h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: Thanksgiving A History - A987249
Author: Jodan - Mining 42 and Dubya - U201497

Something unfamiliar to Brits, but important none-the-less

Good stuff How about a link to A260272 for Plymouth, England?

Number Six - Plymouth Argyle and England

Actually I'm doing links as soon as I'm done checking my conversations. I also wrote a short little piece on the pilgrims. Thanks for bringing that to my attention

"perhaps millions of American family traditions"

you mean "millions of American families' traditions" ?

I'll try to get past the first sentence at some point after I've had more sleep. . .

sorry . . .

Friar, the very tired

The writer Bill Bryson gave a superb account of the true history of the first Thanksgiving in his book 'Made in America'. For a start, much of the legend surrounding the first 'Americans' comes from an 1826 poem, 'The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers (in New England)' by Felicia Dorothea Hemans, a Welsh writer who had never even been to America. In the poem, she describes how the pilgrims landed 'where they first trod' - ie, Plymouth Rock, which they couldn't actually have landed on because it's way above sea level (in fact, they landed some way up the coast); Plymouth Rock isn't mentioned in any histories of the time until about a century after the event. And the landing spot they did eventually stop at was their fourth stop-off, not their first as popular legend has it.

Secondly, they weren't Pilgrims, nor were they Puritans. Travellers to the Americas wouldn't be called pilgrims for another 200 years. They called themselves 'Saints', but generally they were known as 'Separatists', on account of their desire to travel all that way to be separate from the ways of England.

Most unusually of all though, it wasn't the 'natives' who taught the newcomers how to plant crops and find food; they ran off and left them on account of the fact that they'd seen what white men tend to do in these circumstances... for there had been many others there before these 'founding fathers'. The man who helped the Separatists was from another tribe completely - and he spoke English and Spanish already, which was how he was able to help them

What's fun is, this is all accounted in the first four pages of Bryson's book and he's already ripped to shreds one of America's most popular myths. He continues to do this with pretty much every other legend the country boasts (including pointing out how few of Thomas Edison's inventions were actually his own). Cracking read!

That's nice. I read bits and pieces of what you just said on the internet, but if you think I should include it, I will. You're right, I forgot to call them separatists, but this entry isn't about the pilgrims, saints seperatists whatever. I'll reread the Pilgrim section and make the necessary changes

ahhh jinster. . . font of knowledge!


Friar

then what am I?

Please compliment me!

The word Pilgrim comes from the Latin 'perager' per=throug and ager=field ie a travelor. Bunyon used it in the title of his work dated 1678 hardly two hundred years after the Mayflower compact.
These were certainly travellors and in that sense they were pilgims.