The First Thanksgiving

Fifty-six years before the English Puritan refugees at Plymouth celebrated their “first Thanksgiving”, Spanish explorers and their Timucua allies celebrated one in Saint Augustine, in what is now Florida. They had bean soup.

Pedro Menéndez de Avilés was a Spanish admiral from Asturias. He was under orders to root out some French colonists in the area. Sighting land in La Florida on 28 August 1565, the feast day of Saint Augustine, he and his men landed and made friends with the locals. It turned out that they didn’t like the French much, either.

Menéndez founded the colony of Saint Augustine, named after the saint on whose day they landed, and he and his men celebrated with Holy Mass followed by a feast of thanksgiving with their new local friends.

Indeed, the Greek word from which we derive Eucharist means “thanksgiving”, so every Mass is a Thanksgiving. The bean soup was just a bonus.

Fast forward to 1614: a young North American Native named Tisquantum is kidnapped by English privateers, who brought him and several other captured Natives to Málaga, Spain, with the idea of selling them into slavery there. Some local Augustinian friars caught wind of this, and they bought the whole lot and set them free.

Tisquantum and a number of his compatriots converted to Catholicism and accepted Baptism. Tisquantum eventually left the friars, intent on returning home. He traveled widely, spending some time in London where he learned English. He finally made it home in 1619.

In his absence, his people, the Patuxet, had been wiped out by disease. He moved in with the folks now living at the site of his former village – a people who called themselves Pilgrims and their village Plymouth.

You see where this is going, right?

The Pilgrims had trouble pronouncing Tisquantum’s name, calling him “Squanto”. It was Squanto who taught the Pilgrims to survive in this strange country. It was Squanto who served as translator and negotiator between the Pilgrims and the various Native peoples.

Finally, it was Squanto who in the fall of 1621 proposed the happy idea that the Plymouth colonists and the Wampanoag people share an autumn harvest feast of thanksgiving.

May you and your family have a happy feast tomorrow, giving thanks to God for His goodness and bounty.