The True Story of Thanksgiving: Squanto, the Pilgrims, and the Pope

We and the Mayflower Pilgrims owe thanks to the Pope and some Catholic priests for the Thanksgiving of 1621 with Squanto and the Plymouth Colony.

November 22, 2023 by Fr Gordon MacRae

Growing up within sight of Boston, Massachusetts meant lots of grade school field trips to the earliest landmarks of America. We looked forward to those excursions because they meant a day out of school. The only downside was the inevitable essay. Back then, I had no love for either history or essays. Go figure!

Some field trips are vividly remembered even six decades later. A visit to the deck of “Old Ironsides,” the U.S.S. Constitution in Boston Harbor, stands out as the most exciting. Visits to the sites of the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, and Paul Revere’s famous ride also stand out as great adventures in hands-on U.S. history — the essays notwithstanding.

Then there was the trip to Plymouth Rock (YAWN!), the most underwhelming national monument in America. Everyone of us emerged from the bus to file past Plymouth Rock while poor Mr. Dawson had to listen to an endless cascade of “That’s IT?!”

“Dedham granodiorite.” That’s the scientific name of the rock where the Mayflower Pilgrims were left to settle in the New World in what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts. Plymouth Rock was noted and described in the Pilgrims’ journals, but it fell into obscurity for a century until the town of Plymouth decided to build a wharf in 1741. That’s when 94-year-old church elder Thomas Faunce set out to identify Plymouth Rock and mark the site. Thirty-four years later, the town moved the rock to a more prominent location, accidentally breaking it in half in the process. Only the top half made its way to the town’s new site.

Then shopkeepers began chiseling away at it, selling chunks to tourists for $1.50 each. Over the ensuing years, Plymouth Rock was moved again and again, split in half a second time, cemented back together, then what was left of it ended up surrounded by a concrete portico to become the nation’s first national landmark.

You Can Say That Again!

Every year since 1961 on the day before Thanksgiving, The Wall Street Journal publishes the same two lead editorials by Vermont C. Royster. They are considered classics. “The Desolate Wilderness” describes the purpose and plight of the Puritan founders of New England who left such a deeply engraved mark, for better or worse, on the spirit of this nation. “And the Fair Land” lays out the free market foundation upon which American enterprise was built. These editorials are now a Thanksgiving tradition, and if the WSJ can get away with annual repetition, so can I.

This year I’m revisiting the story of Squanto and the Pilgrims, with a few additions and updates, and posting it before Thanksgiving in the hope it might be Tweeted, pinged, e-mailed, and otherwise shared.

The lack of awe inspired by Plymouth Rock is in inverse proportion to the story of how the Pilgrims came to stand upon it. Every grade school student knows the tale of the Mayflower. In 1620, its pilgrim sojourners fled religious persecution from the established Church of England. They embarked on a long and treacherous voyage across the Atlantic in the leaky, top-heavy Mayflower. Landing at Plymouth, Massachusetts, the Pilgrims befriended the native occupants, endured many hardships, then, after a successful first harvest in the New World, celebrated a Thanksgiving feast with their Native American friends in the autumn of 1621.

That story is true, as far as it goes, but the story your grade school history book omitted is downright fascinating, and every Catholic should know of it. Before boarding the Mayflower, the Pilgrims were called “Separatists.” The religious “persecution” they came here to flee consisted mostly of their determination to purge the remnants of Catholicism from the established Church of England.

Author, Philip Lawler summarized their agenda in his book, The Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston’s Catholic Culture (Encounter Books, 2008):

“[T]he Puritans were campaigning against the lingering traces of Catholicism. Decades of brutal persecution — first under Henry VIII, then under Elizabeth I — had eliminated the Roman Church from English public life in the sixteenth century; the country's few remaining faithful Catholics had been driven underground. For the Puritans, that was not enough . . . They were determined to erase any vestigial belief in the sacraments, any deference to an ecclesiastical hierarchy.”

