PARTAKERS OF PLENTY
A Study of the First Thanksgiving
James Deetz and Jay Anderson
This article is printed with the permission of the
Saturday Review of Science and was previously published
under the title of “The Ethnogastronomy of Thanksgiving”
in the November 25, 1972 issue of the
Saturday Review of Science
PARTAKERS OF PLENTY
A Study of the First Thanksgiving
“Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. The four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.”
So wrote Pilgrim Edward Winslow to a friend in England shortly after the colonists of New Plymouth celebrated their first successful harvest. This brief passage is the only eyewitness description of the events that were to become the basis of a uniquely American holiday: Thanksgiving. As with so many of the facts of the Pilgrims’ first years in America, this occasion has become so imbued with tradition that it is difficult to place it in the perspective it occupied in Winslow’s eyes. Indeed, any reference to giving thanks is notably missing from Winslow’s description. What took place on that fall day some three-and-a-half centuries ago is best understood as the first harvest festival held on American soil, the acting out of an institution of great antiquity in the England the Pilgrims had left behind. It was a time of joy, celebration, and carousing, far removed from any suggestion of solemn religious concern. To appreciate just what it meant to those Englishmen, we must know who they were and what they had endured in the year prior to that first harvest of 1621.
The one hundred and one emigrants who crowded aboard the Mayflower in the fall of 1620 were a mixed lot. Thirty-five of them were religious dissenters who had known years of persecution, flight, and exile. Another sixty-six were added to the group by its financial backers to bring their total number to a level deemed sufficient to establish a colony in the New World. Whether a non-dissenting cooper like John Alden or a religious leader like William Brewster, each member of the tiny band carried the mark of English culture as it was on the eve of the Renaissance. Save for the higher social classes, which were not represented in the group, the English people of the time were products of a medieval world whose legacy was still felt in the first years of the seventeenth century. It is easy to forget that 1620 is further removed in time from the American Revolution than it is from Columbus’ discovery of the New World in 1492. So it was that the church members—“saints,” as they styled themselves—carried the strong tradition of East Anglican yeoman culture to the New World, its peasant customs deeply rooted in the soil and its bounty. The others in the group—called “strangers” by William Bradford—were a more heterogeneous lot, many coming from the urban world of London, others from the countryside. As a group they were to create a culture in New England that bore unmistakable traces of the Middle Ages, whether it be in dress style, the arrangement of their community, their theology, or their social institutions.
From the start events seemed to conspire against the Pilgrims as they prepared to depart from England. They were originally scheduled to sail in late summer on two ships, but difficulties with one of them resulted in their being crowded aboard the Mayflower, which finally put to sea in mid-September. The crossing itself was, for that time, successful; only one of the company perished. (Just two years before, another group of 180 dissenters had attempted to reach Virginia from Amsterdam; only forty-nine survived.) After sixty-six days at sea land was sighted off Cape Cod, and the weary band, much buffeted by ocean storms, must have indeed been glad to have arrived. But by then the year was old, and there was no hope of acquiring adequate sustenance from the land in the coming months.