Thanksgiving in Plain Style

This Subcast episode marks the American Thanksgiving holiday by looking at two early accounts of the celebration by Pilgrims William Bradford and Edward Winslow and then turns to that great hymn of thanksgiving -- Psalm 107 -- from The Bay Psalm Book, the first book published in what would become the United States.  We'll also look at what's called the "Puritan Plain Style" of composition, a marked departure from the ornate literature of its Anglican contemporaries.

Transcript

Welcome, welcome, everyone!  Glad you could come!  This is another holiday bonus episode of the Classic English Literature Subcast.  Here in the US of A it’s Thanksgiving Day, that most American of holidays in which gluttony masquerades as gratitude.  Since in the mainline episodes we’ve been in the first half of the 1600s, today’s a good day to talk about that First Thanksgiving at Plymouth in 1621, in which the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag feasted the success of the harvest.

But first let’s clear up a couple of things: that 1621 knees-up in Plymouth was not, in any strict way, the first thanksgiving.  The indigenous peoples had celebrated harvest festivals since the year dot.  The Green Corn Festival of the Iroquois, to take but one example, heralded the ripening of staple crops.  In the Virginia colony, the Jamestown settlers held a thanksgiving service in 1607 for their safe arrival.  In 1610, another thanksgiving marked the arrival of supply ships after the so-called “Starving Time” when almost 90% of the population perished.  Also, on December 4, 1619, settlers at the Berkeley Hundred plantation, led by Captain John Woodlief, arrived in Virginia. As instructed by their sponsors in England, they held a thanksgiving service upon arrival, declaring: “We ordain that the day of our ship’s arrival ... shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God.”

And I won’t even get into the Spanish and French celebrations in Florida, Texas, and Canada.

So, yes, the “First Thanksgiving” was not the first thanksgiving.  Myth busted.  So why has the Pilgrim feast so captured the cultural imagination?  Because it’s the story that fits American mythology best – and I don’t mean “myth” here as “lie”.  I mean myth in the literary and anthropological sense as in a story that speaks to the values and identity of a people, a culture.  And more than Virginia or Canada, the Plymouth story grows to become the Genesis story of America.  

But it didn’t start out that way, of course.  People looking to get the “real story” of Thanksgiving go to the most obvious source: William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation.  Written between 1630 and 1651, Bradford’s book chronicles the Pilgrims' time in England, their persecution for religious dissent under King Jamie I, and their decision to leave for the Netherlands. It details their years in Leiden, their shock at the permissive tolerance of Dutch society, and their eventual decision to seek freedom and opportunity in the New World.

It also describes the voyage of the Mayflower, the signing of the Mayflower Compact, and the Pilgrims’ arrival at Cape Cod in November 1620.  We get the challenges of the first winter, where nearly half the colonists died, and the assistance they received from the Wampanoag people, including Squanto, who played a vital role in teaching them survival skills.  We talked about some of this in our 4th of July episode on English coming to America.

But you’ll be disappointed by Governor Bradford’s relation of the origins of our great feast.  In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to know that he even mentions it.  Here’s the entirety of his description:

They began now to gather in the small harvest they had, and to fit up their houses and dwellings against winter, being all well recovered in health and strength and had all things in good plenty. For as some were thus employed in affairs abroad, others were exercised in fishing, about cod and bass and other fish, of which they took good store, of which every family had their portion. All the summer there was no want; and now began to come in store of fowl, as winter approached, of which this place did abound when they came first (but afterward decreased by degrees). And besides waterfowl there was great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many, besides venison, etc. Besides, they had about a peck of meal a week to a person, or now since harvest, Indian corn to that proportion. Which made many afterwards write so largely of their plenty here to their friends in England, which were not feigned but true reports.

  Yep, that’s it.  No talk of feasting, or games, or camaraderie with the Wampanoag.  No mention of parades or football games or Uncle Ted being deep into his second bottle of Bailey’s.  Just: we got a bunch of food together, as you already know.  Since this is a podcast about English literature, I feel obligated to point out that Bradford’s writing in this passage – and, indeed, in the entire book – is a prime example of what is now called the “Puritan Plain Style.”  Bradford scrupulously avoids excessive ornamentation in his writing, focusing instead on factual and straightforward accounts of direct experiences.  The sentences are syntactically simple, with a dearth of rhetorical flourish, and references to everyday events and objects replace the elaborate metaphors and conceits we find in Francis Bacon or John Donne.  Of course, classical allusion – seen as dangerously pagan – has no place in plain style.  Glorifying God and His providence is Bradford’s primary intent, not to showcase literary dexterity.  This plain style will be a hallmark of English Puritan literature in both old and new Englands.

OK, so where did the idea of a big feast come from?  Where do we get the fairy story of cultural exchange and amity?  That comes from a little pamphlet called “Mourt’s Relation,” published in 1621.  It’s written mostly by Edward Winslow, a prominent leader of the Pilgrim community (though it’s thought Bradford may have had his hand in some of it).  The title – Mourt’s Relation – comes from the fact that it was published under the name George Morton, or Mourt, who, though a Separatist with the Pilgrims in Holland, did not travel with them to New England.  He only came over in 1623.  Somehow, it was thought he’d written the booklet and it’s stuck.  Anyway, it’s this that gives us a more familiar image of the Thanksgiving legend:

our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together, after we had gathered the fruits 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 amongst 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.

That sound more like it?  Yeah, now we’re cookin’.  I think I came across something suggesting swan was on the menu that day.  That’s a bit posh, isn’t it?  Hardly anyone can afford swan nowadays.  The King only eats it now on Guy Fawkes Day – flame-broiled, I am informed by reliable sources.  Anyway, very direct, unadorned prose so as not to obscure the message of God’s bounty to the community.

