The challenging First Thanksgiving

The first Thanksgiving happened a bit differently than most of us might imagine. The Pilgrims’ first governor, William Bradford, endured a profoundly challenging beginning to his time in Plymouth. Before even stepping foot on shore, he suffered a devastating personal loss. His wife, Dorothy, tragically drowned after falling from the Mayflower while it was anchored in Provincetown Harbor. Not long after, Bradford himself narrowly escaped death when he stumbled into a deer trap—a reminder of the dangers they faced in their new and unfamiliar environment.

Bradford’s initial impressions of the Indigenous peoples were far from warm. In fact, he harbored deep mistrust, reflecting the tension and uncertainty of their first encounters. His account, written in Of Plymouth Plantation, captures the harshness of their arrival and his perception of their situation:

*"Being thus arrived in a good harbor and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of heaven who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean, and delivered them from all the perils and miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm and stable earth, their proper element.

But here I cannot but stay and make a pause, and stand half amazed at this poor people’s present condition; and so I think will the reader too, when he well considers the same. Being thus past the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before in their preparation, they had now no friends to welcome them, nor inns to entertain or refresh their weather-beaten bodies, no houses or much less towns to repair to, to seek for succor.

It is recorded in Scripture as a mercy to the Apostle and his shipwrecked company, that the barbarians showed them no small kindness in refreshing them, but these savage barbarians, when they met with them (as after will appear) were readier to fill their sides full of arrows than otherwise. And for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent, and subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search an unknown coast."*