With Americans celebrating Thanksgiving tomorrow, I thought that I'd rerun (and slightly update) my post from last year.
It is worth remembering the only specific contemporary account of the first Thanksgiving in Plymouth, that of Edward Winslow. His letter was dated December 13, 1621.
I include most of a paragraph about farming methods because it indicates some of the foods that they would have served:
We set the last spring some twenty acres of Indian corn, and sowed some six acres of barley and peas, and according to the manner of the Indians, we manured our ground with herrings or rather shads, which we have in great abundance, and take with great ease at our doors. Our corn [i.e., wheat] did prove well, and God be praised, we had a good increase of Indian corn, and our barley indifferent good, but our peas not worth the gathering, for we feared they were too late sown, they came up very well, and blossomed, but the sun parched them in the blossom.
Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after have a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors; they four in one day killed as much fowl, as with a little help beside, served the company almost a week, at which time amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest King Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain, and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.
There are some interesting things and some ambiguities in this account. The only recreation mentioned besides feasting is exercising their arms (guns). Note also that four men in one day shot almost enough fowl to last a week. Both of these points would tend to undercut the claims in Arming America that guns were not accurate enough to be of much use and that people didn't care about guns.
This page speculates about the probable menu. There is also a more general account of the harvest time written decades later by William Bradford.
Actual color photograph of Pilgrim John Howland ---->
Last year, in a long, interesting post, Patrick Spero tells of a late 17th century account that omits the Indians as guests and places the date of the first formal Thanksgiving in the fall of 1622, not 1621. Yet there is little reason to doubt the date of Winslow's 1621 account, since his letter was dated in December 1621 and is in sequence with other letters that place the events being described in 1621, not 1622. It would seem highly unlikely that the year on his letter is wrong. The various influences on Thanksgiving traditions and the revisionist tendencies of later reporters make a fascinating story in themselves.
UPDATE: My post concerned the "the first Thanksgiving in Plymouth." Not surprisingly, several bloggers or posters have pointed to other pre-1621 Thanksgivings celebrated by Native Americans, Spanish explorers, or other European visitors and settlors in what is now the United States.
Great. So much for my traditional Thanksgiving. Do you have any idea how many boxes of bread crumbs it takes to stuff a deer? And what am I supposed to do with deer giblets?
Pilgrim John Howland is one of my ancestors, an indentured servant when he came over. According to family legend, he got into the grog one day as they were making their passage over. He went on deck to get a breath of fresh air / hurl, and fell overboard. Only his drunken grip on a trailing line as he went over saved him. Oddly, the diorama showing him falling overboard at the Mayflower museum (and most retellings) omits this piece of lore...
I'm glad to see the shad reference. I have read that the practice of fertilizing fields with fish was used in medieval France, so it's nice to see that the legend of the Indians helping out the pilgrims with the fish-as-fertilizer trick has some support.
Passenger pigeons possibly? Heath hens were also common back then and may have the fowl. Or, of course, they may have eaten wild turkey.
Of course, if they did eat passenger pigeons and heath hens, that presents an obvious problem for those wanting to recreate the first Thanksgiving.
I don't recall the specifics, but one species of fowl present in 1621 was exceptionally plentiful--and very easy to shoot in the early years of the Plymouth Colony, before the colonists depleted the population of that species.
What the Plymouth settlers seemed to have were mostly early fowling pieces and muskets - smoothbore flintlocks and maybe some old matchlocks 5'-6.5' long with mostly .65-.75 caliber bores- think long 18 to 12 gauge shotguns. There would be very few (probably no) rifled firearms.
There were no requirements that birds be shot “on the wing” back then; a flock of ducks floating in shallow water or geese in a field would be fairly easy targets. I don’t know how common they were in 1620s Plymouth, but wild turkeys are also pretty plentiful in modern New England, and would be fairly large, slow targets.
As for very early colonial firearm ownership, an early inventory of the Virginia Colony showed 987 muskets of various types and 55 pistols among 1,029 settlers (from Brown, Firearms in Colonial America).
By all accounts, passenger pigeon, duck, and geese flocks were so large that just shooting into the flock would hit a number of birds at random. Passenger pigeons were primarily used for fat and stock, less for meat, so that a large amount of buckshot could be tolerated. (Until its total extinction in the 19th century, the passenger pigeon was the primary source of cooking fat in North America). Wild ducks, geese, and turkey were all probably large enough that they could tolerate a bit of powder and metal, but I believe most consumers prefer their fowl unfouled.