— Philip Lawler in The Faithful Departed

The Pilgrims came here to establish a New World theocracy, a religiously oriented society that would reflect their religious fervor which was also anti-Catholic.

Puritanism deeply affected the American national character, but I wonder if the Pilgrims would even recognize the American religious landscape of today. It is far from what they envisioned.

The Puritan Pilgrims were not always considered the survivors of religious persecution American history made them out to be. Writer, H.L. Mencken described Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” And G.K. Chesterton once famously remarked:

“In America, they have a feast to celebrate the arrival of the Pilgrims. Here in England, we should have a feast to celebrate their departure.”

— G.K. Chesterton

Pilgrim’s Progress

When the Pilgrims stepped off the Mayflower on December 11, 1620, they were not at all prepared for life in the New World. They were originally destined to colonize what is now Virginia, but the Mayflower veered badly off course. They also considered settling at the mouth of the Hudson River in modern day New York, but Dutch traders conspired to prevent it.

Before leaving England on September 16, 1620, the Pilgrims used their meager resources to purchase a second ship to sail along with the Mayflower and remain with them in the New World. That vessel was called the Speedwell. It was anything but well, however, nor was it speedy. Just 200 miles off the English coast, the Speedwell was sinking. Those aboard had to transfer to the crowded Mayflower while the Speedwell returned to England. There was evidence that the Speedwell was intentionally rigged to fail, leaving the colonists with no vessel with which to explore once the Mayflower departed.

The voyage across the Atlantic was delayed for months, finally landing the Pilgrims in New England at the start of winter. There were 102 aboard the Mayflower when it left England, but by the end of their first winter in the New World, only half that number were still alive. Unable to plant in the dead of winter, their first encounter with the indigenous people of coastal Massachusetts — known to those who lived there as “The Dawn Land” — came when the near starving Pilgrims stole ten bushels of maize from an Indian storage site on Cape Cod. It was not a good beginning.

Massasoit, the “sachem” (leader) of the once powerful Wampanoag tribe, was not at all enamored of the visitors, and the fact that they seemed intent on staying disturbed him greatly. The Pilgrims had no way to know that prior European visitors to those shores left diseases to which the people of The Dawn Land had no natural resistance. By the time the Pilgrims arrived, 95% of the indigenous population of New England, including the Wampanoag, had been decimated.

Still, Massasoit could have easily overtaken and destroyed the invaders, who were barely surviving, but they had something he wanted. Massasoit feared that his tribe’s weakened state might spark an invasion from rivals to the south, and he noted that the Pilgrims had a few cannons and guns that could help even the odds.

The Pilgrims Meet “The Wrath of God”

So instead of attacking the Pilgrims, Massasoit sent an emissary in the person of Tisquantum, known to history as Squanto. He was actually a captive of Massasoit and arrived just weeks before the Pilgrims. Tisquantum was likely not his original name. In the language of the people of The Dawn Land, Tisquantum meant the equivalent of “the wrath of God.” It may have been a name given to him, and, as you’ll see below, perhaps for good reason. 

Squanto was to become the primary force behind the Pilgrims’ unlikely survival in the New World. On March 22, 1621, the vernal equinox, Squanto walked out of the forest into the middle of the Pilgrims’ ramshackle base at Plymouth, a settlement known to Squanto as Patuxet. That place was once his home. To the Pilgrims’ amazement, Squanto spoke nearly perfect English, and arrived prepared to remain with them and guide them through everything from fishing to agriculture to negotiations with the nervous and well-armed Massasoit and the Wampanoag.

As historian Charles C. Mann wrote in “Native Intelligence,” (Smithsonian, December 2005), “Tisquantum was critical to the colony’s survival.” Squanto taught them to plant the native corn they had stolen instead of just eating it, and he negotiated a fair trade for the theft of the corn. The Pilgrims’ own supplies of grain and barley all failed in the New World soil while the native corn gave them a life-saving crop. Squanto taught them how to fish, and how to fertilize the soil with the remains of the fish they caught. Most importantly, Squanto served as an advocate and interpreter for the Pilgrims with Massasoit, averting almost certain annihilation of the weakened and distrusted foreigners.

