Wonderful research.  And I think the results speak for themselves.  It
appears that we Virginians can speak proudly to a first Thanksgiving of some
sorts, but more importantly the designation of an annual day of
Thanksgiving.

Randy Cab ell
----- Original Message -----
From: "Brent Tarter" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, November 20, 2006 8:50 AM
Subject: [VA-HIST] Berkeley Thanksgiving in 1619?


> Va-Hist subscribers:
>
> I have been trying to ascertain what, if anything, took place when a
> small party of colonists reached Berkeley Hundred in December 1619. That
> is the origin of the Berkeley thanksgiving legend. Here is what I have
> discovered so far and would be very much obliged for any additional
> information (from primary sources, not from recent tall tales) that
> anybody could provide:
>
>        Virginia writers have often complained that northern writers
> gave New England writers too much credit for the founding of the nation.
> They protest that Pilgrims and Puritans, who arrived long after the
> settlement of Jamestown, have been portrayed as the real first
> Americans.
>        Nearly every autumn for more than fifty years the festival of
> thanksgiving is the occasion for somebody in Virginia to renew the
> complaint and to assert that there was a thanksgiving at Berkeley
> Plantation in Virginia in 1619, more than a year before the Pilgrims
> even arrived and two years before the Pilgrims held their famous
> thanksgiving.
>        The story is that when a ship load of colonists arrived at
> Berkeley Hundred, which is now Berkeley Plantation in Charles City
> County, in December 1619, they gave thanks according to the instructions
> they received from the patrons who sent them.
>        What do the few fragmentary surviving historical records
> disclose?
>        Those few documents, first published from the Smyth of Nibley
> Papers in the New York Public Library in its Bulletin of May 1899 and
> again in 1933 in the third volume of Susan Myra Kingsbury's Records of
> the Virginia Company of London, show that the ship Margaret and its
> passengers left England in September 1619 intending to settle at
> Berkeley Hundred in Virginia.
>        On 4 December the ship landed at Jamestown, where the secretary
> of the colony recorded its safe arrival and listed the thirty-five
> passengers by name (although the number is thirty-eight in some
> twentieth-century tellings of the story). Ten days later, the secretary
> issued a certificate for the information of the Bermuda Hundred sponsors
> back in England.
>        The few surviving documents do not indicate when the party left
> Jamestown, when it landed at Berkeley Hundred, or what, if anything, the
> settlers did when they arrived at their intended destination. The story
> is that they immediately gave thanks as their instructions required.
>        It is very likely that every person who survived an Atlantic
> crossing (going either way) gave thanks for his or her safe arrival as
> soon as possible. Sea voyages were always dangerous, and ships were
> always unhealthy. A safe arrival would naturally be a cause for relief
> at the avoidance of ship wreck, pirates, or disease. The men aboard
> Christopher Newport's ships did just that when they landed in Virginia
> in 1607.
>        There are no surviving documents that indicate what the
> colonists did when they stepped ashore at Berkeley Hundred in 1619.
>        Their instructions, in fact, did not require them to give thanks
> when they arrived. Their instructions actually stated (in the peculiar
> spelling and syntax of four centuries ago), "wee ordaine that the day of
> our ships arrivall at the place assigned for plantacon in the land of
> Virginia shall be yearly and perpetualy keept holy as a day of
> thanksgiuing to Almighty god."
>        Lo! The instructions ordered that the first thanksgiving take
> place one year after the day that the colonists landed at Berkeley
> Hundred.
>        There are no known surviving documents that record what took
> place at Berkeley Hundred, either when the Margaret arrived or on the
> first anniversary of that date. It is, in fact, rather unlikely that a
> thanksgiving ceremony took place in December 1620. A list of the ship's
> passengers, annotated in England some time after 20 March 1620,
> indicates that twenty-seven of the thirty-five immigrants were dead by
> the time the list was annotated. One had returned to England, and the
> fates of two more were unknown. So, if survivors of the original
> settlers who went ashore at Berkeley Hundred sometime after 4 December
> 1619 gave thanks on the anniversary date in 1620, it is probable that
> only a portion of the original men were still alive there.
>        A heavy death toll might have inspired survivors to give thanks
> for their own survival rather than to celebrate their arrival or to
> lament their colleagues' loss. Whether any of the survivors lived long
> enough to repeat the ceremony in 1621 is even more doubtful, and the
> absence of any of the Margaret's passengers from a list of all the
> colony's white inhabitants recorded in the spring or summer of 1622
> makes it certain that none lived there to the third anniversary of the
> landing.
>        Not only is the date of the landing at Berkeley Hundred not
> known, it is the subject of some confusion. The dates on the Jamestown
> certificate (4 December, the date of the arrival there, and 14 December,
> the date of the certificate) have been misrepresented in some accounts
> by people who misunderstood the nature and consequences of the calendar
> reform of 1752 and improperly tried to adjust 1619 dates to take the
> reform into account.
>        Confusions notwithstanding, in 1962, former Virginia state
> senator John J. Wicker persuaded Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., an advisor
> to President John F. Kennedy, of Massachusetts, to acknowledge the
> priority of the Virginia thanksgiving of 1619. That still does not make
> an event that probably did not happen in 1619 and may not have happened
> in any subsequent year the founding of a colonial or state tradition,
> any more than the Pilgrim harvest festival, which took place in 1621 and
> probably did not become an annual event until the nineteenth century, is
> the origin of an uninterrupted national tradition of giving thanks for
> blessings received.
>        The one part of the Berkeley thanksgiving that is undeniably
> correct is that it was intended from the beginning to be an annual day
> of giving thanks, and in that it may perhaps claim to be the first in
> intent, even if not in fact.
>
>
> Brent Tarter
> The Library of Virginia
> [log in to unmask]
>
> Visit the Library of Virginia's web site at http://www.lva.lib.va.us
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