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
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