A Catholic Rescue

For their part, the Pilgrims interpreted Squanto’s presence and intervention as acts of Divine Providence. They had no idea just how much Providence was involved. It is the story of Squanto — of how he came to be in that place at that very time, and of how he came to speak fluent English — that is the most fascinating story behind the first Thanksgiving.

In 1614, six years before the arrival of the Mayflower, Captain John Smith — the same man rescued by Pocahontas in another famous tale — led two British vessels to the coast of Maine to barter for fish and furs. When Smith departed from the Maine shore, he left a lieutenant, Thomas Hunt, in command to load his ship with dried fish.

Without consultation, Thomas Hunt sailed his ship south to what is now called Cape Cod Bay. Anchored off the coast of Patuxet (now Plymouth) in 1614, Hunt and his men invited two dozen curious native villagers aboard the ship. One of them was Squanto. Once aboard, the Indians — as the Europeans came to call them — were forced into irons in the ship’s hold. Kidnapped from their homes and families, they were taken on a six-week journey across the Atlantic. Not all the captives survived the voyage. Those who did survive, Squanto among them, were brought to Malaga off the coast of Spain to be sold as slaves.

Fortunately for Squanto, and later for our Pilgrims, Spain was a Catholic country. Seventy-seven years earlier, envisioning injustices visited upon the indigenous peoples of the New World, Pope Paul III issued “Sublimus Dei,” a papal bull forbidding Catholic governments from enslaving or mistreating Indians from the Americas. The Pope declared that Indians are “true men” who could not lawfully be deprived of liberty. “Sublimus Dei” instructed that European intervention into the lives of Indians had to be motivated by benefit to the Indians themselves. It would take America another 300 years to catch up with the Catholic Church and abolish slavery.

As a result of the papal decree, the Catholic Church in Spain was opposed to the mistreatment of Indians, and opposed to bringing them to Europe against their will. Of course, the Catholic ideal did not always prevent slave trade on the black market. At Malaga, Thomas Hunt managed to sell most of his captives, and was about to sell Squanto when two Spanish Jesuit priests intervened. The Spanish-speaking priests seized Squanto who somehow convinced them to send him home. Not knowing where “home” was, the priests arranged for Squanto’s passage as a free man on a ship bound for London. It is likely that the Jesuits even baptized Squanto as a Catholic. It would have been a way to assure his status as a free man.

Squanto’s world tour was underway. In late 1614, having no idea where he was, Squanto walked into the London office of John Slaney, manager of the Bristol Company, a shipping and merchant venture that had been given rights to the Isle of Newfoundland by England’s King James I in 1610. Squanto spent the next three years stranded in London before being placed on a ship bound for St. John’s, Newfoundland in 1617. By now fully immersed in the language and ways of the English, Squanto spent another two years stranded in Newfoundland — 1,000 miles of sea and rocky coast still separating him from his native Patuxet.

Late in 1619, Squanto befriended Thomas Dermer, a British Merchant in Newfoundland who agreed to sail Squanto home, though neither knew where home was. They knew it was south, so south they sailed. Squanto eventually recognized a Patuxet landmark — maybe even what we came to call Plymouth Rock.

With Thomas Dermer’s ship anchored off Patuxet, Squanto stepped onto the shores of home after a nearly six year absence. But the people of The Dawn Land — Squanto’s people — were no more. Squanto was devastated to learn that disease had ravaged his home in his absence, and not a single Patuxet native had survived. Squanto was alone.