Folks today have no problems removing shot from dove and the like. Is there really any reason to suspect that early Americans couldn't do likewise?
Happy Thanksgiving, the fouling of the silver clouds with dark linings by those wearing dung-colored glasses notwithstanding.
I am most thankful that I don't feel it is necessary to drudge up some misery of the past everytime someone else wants to celebrate something.
It has been mentioned, but I don't think that is a photo of a real pilgrim, maybe you ment it as a joke and I just didn't get it.
Happy thanksgiving.
Canadian versus American Thanksgiving
But above all, here's wishing Eugene, and all the Volokhites who tarry over his blog the other days of the year, minus drumstick, a very Happy Thanksgiving!
Cheers,
Victoria
Grandpappy said there would be consequences to losing that war.
Obviously they hand colored a b&w photo, as was the fashion of the time.
Daniel, I recognize that the text is ambiguous, but it sounds as if you might have absorbed some of the more farfetched notions of Arming America.
I have read hundreds of probate inventories from Massachusetts estates in the 1630s through the 1660s and thousands from elsewhere in the late 1600s and 1700s. I don't recall seeing a single bow and arrow being listed in the estate of a white colonist, though of course there might have been one or two that I missed or didn't recall. The idea that substantial numbers of settlors would have preferred bows and arrows to guns is something that Bellesiles provides no support for, and may have simply made up. (Bellesiles' evidence on bows and arrows and bladed weapons more generally is meticulously analyzed in an article by Justin Heather published in the Journal of Law & Politics.)
When English settlors referred to going fowling, they almost certainly were talking about going fowling with the weapon that they brought specifically for that purpose, their fowling pieces. Lest you still doubt this, here is more from Winslow's letter:
I am unfamiliar with your reference, and my argument was from a combination of first principles and personal experience in ethnography. A gun of any sort is a sophisticated piece of technology, it is not likely to be easily replaced or repaired in the wilderness (did the settlers include gunsmiths and travel with smithing equipment?), and most certainly to be included among the objects considered to have been most highly valued. A bow and arrow, on the other hand (and this is confirmed by my experiences in Indonesia, New Guinea, and Guatamala) is something that can be assembled by anyone entirely with local materials. It can be made and repaired quickly and if non-repairable it can be disposed of without real loss as the materials were all perishables in the first place. Therefore, it would be hightly unlikely that a bow or arrow would ever make its way onto a probate list.
The text you now cite has two interesting features: the preference that settlers bring shot for big fowl and the indication that they would be shooting from stands. For fowling, that suggests sport hunting for big birds and shooting at random into flocks, which must both be considered more recreational than neccessary hunting. Big birds are always more rare, and shooting into flocks is the best way to quickly disperse flocks.
I do not doubt that birds were hunted with guns, I just need to be convinced that the bulk of birds eaten were so caught. There is abundant ethnographic evidence that other methods are more efficient and are often used to guarantee the basic diet while parallel hunting with guns has a cultural value independent of fulfilling any basic needs. (And, as someone who has suffered from too much buckshot in boar or venison in restaurants in France, Hungary and in Germany, I have a basic culinary suspicion that it would be always acceptable!)
Finally, and mostly because I know close to nothing about guns, I did a bit of web surfing about "fowling guns". It was interesting that most citations concern their use on humans rather than on birds. Was there a different kind of amunition used for killing people rather than large fowl? If there was not a different kind of amunition, I suspect that potential colonists were being advised to bring a versatile weapon rather than committing themselves to a diet dominated by gunned-down fowl.
Best regards,
Daniel Wolf
Frankfurt am Main
Daniel Wolf,
A few thoughts. First, on your original post, the text may be ambiguous, but it is pretty clear from the text that Massasoit's men brought the 5 deer, not the settlers, as your post suggested.
I am not a hunter (or even a “gun enthusiast”), but I am familiar with muskets and have fired a number of different muskets. Muskets are much like shotguns and should be about as useful (“efficient” in your original post) for hunting birds, except for the rate of fire. You can fire a single ball (think a large marble), or a bunch of small balls (birdshot). I am confident I could hunt and get many birds with a musket, but less so with a bow, which I am also somewhat familiar with - you need to be more accurate with a bow than with birdshot. One round of birdshot would probably take down at least one bird in a flock, and likely several; one arrow would get, at most, one bird.
