A Time to Give Thanks

The Journey of the Mayflower: God’s Outlaws, or the Invention of Freedom

by Stephen Tomkins (Hodder & Stoughton, £21.99)

Today is Thanksgiving Day across the United States, a feast day that rivals Christmas in the minds and memories of its citizens. We have to particularise the United State of America, as Thanksgiving, which derives from the ancient European custom of harvest festivals, is celebrated on different days and in different ways in Canada and a host of other countries. It is the power of US commerce that has fixed this date in the minds of those in other cultures.

In the USA, however, the ancient custom is now linked with the saga of the pilgrims fathers, who crossed the wide Atlantic to escape from royal tyranny over non-conformists in England and to live in freedom according to their own lights in the new world, with the bible as their sole guide. The saga of the pilgrim fathers, far more than the Jamestown settlement, is the foundation myth of the United States.

This year the festival carries an added weight, as this is the 400th anniversary of the voyage of the Mayflower, and this is being marked (in whatever ways are safe at this time) both in the US and in Great Britain.

There are heroic aspects to this story which are admirable, and Stephen Tompkins relates misadventures and achievements, drawing on new information of all kinds about the social and religious conditions, the ships used and the and the pilgrims themselves.

First winter

For their first winter in New England conditions were hard and the group suffered from shortages. They were helped by the local Native Americans – and were grateful. This first Thanksgiving in the new world saw friendly relations between the self-exiled immigrants and the local people.

Relations in the seasons that followed were not so good: the intruders sought to dominate the local people in an imperious way. Troubles sprang up between whites and the local Native Americans. The pilgrims punished their ‘godless wicked foes’, and so began the inexorable annihilation of those who had lived in the country for millennia.

This was one dark aspect of the pilgrim story. The other was their exclusiveness. Other non-conformists such as the Quakers and the Catholics had no place among them. They had to found their own settlements in Pennsylvania and (for Catholics) in Maryland (found by the Irish peer Lord Baltimore).

Thus the story of individuals seeking their freedom has heroic and admirable aspects. Yet out of Edenic landscape the pilgrims promoted the creation of new divisions, which ended with the 13 quarrelling colonies who then quarrelled with England. And (some would say) have gone on quarrelling with others ever since.

This negative side of the story is discussed by Stephen Tompkins in his even-handed book. For those, both in America and Europe, who would like to have some clearer idea of the pilgrim fathers’ story – and the background to Thanksgiving – this is a very readable and accessible narrative. It is, of course, not the last word. As the story is a fable of American history it continues down to today. But that will for the readers to discover for themselves.

Freedom

No-one can demand freedom for themselves and then deny it to others. Respect for others and their beliefs and ideas is the only way in which the religious and personal freedom which all crave for can be lived by all. American literature has since the 17th Century interrogated puritan culture and found it wanting in many respects: Nathaniel Hawthorne devoted his life to this in the Scarlet Letter and other novels.

There is a continuing need to recapture not only the courageous story of the pilgrim fathers in what they did, but also more importantly a continuing need every year – every day indeed – to recover the spirit of tolerance and sharing of that first winter in the new world.

Americans seem to have God’s abundance of good things, but it should be for all and not for a select few, and it involves not only respect for others, but also for the created world they believed God made for man, but which as they could read in Genesis, was made for natural things first. This globe, our common home, has to be lovingly shared with other people and with the creatures for which it was made first.