Squanto knew he could not remain there. He convinced Thomas Dermer to accompany him inland in search of anyone among his people who might have survived. There was no one. It wasn’t long before both men were taken captive by Massasoit, sachem of what had been a confederation of 20,000 native Massachuset and Wampanoag tribal peoples. By the time Squanto and Thomas Dermer stood captive before Massasoit, however, all but 1,000 of them were dead from diseases carried to the New World aboard European vessels.

Just weeks later, it was to this setting that the Mayflower’s naive and ill-prepared Pilgrims arrived to face the winter of 1620 in the New World. Squanto, now alone — his life ravaged and his home and people destroyed — convinced Massasoit to send him to the Pilgrims as a negotiator and interpreter instead of attacking them. Squanto put his wrath aside, and became a bridge linking two disparate worlds.

Without Squanto — and, indirectly at least, the Pope and some Jesuit priests — the fate of the Puritan Pilgrims would have been vastly different, and Thanksgiving would likely have never taken place. Squanto was, as Governor William Bradford of Plymouth Plantation wrote of him,

“A spetiall instrument sent of God for their good beyond their expectations.”

On that point, both Puritans and Catholics might agree. At your Thanksgiving table this year, say a prayer of thanks for Tisquantum — Squanto. Our national ancestors were once pilgrims and strangers in a strange land, and that land’s most disenfranchised citizen assured their survival.

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The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

The Faithful Departed: Bishops Who Bar Catholics from Mass

As President Trump called upon governors to classify churches as essential, a Catholic Bishop in a state among the least impacted by Covid-19 suspended public Mass.

I have to write about this now because I wrote about it then. During the now notorious presidential election of 2016, I wrote “Wikileaks Found Catholics in the Basket of Deplorables.” If you missed it then, you probably should not miss it now. I and many others naively lent credence to all the media hype about Russian collusion back then — now proven to be entirely false and an egregious injustice to General Michael Flynn. The above post actually commended the Russian hackers for providing transparency often promised but rarely delivered by American politicians.

That post was about revelations found in the emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, about the Democratic Party’s plans for the Catholic Church in America. I wrote the post just after Mrs. Clinton’s now infamous debate declaration: “Supporters of Donald Trump are a Basket of Deplorables.” I was not one of Donald Trump’s supporters, but I knew that Hillary lost the election then and there. Attacking candidates is just politics as usual. Attacking voters is political suicide.

The post above cited several examples of emails between the Clinton campaign and various Catholic entities with overtures to move the Church from a pro-life agenda toward a more left-leaning script for Catholic social progress. Climate change and open borders are to be the moral imperatives of the day.

I had more or less forgotten about the now famous Basket of Deplorables until the current election raised it anew — though not in so many words. Three years after the term was first
uttered, many in the news media still apply it by inference to everything and everyone in any way connected to the current American President.

Now thrust upon his growing heap of media scorn is a call from the President to America’s governors to give churches and other houses of worship the same treatment some of them have bestowed upon liquor stores, abortion clinics, and beauty salons. This President wants churches to be deemed “essential.” He at first threatened to “override” any governor who balks at this, a notion that the news media has gone to great lengths to ridicule. In a hastily scheduled White House Press Conference, Trump said:

“I call upon the governors to allow our churches or places of worship to open. If they don’t do it, I will override the governors. The ministers, pastors, rabbis, imams and other faith leaders will make sure their congregations are safe as they gather and pray.”

On May 22, 2020, the Centers for Disease Control supplemented the President’s request by laying out a series of guidelines for houses of worship to safely provide services. These include the usual recommendations for social distancing, cleaning practices, and face coverings all of which churches could easily observe.

The Real Presence and the Present Absence

But what do we do when it is Catholic bishops, and not politicians, closing church doors to faithful Catholics? As the American President deemed churches to be essential and called to reopen them, the Catholic Bishop of Manchester, New Hampshire, one of the states least impacted by the contagion, issued his formal “Decree Establishing Liturgical Norms During Covid-19 Pandemic”:

“Mindful that the dignity of the human person requires the pursuit of the common good (CCC 1926) and as Bishop of the Diocese of Manchester understanding my responsibility to issue liturgical norms by which all are bound (Canon 838:4), I hereby decree [that] the public celebration of Mass remains suspended… until such time as I deem it prudent to modify [this decree].”