I do not know how many settlers may have had bows, but I do know that in the 1620s the Virginia colony refused a shipment of longbows – apparently not because they didn’t want them, but because they were worried that the local natives would be able to replicate the better English longbow technology and pose an even greater threat to the colony. So even if they may have preferred bows, they may have avoided bringing them into Plymouth for the same reason.
Given the number of guns in the colony and the real threat of starvation, I expect that the Plymouth colonists weren’t nearly as concerned with breaking a gun than they were with getting enough food. As for repairs, even in the 1620s many muskets should have had fairly interchangeable parts, so a small chest of spare parts may have been sufficient to keep many muskets going for years.
Um... no... Up until the 19th century, firearms were hand-crafted unique works of art. The concept of interchangeable parts didn't even come into play until the mid 18th century, as an idea by French Gunmaker Honore Le Blanc. And even then it didn't take off because gun makers weren't interested in having guns that were easily repairable (bad for business). It wasn't until 1796 when Jefferson brought the idea back to America and commissioned Eli Whitney to manufacture 10,000 muskets with interchangeable parts that it really took off. A nifty article on the subject.
Irrellevent, however. Because we live in a disposable society, we seem to see everything in terms of whether or not it is repairable or disposable. I don't even think modern man can concieve of an item that was hand crafted, one at a time, with pride and care in the craftsmanship. A lack of gun repair specialists on the roster does not imply a lack of guns.
Yes, and Black and White Photos were so abundant in the 17th century... By that point, mankind had only gotten to the point of projecting an image on the wall of a tent that could then be traced or painted over. (camera obscura). The first permanent photograph was around 1826. Yet another obscure historical link.
Ok, I admit it, debunking historical myths is a hobby. :)
No, it isn't. It's a tube with one closed end and a way to trigger swift combustion.
Metal shaping may seem difficult to keyboardists, but the worker classes don't find it difficult.
Firearms replaced bows for many good reasons.
First, the term "fowling" would normally mean hunting with a fowling piece. This would be a monster - 10 gage or bigger with an early version of a flintlock, probably a snaphaunse. The Pilgrims had this piece with them while exploring. They were attacked on Cape Cod and one of them returned fire with a "firelock" while the others lit their slowmatch. The firelock was probably a fowling piece.
The fowls were most likely migratory waterfowl - ducks and geese. There are lots of lakes in the area. During October flocks of migrating birds stop for the night.
They would have used birdshot and a single shot would kill more than one bird.
For military use, they had matchlocks. These were cheap and fairly reliable. They were smoothbore but they were more accurate than 18th century muskets. This is because 17th century muskets had front and rear sights while 18th century muskets only had a bayonet lug.
You can hit a pop can at 10 yards with a smoothbore musket, but not reliably. I've seen it done and I have put four shots into a space the width of your hand.
Matchlocks were not very useful in the colonies. You have to carry a burning cord. Unless your match was lit you could not fire but you could only carry a limited amount of match. Indians didn't fight in massed lines with enough warning to light your match and the smoke from the match scares animals. Accordingly, most colonists had traded in their matchlocks for flint pieces by the 1640s. In some cases a new lock was put on a matchlock stock.
Note - A matchlock musket is not hard to make but it was beyond the abilities of early colonial blacksmiths. Flintlocks are pretty durable as long as they are maintained. The most that is likely to happen is that the spring will break. This would be replaced with one from England. This would not happen often enough to keep someone in business so it would be a sideline. I have an original snaphounse that worked as soon as I replaced the spring and got rid of the rust.
A common hunting load was buck and ball. This was a ball on top of four medium-sized balls. JR102C was killed with this load in Jamestown early in Virginia's history.
The photo is of an interpreter at Plimoth Plantation playing the roll of John Howland.
I understood that wild turkeys at that time were not only plentiful, they congregated in flocks of hundreds. At night, a flock would sleep on the lower (and strongest) branches of a single tree. If four men armed with 10 gauge fowliing pieces lined up beside a tree and fired at the same time, most of the flock would get away, but many birds would be downed. Locate two or three trees and do this, and they'd probably harvest all the turkeys they could carry. Not that this was necessarily the most efficient procedure; for instance, if you knew where to set up nets, netting passenger pigeons could capture more poundage in a shorter time, without stumbling around the woods in the dark.
2. Let's not forget that the Pilgrims first landed in Provincetown, MA, five weeks before hitting Plymouth. They departed because all the art galleries were closed that week.