We can see the plain style at work in Puritan religious verse as well.  Twenty years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, the first book was printed in what is now the United States.  Officially called The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre, the Bay Psalm Book rendered English translations of the Hebrew into a meter suitable for singing during worship services.  Other psalters existed, of course, but Puritans found the translations troublesome theologically.  So scholars such as Richard Mather and John Eliot undertook this new metrical rendering published by Stephen Day, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1640 as a quarto edition of 148 leaves with a print run of 1700 copies.  The psalms are set in common meter (alternating lines of eight and six syllables).  Since we’re on a Thanksgiving theme today, let’s have a look at Psalm 107, first from the Geneva Bible translation in prose.  I’ll just read the first handful of verses.

Praise the Lord, because he is good: for his mercy endureth forever.

Let them, which have been redeemed of the Lord, show how he hath delivered them from the hand of the oppressor, and gathered them out of the lands, from the East and from the West, from the North and from the South. When they wandered in the desert and wilderness out of the way, and found no city to dwell in, both hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted in them.  Then they cried unto the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress, and led them forth by the right way, that they might go to a city of habitation.

As you can hear, the Geneva Bible really sets the template for this plain style adopted by English Puritans.  But you really can’t sing it.  The melodies used for singing the psalms varied from congregation to congregation, but there are several common tunes. A tune like "Southwell" or "Dundee" would also have been typical. Here is an organ sample of the melody “St. Anne” which also works well for common meter singing such as Psalm 107 requires.

These tunes are simple, repetitive, and meant to be sung a cappella by the congregation.  So they rendered it in the Bay Psalm Book thusly:

O Give ye thanks unto the Lord,

because that good is he:

because his loving kindness lasts

to perpetuity.

So let the Lords redeem’d say: whom

he freed from th’ enemies hands:

And gathered them from East, and West,

from South, and Northern lands.

I’th desert, in a desert way

they wandered: no town find,

to dwell in. Hungry and thirsty:

their soul within them pin’d.

Then did they to Jehovah cry

when they were in distress:

who did them set at liberty

out of their anguishes.

In such a way that was most right

he led them forth also:

that to a city which they might

inhabit they might go.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I find this rendering somewhat syntactically tortured.  The meter seems quite difficult to regularize – feels like sometimes the beat falls on the wrong word.  You sure can’t dance to it – which is probably what the Puritans wished to avoid.  And the rhymes are a bit forced in places, no?  “Distress” and “anguishes” feels like a reach.  Nonetheless, the Bay Psalm Book was one of the great literary achievements of early English in America and though none of its translations are used today, it was very influential well into the 18th century. 

By the by, Psalm 107 also contains one of my favorite lines in all the psalms.  From the Geneva again, verses 23 and 24: “They that go down to the sea in ships, and occupy by the great waters, / They see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.”  I grew up in Rhode Island and spent a fair amount of my childhood on the New England coast.  There’s something so evocative and elemental about those lines for me.  If you go to Gloucester, MA – historically a quite significant fishing port – there’s a famous bronze statue overlooking the sea of the Gloucester fisherman called “Man at the Wheel.”  A rugged fisherman stands resolutely at the helm of his vessel, his gaze fixed on the distant horizon, determined, courageous, constantly challenging the unpredictable deep.  His oilskins and rain-slicked hat shield him from the relentless wind and spray as weathered hands grip the ship's wheel with a mix of strength and finesse, as though steering not just the ship, but the fate of those who depend on him while he braves the crashing waves of Gloucester Harbor.  On the base of memorial those words from the psalm are carved.  Those spare, plain words, as taciturn as the sailor’s face.  Uh!  I just love that.  When those English Puritans in their meeting houses sang these lines

They that goe downe to the sea
in ships, that trade therin,

These men within the deepe waters
Jehovahs works have seene

perhaps memories of their passages, years ago, on the Mayflower or the Arbella lingered in their thanks to God for his guardianship  and preservation against the travails of the wild world.

We note in all these texts the overriding theme of God’s divine providence, the belief that English Puritans in the so-called New World were the agents of the Almighty’s cosmic plan for the redemption of fallen humanity.  We talked about the “city upon the hill” trope from John Winthrop’s A Model of Christian Charity and its resonance throughout American history on our July 4 episode.  All that obtains here.  And this is why, I think, that we in America envisage the Pilgrims’ feast with the Wampanoag as the “First Thanksgiving,” despite the fact that we’ve many earlier documented celebrations.  Because we think of the Pilgrims as idealistic sojourners, believers in individual conscience, anti-monarchist, independent and principled.  They are the earliest avatars of what we now think of as “the American Spirit” in ways that the Virginian or Canadian colonists are not.  These latter were purely business ventures, but (though the bulk of the people who settled Plymouth were there only for the filthy lucre), we think of the Pilgrim settlement as one of higher ideals – the birth of a new world.  And those early interactions with the native peoples do seem to promise harmony and comity and good faith dealing.  But, of course, we know how that story ends – centuries of war, ethnic cleansing, and forced removal began mere years after that halcyon meal by the shores of Massachusetts Bay.  If the Cape Cod Thanksgiving is America’s Genesis – the myth of its creation in a fruitful wilderness – the serpent lurks in the trees.  But perhaps, for a moment – a fleeting, tiny, wisplike moment – there was a glimpse of the possible, that Kingdom of Peace promised by the prophet Isaiah.  Maybe we should be thankful for its existence, and strive to regain that moment.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone, everywhere!