There are a multitude of reasons why the ongoing suspension of Catholic Mass in this of all states is an unintended assault upon the religious needs of the people. In a surprising juxtaposition of roles, as some bishops closed churches and barred the faithful from Mass, the Centers for Disease Control issued a statement that should give pause to secular and spiritual leaders alike: “Millions of Americans embrace worship as an essential part of life.”

I would have expected such a sentiment from our bishops, not from a government entity established to control contagion. Sadly, however, that truth professed by the CDC applies less to New Hampshire than any other state. According to the Pew Research Center, New Hampshire is ranked 50th out of the fifty states for religious identity, observance, and influence. It also ranks 50th out of the fifty states in charitable giving.

In publishing his recent Decree, the Bishop of the Diocese of Manchester, NH, Bishop Peter A. Libasci, stated that as of May 18, 2020, over 3,600 New Hampshire citizens [out of a population of over 1.3 million] have tested positive for Covid-19, and 172 of our neighbors have lost their lives.” This is true, and at this writing the death toll in New Hampshire stands at about 250. Tragically, all but 65 of them were residents of nursing homes, the most vulnerable among us but they would not have been present at Mass anyway. These figures pale next to how Covid-19 has impacted some other states where governors and bishops are reopening churches while applying the norms for safety recommended by the CDC.

But there is another New Hampshire statistic that should be far more alarming to both the Governor and the Bishop. Among the fifty states, New Hampshire has the nation’s highest and most hopeless rate of death among working age young adults between the ages of 16 and 40. This is driven by another, far more deadly contagion: opiate addiction and all the physical, mental and spiritual hopelessness it entails. I wrote about this Grim Reaper in “America’s Opioid Epidemic Is Wreaking Havoc in this Prison.”

That post described a wall of sorrows in one unit in this prison containing the photos of young men who have lost their lives to addiction after leaving prison. The 37 photos on that wall of death included only those who lived in this one unit of 288 prisoners. And just as I sat down to type this post, a 38th photo was added. One of our good friends just tragically ended up on that wall.

Jerry came to prison at age 19 in 2005. In recent years, he attended Sunday Mass with Pornchai Moontri and me. Before the Covid-19 shut down he was able to come and talk to me in the prison Law Library where I work. On Friday, May 15, 2020 he was released from prison having completed his sentence at age 33. He lived in freedom for only a single day before losing his life to a fentanyl overdose. This is a painfully familiar story here as young prisoners face the reality that life in freedom sometimes means bringing the bondage of addiction home with them.

Bishop Libasci’s Decree cited his justification for keeping the churches closed: “172 of our neighbors have lost their lives” to Covid-19 statewide. This pales next to the grim truth of those in his Diocese who lost their lives in hopeless addiction. The New Hampshire Chief Medical Examiner reports that 2,500 young lives were lost to opioid drug overdoses in this small state since 2015.

Most of these deaths were those of young men and women from 16 to 40 years of age. One small New Hampshire city recently saw over 400 drug overdose deaths in a single year. There is likely no other state more in need of the spiritual strength and solace of open churches and the Sacrifice of the Mass than New Hampshire.

Trusting Faithful Catholics

One commenter on this subject in a Facebook discussion (which I could not see because I have never seen Facebook) commended Bishop Libasci and other bishops for helping to keep people safe by closing churches. I could only think of a statement of Saint Paul in his letter to the Corinthians:

“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.”

— 1 Cor. 13:11

The point should be obvious. When I was seven, I needed the help of adults to take care of myself. At sixty-seven that is simply no longer so. The Centers for Disease Control issued guidelines for what we adults must do to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe in public environments, including at Mass.

