new nickname, courtesy of New Englanders who were disgruntled that the Sunshine State was encroaching on their holiday. The Florida professor was now “the Grinch Who Stole Thanksgiving.”
Berkeley Plantation, Virginia. The Commonwealth of Virginia’s claim to hosting the First Thanksgiving rests on an event that happened on December 4, 1619. On that day, the English ship Margaret dropped anchor in the James River at what was then known as Berkeley Hundred and is now called Berkeley Plantation. It is located twenty-four miles southwest of Richmond.
The Margaret was carrying thirty-six Englishmen—farmers, craftsmen, and other skilled workers—who were committed to building a successful settlement in the New World. They had departed England ten weeks earlier under a commission from the London-based Berkeley Company to settle eight thousand acres of land along the James River. These settlers hoped to avoid the fate of Jamestown, which had failed in part because the cavaliers and courtiers who went there in 1607 knew little about farming or other skills essential to the colony’s survival. The Margaret party’s captain, John Woodlief, was an experienced settler, one of the few survivors of the 1609–1610 starving time in Jamestown, when 80 percent of the colonists died.
After the new settlers rowed ashore, Captain Woodlief commanded them to kneel, and he led them in a prayer of thanksgiving for their safe arrival. This was done in accordance with the charter that had been issued by their sponsors in England. The instruction to hold such a service upon their arrival in Virginia was the first of ten orders listed in a letter that the Berkeley Company had handed to Captain Woodlief prior to the settlers’ departure from England. In addition to the instruction that the settlers give thanks on the day of their arrival, the letter further ordered them to make the date of their arrival an annual day of thanksgiving:
We ordain that the day of our ship’s arrival at the place assigned for plantation in the land of Virginia should be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God.10
The Berkeley Hundred Thanksgiving was a strictly religious affair, in keeping with other instructions the settlers received from their sponsor: Follow the rites of the Church of England, use the Book of Common Prayer, and attend daily prayers or forfeit supper. No Native Americans were present at the service, and there is no record of the settlers partaking in a festive meal.
As Virginians like to point out, the Berkeley Hundred Thanksgiving service in 1619 was the first “official” Thanksgiving in the sense that December 4 became the date of an annual observance. The settlers carried on the tradition for two more years, but Berkeley Hundred was destroyed on March 22, 1622, in a coordinated attack by the Powhatan Indians on English settlements in Virginia. Many settlers died in the attack, including a large number at Berkeley Hundred. Soon afterward, the settlement was abandoned and the survivors returned to England.
The story of Virginia’s First Thanksgiving was lost to history for more than three hundred years. It was finally rediscovered in 1931 when Dr. Lyon Tyler, a retired president of William and Mary College and son of President John Tyler, was researching a book on early Virginia history at the New York Public Library. There he happened upon the Nibley Papers, a cache of documents that chronicled the Margaret’s voyage to Virginia and recorded the establishment, settlement, and management of the Berkeley Hundred. The Nibley Papers included the original instructions to Captain Woodlief to mark an annual day of thanksgiving. That “one little fact” made the rediscovery of the Nibley Papers “conspicuous in American history,” Tyler concluded. It proved, he crowed, that the Virginia Thanksgiving of 1619 anticipated the one in Plymouth by two years.11
Dr. Tyler’s discovery of the Nibley Papers sparked a campaign to revive the Virginia Thanksgiving, which had last been celebrated in 1621. A Virginia state senator, John J. Wicker Jr., took up the cause in the late 1950s. He traveled to Boston, where he met with the governor of Massachusetts in an effort to persuade him that Virginia was the site of the true First Thanksgiving. (No luck on that score—no surprise.) Wicker’s enthusiasm for his cause drove him to don the garb of a seventeenth-century English settler and go on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson to plead the case for Virginia to replace Plymouth as the home of the First Thanksgiving. In 1958, three hundred thirty-seven years after the third annual Thanksgiving Day at Berkeley Plantation, Virginians revived the tradition begun by the original settlers there and held a “Virginia Thanksgiving Festival.” (The Virginia Thanksgiving Festival is now an annual event, celebrated on the first Sunday of November.)
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