The Pilgrims Before the First Thanksgiving

When was the last time you thought about the Pilgrims?  Let me guess — last Thanksgiving.  With this year's Thanksgiving on the way, I thought I would return to something I used to teach in my American literature courses: an excerpt from Of Plimoth Plantation, William Bradford's account of the Pilgrims' migration and settlement in North America.  By the way, in writing the title of Bradford's narrative, I have used the original spelling of Plimoth, which we know today as Plymouth, but I have used modern spellings of words in the quotations below.

The Pilgrims are part of the highlight reel that many of us remember from our grade school days.  They showed up after Christopher Columbus and before Paul Revere.  Now that I'm an adult, I know that a few other things happened in between, but these are some of the touchstones that make up our collective historical memory.

The basic story goes that some English men, women, and children, seeking religious freedom, sailed to America on the Mayflower, suffered a harsh winter, and benefited from the generosity of a local tribe, giving them reason to give thanks (although the notion of a Thanksgiving holiday would not come for more than two centuries).

The real story is not only more complex, but also far more interesting.

The "Reason, and Causes of Their Removal"

The Pilgrims were indeed English, but they did not migrate directly to North America from England.  Their first stop in the quest for religious freedom was actually Holland, where they spent about 12 years.  In Of Plimoth Plantation, Bradford includes a chapter called "Showing the Reasons, and Causes of Their Removal" — that is, factors driving their departure from Holland to the largely unknown continent of North America.

That Bradford included such an explanation is not all that surprising.  Readers naturally might wonder why the group made the momentous and surely difficult decision to leave the relatively familiar setting of a settled country in Europe to brave the foreign wilderness of North America.

The details of their "Reasons" and "Causes," however, are both surprising and inspiring.  Their faith, it turns out, was only part of the story.

Their "weighty and solid reasons"

"In the agitation of their thoughts, and much discourse, of things hereabout," Bradford explains, "at length they began to incline to this conclusion, of removal to some other place."  In other words, they started to consider leaving Holland for "some other place," which would turn out to be North America. This sounds like a decision that anyone would take seriously, but note what Bradford says next:

“Not out of any newfangledness, or other such like giddy humor, by which men are oftentimes transported to their great hurt and danger, but for sundry weighty and solid reasons; some of the chief of which I will here briefly touch.”

I can't read these words without thinking that there's an interesting, even a juicy story behind them.  Bradford sounds defensive, as if someone might — or actually did — accuse the Pilgrims of making a hasty or casual decision, even giving into a "giddy humor."  By the way, Bradford is not using "humor" in reference to comedy, but rather as another word for caprice or perhaps disposition.  (In the seventeenth century, some people still believed that personalities were shaped by the balance of bodily fluids, or "humors": blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile.  This belief has given rise to words that are still part of the English language: sanguine, phlegmatic, bilious, and choleric — a subject I feel sanguine about taking up in a future column.)

This decision, Bradford is quick to point out, was not the result of whim or a dangerous taste for novelty or adventure, but rather "for sundry weighty and solid reasons."

The "hardness of the place and country"

What were those reasons?

The first one is darkly comical, at least in retrospect:

And first, they saw and found by experience the hardness of the place and country to be such, as few in comparison would come to them, and fewer that would bide it out, and continue with them.

In short, some in their group thought the conditions they encountered in Holland were just too difficult.  Now, I will concede that they were indeed rough by our modern standards — no TikTok, for starters, but also no electricity, no indoor plumbing, no modern medicine.  I have to wonder, though, how they possibly could have thought that the North American wilderness would be better.  It had no more space heaters or BENGAY than Holland did, but it also lacked the kinds of buildings, roads, or governments that Europeans were accustomed to having.

It's worth remembering that Bradford was writing this account years after the Pilgrims made their move, so he surely recognized the irony of their situation.  If ever any people jumped from a frying pan into a fire, the Pilgrims surely did when they abandoned Holland for the American wild.

In any case, we should recognize some nuance in the reasoning here.  It was not so much the "hardness" itself that drove their decision, at least in Bradford's account, but the impact of these conditions on building and sustaining their group.  The focus, in other words, was not on individual comfort or prosperity, but on community.

Looking Out for Their Children

Another reason Bradford addresses is similarly selfless:

For many of their children, that were of best dispositions and gracious inclinations, having learned to bear the yoke in their youth, and [being] willing to bear part of their parents' burden, were, oftentimes, so oppressed with their heavy labors, that though their minds were free and willing, yet their bodies bowed under the weight of the same, and became decrepit in their early youth; the vigor of nature being consumed in their very bud as it were.

We can't blame these people for striving to protect their children — and not merely from physical deterioration.  Bradford continues:

But that which was more lamentable, and of all sorrows, most heavy to be borne, was that many of their children, by these occasions, and the great licentiousness of youth in that country, and the manifold temptations of the place, were drawn away by evil examples into extravagant and dangerous courses, getting the reins off their necks and departing from their parents. Some became soldiers, others took upon them far voyages by sea, and other some worse courses, tending to dissoluteness and the danger of their souls, to the great grief of their parents and dishonor of God. So that they saw their posterity would be in danger to degenerate and be corrupted.

Even young Pilgrims, it seems, could stray, seizing the opportunity to get "the reins off their necks" — and remember, this is before TikTok.  Ah, some things never change.

A Higher Purpose

For these and other "weighty and solid reasons," the Pilgrims made the move, surely one of the most ambitious in history.  Bradford enumerates some of the hardships that his fellow Pilgrims adduced as reasons not to go — the difficulty of the voyage across the Atlantic, for one thing, but also the "miseries of the land" for those who survived the trip:

For there they should be liable to famine, and nakedness, and the want, in a manner, of all things.  The change of air, diet, and drinking of water, would infect their bodies with sore sicknesses, and grievous diseases.

These fears and others Bradford described in his book were no small things, but there was another way to look at this journey, one that can inspire us today.

"It was answered," Bradford explains, "that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and must be both enterprised and overcome with answerable courages."  Bradford's words speak to the greatness of the human spirit, which can drive us to confront the difficult and the fearsome, especially when the cause is noble.  Returning to an earlier point, Bradford concedes that such actions should not be taken lightly, then adds:

But their condition was not ordinary; their ends were good and honorable; their calling lawful, and urgent; and therefore they might expect the blessing of God and their proceedings.  Yea, though they should lose their lives in the action, yet might they have comfort in the same, and their endeavors would be honorable.

You don't have to be a Pilgrim — or, for that matter, a Christian or an American — to appreciate this point.  Bradford and his fellow Pilgrims, for all of their human weaknesses, were willing to make sacrifices for a higher purpose.  That's humanity at its best.