This is a point for which conservatives and Libertarians refer to the Left as purveyors of Big Government and “The Nanny State.” And it’s a point for which George Orwell cautioned us all in his dystopian 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. We surrender our freedoms when we hand the interpretation of them over to “Big Brother.” Remember the cautionary words of the late President Ronald Reagan:

“The most dangerous words in the English language are, ‘Hello, I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”

America is vigilant about concessions to totalitarian governments but too many turn a blind eye to how our political, social, economic, intellectual, and spiritual narratives are dominated in our media by the extreme left of our cultural elite. For someone to make the decision for us by denying Mass to the faithful when they should be entrusted with caring for themselves is insulting, at best.

When that decision leaves faithful Catholics in spiritual deprivation, they are placed at even greater risk by traveling long distances to seek out Mass in a more reasonable Diocese. This point was made by some readers of a recent post of mine. One comment that stands out is this one by “Judith” posted on “Pandemic Lockdown: Before the Walls Close In.”

“Here in the trenches, we recently received a communiqué from the Minister of Compliance in the Department of the State-Sanctioned Religious Observance informing us of the new rules regarding worship. If the Church / State requires masks, reception of Communion after Mass, and taking down our names and contact information in order to attend Mass, I will be assisting at the SSPX Mass an hour-and-forty-minutes away [which happens to be in Bishop Libasci’s diocese]. I know for a fact they don’t put up with this… God forbid you exercise your free will by choosing to risk your life to follow the precepts of the Church.”

Congressman Dan Crenshaw, a former Navy Seal and one of the most honorable members of Congress, wrote a March 19, 2020 op-ed for The Wall Street Journal entitled, “Why Does Reopening Polarize Us?” He raises an interesting twist of political psychology. Liberal and conservative brain functioning shows differences in their mapping when risk-taking is considered.

But it is now the conservatives who “are the ones ready to confront risk head-on.” He says this is also consistent with his experience in the military, and may explain why the vast majority of Special Forces operatives identify as political and social conservatives. But he cautions that liberals lagging behind in re-opening society may have another agenda, treating the lockdowns and consequent economic devastation as an opportunity to restructure America into a socialist utopia.”

In the National Catholic Register, Thomas M. Farr, President of the Religious Freedom Institute, has a recent column entitled, “Coronavirus and Religious Freedom.” He cites that the line drawn between “essential and nonessential” businesses and services by government decree is highly suspect. He singled out Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, a Democrat, former pediatrician, and notorious proponent of late-term abortion, as declaring that religious services are not essential,” but abortion clinics and liquor stores are.

Thomas Farr also adds that for Catholics, access to the Sacrifice of the Mass is “essential to our happiness in this life and the next.” I can only repeat what Father James Altman so courageously declared in a recent, now viral, homily entitled, “Memo to the Bishops of the World”:

“The faithful do not need you to look after their bodies. They need you to follow the Supreme Law of the Church and look after their souls.”

Effective June 6, 2020, Bishop Libasci modified his Decree to allow public Masses to resume in his diocese with strict conditions and limitations in addition to those recommended by the CDC.

Elsewhere, on the topic of faithful priests with courage, Father George David Byers had a memorable quote in a recent post, “Coronavirus ‘Creativity’ for Mass: ‘Just do it in the Parking Lot.’ No. And… Hell no!”

“I’m not going to be a Parking Lot Priest just to look up-to-date. No! … Hell no!”

But I am giving the last word to Saint Paul’s Second letter to Timothy:

“I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word, be urgent in season and out of season, convince, rebuke, and exhort; be unfailing in patience and in teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itchy ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths. As for you, always be steady, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.”

— 2 Tim 4:1-5

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: You may also wish to read and share these memorable related posts:

The Once and Future Catholic Church

Wikileaks Found Catholics in the Basket of Deplorables

In the Diocese of Manchester, Transparency and a Hit List

Grand Jury, St. Paul’s School, and the Diocese of Manchester

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