November 2020
By Les Conklin
Yup. It’s good to see you again. Desert Les is back. Not because them Peak readers demanded it but because the fool editor told Desert Les to fill this here white space with interestin’ doings and seeings.
Desert Les has been following orders and hunkerin’ down in the family bunkhouse. That dang virus can’t find us here. Nope.
Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor by William Hallsall . Wikipedia
, Desert Lea and Desert Judy were watching cable news. A medical expert advised that viewers should not have the usual large family gathering for Thanksgiving dinner. The show’s anchor wrapped up the interview with an insightful comment. He said, “I doubt the Pilgrims intended Thanksgiving dinner to be a superspreader event.” What that anchor did not say was that the first Thanksgiving probably resulted from Native American and Pilgrim superspreading. Yup.
Pilgrim Superspreading
The Mayflower’s journey to the New World was grueling. The plan was to reach their destination during the summer but a late start and a stormy 10- week voyage doomed an on-time arrival. It was November 21, 1620 when the Mayflower, with 102 passengers and a crew of about 30, dropped anchor near present day Provincetown, Massachusetts. The Pilgrims spent the next month and a half exploring Cape Cod and choosing a settlement site.
A large expedition with 34 persons in the open small boat: 24 passengers and 10 sailors, searched for a settlement site. The winter weather was much colder than in England and the men were not properly clothed. To make matters worse, stormy below freezing weather forced them to overnight on shore and their shoes and socks froze during the night. Bradford, the Pilgrim’s leader later wrote, “Some of our people that are dead took the original of their death here” on the expedition.
On December 25, 1620, they finally decided upon Plymouth, and began construction of their first buildings.
The Cape’s bleak, frigid, stormy weather made it impossible to build sufficient shelter on shore, so the passengers remained on the ship. They spent most of their time below decks. There was little fresh, nutritious food. Living space was cold, damp, cramped, unhygienic with poor ventilation and foul air. Hardly a recipe for healthy living.
Pardner, A contagious disease with symptoms of pneumonia, scurvy and tuberculosis struck. Entire families were wiped out and at times there were only a few people, including Miles Standish, who were able to care for the sick, dying, and deceased.
In the spring huts were built on shore. Only 53 passengers and about half the crew remained alive. Can you imagine what it would be like to lose 50 percent of your family, 50 percent of your friends and neighbors, 50 percent of your entire community and face the challenge of surviving with a limited amount of food in a strange “wilderness?”
Native American Superspreading
Wampanoag Nation. Territory Included Eastern Massachusetts, Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket and Southeastern Maine. Wikipedia.
Fifteen years before the Mayflower’s arrival, Frenchmen explored southern New England. They were looking for a suitable location for a colony. What they found was many hostile, healthy Native Americans. The expedition’s leader Samuel D. Champlain decided to look elsewhere.
In 2019, the year before the Pilgrims landing in Plymouth, Thomas Dermer traveled from today’s Maine to Massachusetts. He discovered, “ancient plantations, not long since populous, now utterly void; in other places a remnant remains, but not free of sickness.”
The year after the Mayflower’s arrival a group of Pilgrims reported finding many abandoned villages and overgrown Native cornfields about 15 miles from Plymouth. One of the Pilgrims wrote, “Thousands of men have lived there, which died in a great plague not long since.”
Near today’s Boston a site was found that had so many unburied bones and skulls that it was given a Biblical name that means “place of the skull.” Evidently, so many Indians died, so quickly that there was no chance to bury them.
The Pilgrims discovered native burials on a hill located on the settlement site which they selected. The new Plymouth Plantations had been the site of an old Wampanoag village.
Pardner, why had so many Native Americans died? The question is still being debated but most anthropologists believe that when a European’s arrived in the Americas they brought with them diseases for which Native American had no immunity. These diseases included, smallpox, bubonic plague, chickenpox, cholera, the common cold, diphtheria, influenza, malaria, measles, scarlet fever, typhoid, typhus and tuberculosis. Which of these diseases attacked the Native Americans is to be determined.
