Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [110]
TO MAKE CRANBERRY TARTS
To one pound of flour three quarters of a pound of butter, then stew your cranberry’s [sic] to a jelly, putting good brown sugar in to sweeten them, strain the cranberry’s and then put them in your patty pans for baking in a moderate oven for half an hour.
—HANNAH GLASSE, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, 1805
For many Americans, New England is almost the default setting when imagining an inviting holiday landscape: snowy Christmases, Halloween under bright fall foliage, Fourth of July on the beach. So it’s worth remembering how threatening—how utterly alien—it felt to the English who settled on the site of the plague-decimated Wampanoag village of Patuxet in 1620, building the town that would enter American lore as the Plymouth of the first Thanksgiving. Some of the English later produced boosterish prose, as when Edward Winslow wrote in the 1622 Mourt’s Relation that “the country wanteth only industrious men to employ, for it would grieve your hearts if, as I, you had seen so many miles together by goodly rivers uninhabited.” But they also had to admit that it was a country whose boughs and bushes “tore [their] very armor in pieces.” To the English it was a place of howling wolves, one where “two lions roaring exceedingly for a long time together” left them witlessly terrified.
But the worst thing may have been signs of the plague recently brought by coastal traders and fishermen from Europe; in the weeks after landing at Patuxet, the English saw it as a country of ghosts. Sometimes the plague had struck with such speed and force that the Wampanoag had been unable to bury one another, “their skulls and bones . . . found in many places lying still above the ground where their houses and dwellings had been, a very sad spectacle to behold.” The new arrivals could tell that “thousands of men ha[d] lived” at Patuxet, and “had died in a great plague not long since”; it was a pity, they said, “to see so many goodly fields, and so well seated, without men to dress and manure the same.” Several times they dug into what turned out to be graves, hacking through the icy ground with swords; they hoped to find baskets full of corn, like those they’d already stolen from a Wampanoag winter-storage cache.
Having arrived in December, the English struggled to build enough houses. Even so, half died before spring; it might have been even worse without the stolen maize. Stealing the winter provisions of people already devastated by plague was a dire theft (the English did eventually repay the corn, though long after it might have been needed). But, fortunately for the newcomers, the local sagamore leader, Massasoit, was badly in need of a political alliance and willing to overlook the offense.
Linda Coombs thinks that the biggest misconception about the 1621 gathering is that it was motivated by pure friendship. “This wasn’t because they were great friends,” she says. “People think it was the first celebration in a long series. It was a onetime thing, and it only happened because Massasoit was between a rock and a hard place, being pressed between the English to the east and the Narragansett to the west.” The latter hadn’t yet been struck as hard by disease, and Massasoit “had to choose what was best for his people. So he took a gamble, trying to avoid subjection to the Narragansett.”
In the months before the harvest, the English became heavily dependent on the Wampanoag man Tisquantum, or “Squanto,” to the point that other Native Americans sometimes viewed him as a collaborator (at one point, having learned that Tisquantum was demanding tribute in return for supposedly restraining European disease, Massasoit unsuccessfully demanded his head). Tisquantum was from Patuxet and had survived the plague only because he’d been in Spain and London when it struck. Now he taught the English to plant, fish, and hunt; in one famous episode,