Jamestown, Plymouth and the Camping Trip from Hell

I think I can picture it. The bubonic plague had just swept through England some twenty years earlier, and people had had enough of 17th century London. The exodus started with John Smith via the London Company and the Jamestown settlement.

It probably wasn't too hard for the Puritan leaders to pitch the Mayflower cruise to parishioners. They were probably only too happy to exchange the streets of London for religious opportunities and the imaginary landscapes of the New World.

John Rolfe had found his own heaven in the New World in 1614 with Pocahontas. Right?

And, after overcoming early horrors, John Smith and the Jamestown colony had started growing tobacco, reinforcing their forts and working to rebuild their relations with the local native Americans.

But then, even as preparations were being made on the Mayflower, the settlers in Jamestown passed smallpox to the native Americans in the Massachusetts Bay area, killing 90% of them between 1618 and 1619.

Then, in September of 1620, 102 delusional - or brave - passengers aboard the sailing ship Mayflower arrived in the New World, at the eastern tip of what is now Cape Cod, Massachusetts. They arrived into a beautiful and vicious land; unforgiving and violent. An imminent winter was waiting. It was a land of disease and danger and starvation.

By the following spring, over half of them had died from malnutrition and disease.

Those that survived, like Smith's group, planted corn and other crops.  Ironically, it was Squanto from the Pawtuxet tribe - a people entirely lost to smallpox - that the settlers relied on to learn basic survival, hunting, and planting skills. He spoke English because he had been kidnapped by the British and taken to England years before.

The abundance of their harvest in the fall of 1621 was cause for a celebration.  A gathering that we commemorate across America today as Thanksgiving. No doubt they had reason to be thankful - for having survived a terrifying ordeal across the Atlantic only to witness many of their friends and family succumb to death aboard the Mayflower, moored upon the icy New England shore.

Chief Massasoit (of Wampanoag tribe), who gave them 12,000 acres to colonize, was invited to the November feast. Massasoit showed up with 90 men - so many that they had to hunt for deer and fowl to supplement the foodstuffs of their hosts.

The following year, in 1622, in the English Colony of Virginia, natives of the Powhatan tribe
attacked the settlers along the James River and killed 347 people - men, women and children. The number amounted to about a quarter of all settlers living in the New World at that time.  It is alleged that this was precipitated by John Smith's violent raiding parties into the Indian settlements to demand food.

This brutal massacre emboldened the colonists and their homeland backers. Historian Betty Wood writes:

"(this) ... gave the colonists the excuse they needed to take even more of what they wanted from the indigenous population of the Chesapeake. As far as the survivors of the Massacre of 1622 were concerned, by virtue of launching this unprovoked assault native Americans had forfeited any legal and moral rights they might previously have claimed to the ownership of the lands they occupied."

Following counterattacks by the English colonists that same year (1622), a peace parley was arranged. The Jamestown colonists poisoned the Powhatan liquor for the parley's ceremonial toast. The poison killed another 200 Powhatan natives.

Taped to our refrigerators this time of the year, there are craft paper drawings of belt-buckle pilgrim hats and horns of plenty. Crayon sketches of indians and pilgrims sitting peacefully together sharing the abundance of the season.

Perhaps they were for a day. And maybe that's reason enough to be thankful.

That Thanksgiving afternoon was probably a brief respite from their camping trip from hell.