Fishermen and explorers had visited the coast of New England before the Mayflower arrived. A leading theory is that French captives being held by the Wampanoag passed the disease to their captors, who died at a rapid rate over four years. The epidemic wiped out as much as 90 percent of the Native population in southern New England. Of the approximate 8,000 Wampanoag living near Plymouth in 1600, fewer than 2,000 survived in 1620. Can you imagine losing 75 percent of your family, 75 percent of your friends and neighbors, 75 percent of your community in just a few years. Desert Les cannot imagine it. See Note 1 at end of article.
Both Groups Weakened
Both the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags were greatly weakened by the sickness and death caused by the illnesses that struck them, but the Pilgrims survival was the most problematic.
In addition to losing half of their people, much of their food had been consumed during the long voyage and unplanned delay in establishing their settlement. Also, the plants they brought from England did not do well in the local soil. They were in a strange land and fishing and hunting were difficult. To make matters worse they had forgotten a supply of fishing poles in the hurly burly of the Mayflower’s departure.
Why was Thanksgiving Possible?
Thanksgiving. National Endowment of the Humanities.
Even after the epidemic that killed so many of them the Wampanoag were in a much stronger position than the Pilgrims. They were in their homeland and they greatly outnumbered the surviving Pilgrims. Why did Native Americans treat these English settlers differently than Champaign’s expedition when they could easily have eradicated the infant colony.
There are three reasons. First, they were demoralized. A Mayflower passenger wrote, “Their countenance is dejected and they seem as a people affrighted,” even though they “might in one hour have made a dispatch of us, yet such a fear was upon them, … that they never offered us the least injury in word or deed.” Second, they feared the Pilgrims because they believed the white man’s God had caused their great sicknesses that killed their people. Third, they feared the powerful Narragansetts that lived to the south and now greatly outnumbered the Wampanoag. An alliance with the Pilgrims would increase the strength of the Wampanoag.
Pardner, Now we get to the part of the Thanksgiving story that Desert Les learned in grammar school. The Wampanoag leader Massasoit made peace and established an alliance with the Pilgrims in the spring of 1621. The Wampanoag taught the Pilgrims what to plant and how to hunt certain wildlife and fish. And Pardner that’s why they were invited to the first Thanksgiving in the Fall of 1621. By all reports it was not a superspreader event. .
Unavoidable Tragedies
Given the circumstances and existing knowledge, the superspreading tragedies that befell the Pilgrim and Wapanog were unavoidable. The victims hardly had a chance.
Almost five centuries has passed since the first Thanksgiving. Science has eradicated or dramatically reduced the impact of the diseases that ravaged the colonists and native people in the early 17th century.
In the case of CUVID-19 we too face danger because of lack of knowledge, focus, immunity, and a vaccine. However, becoming a victim of the disease is avoidable. Desert Les and Desert Judy are going to spend this Thanksgiving following the advice of the medical experts. We will be hiding in the bunkhouse and eating an apple that day and Zooming away to our family, something the Pilgrims could not do when they were stuck below deck on the Mayflower.
Pardner, Have a safe and happy Thanksgiving, avoid superspreading and give a thought to the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag who could not avoid illness. We can.
Note 1. One recent analysis concluded the culprit that a nukilled the Wampanoag was leptospirosis, caused by leptospira bacteria. Spread by rat urine. The bacterium lives in animal hosts and is transmitted between animals and to people via urine in fresh water.
Note 2. The author has a personal interest in this subject, Mary Covell (1640-1688) a great great … grandmother was a Wampanoag woman who lived on Martha’s Vineyard. The author also had a number of ancestors who were passengers on the Mayflower, 13 of them died during the winter of 1620/21.
wo
The Peak Welcomes Your Comment
GPPA Membership Make a Donation to GPPA Peak Advertisements & Advertorials
Recent Comments