Seacoast historian J. Dennis Robinson says there’s a lot of myth surrounding the earliest days of the New England colonies. He explores many of them in his book, “1623.”
The Isles of Shoals off the New Hampshire coast have drawn fishermen for centuries. Cod, like the one this 1940s fisherman is hauling in, was a lifesaving gift for the Pilgrims of the Plymouth colony from David Thompson of Odiorne Point, according to Seacoast historian J. Dennis Robinson.
What if everything you think you know about Thanksgiving is wrong?
That’s the provocative premise behind a book published by Seacoast historian and author J. Dennis Robinson.
The book, “1623,” is subtitled “Pilgrims, Pipe Dreams, Politics & the Founding of New Hampshire.” In it, Robinson explores some of the lesser-known characters who were there at New Hampshire’s founding — and he manages, for good measure, to expose as myth the story of Thanksgiving that we all learned in grade school.
“The Pilgrims that we know are a mythological creation, created in the 19th century by Puritan ministers who wrote all the history books,” he said in a recent phone interview.
Seacoast historian J. Dennis Robinson says there’s a lot of myth surrounding the earliest days of the New England colonies. He explores many of them in his book, “1623.”
Harbortown Press
Harbortown Press
A prolific writer, Robinson has been giving talks about what his research has uncovered. “I tell people that when this (talk) is over, everything you believed about Thanksgiving will have been crushed under a giant rock,” he said.
With an irreverent sense of humor and an accessible writing style, Robinson invites us to look beyond the legend to find the truth about our history.
To start with, those who came over on the Mayflower never called themselves Pilgrims, Robinson said. “Even the Puritans called them either non-conforming Puritans or radical Puritans, and they called themselves separatists,” he said. “Pilgrims is a word that’s made up later on.”
These separatists, Robinson said, were radicals who despised any religious beliefs other than their own and wanted to see the Church of England destroyed.
And they weren’t kicked out of England, he said. “They self-exiled themselves, because King James didn’t like radical Puritanism.”
The popular depiction of Thanksgiving shows Pilgrims and Indians sitting down together to share a harvest meal. But in 1623, Robinson writes, after rumors of a coming attack, a group of Pilgrims invited Native leaders to a peace negotiation — and killed them. Legendary Captain Myles Standish brought the severed head of one chief back to his fort and mounted it on a pole.
“Myles Standish at a peace talk murders seven Indigenous people who may or may not have been planning to attack him,” Robinson said. “You don’t invite someone to dinner and kill them.”
Robinson’s interest in New Hampshire history dates back 50 years, when as a recent graduate of the University of New Hampshire with a degree in English literature, he had just returned from a year of study in England. Browsing the shelves at UNH’s Dimond Library, he happened upon Edward Winslow’s “Good News from New England.”
In a journal originally published in 1624, Winslow described how by the summer of 1623, the residents of Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts were suffering from a drought that had led to stunted crops and food shortages.
The Isles of Shoals off the New Hampshire coast have drawn fishermen for centuries. Cod, like the one this 1940s fisherman is hauling in, was a lifesaving gift for the Pilgrims of the Plymouth colony from David Thompson of Odiorne Point, according to Seacoast historian J. Dennis Robinson.
Harbortown Press
That’s when a man named David Thompson, an Englishman who had settled near what is now Odiorne Point in Rye, “arrived in the nick of time with a boatload of nutritious cod for the starving Pilgrims,” Robinson writes. Thompson’s arrival also coincided with a steady rainfall that broke the long dry spell and saved the crops, and the settlers, according to Winslow’s journal.
The brief reference by Winslow to Thompson’s timely fish delivery to Plymouth stunned the young Robinson — and set him on a lifelong path of research and discovery.
“The idea that New Hampshire’s first and largely forgotten English settlers had saved the legendary Pilgrims from starvation hit me hard,” he writes in his book. “Why hadn’t we studied this incident in school, or heard about David Thompson, or even New Hampshire’s founding date of 1623?”
Trained as an apothecary, Thompson had built a fortified house at the mouth of the Piscataqua River, and established a fishery and trading post. He and his family, along with servants and fishermen, were the first European immigrants to settle the New Hampshire coast in 1623, Robinson said.
‘Perfection of the Pilgrims’
Born in Massachusetts, Robinson’s familly moved when he was 10 to the “woods” of Bedford. He went to Manchester High School West, where he was president of the Student Council. “As soon as I came to New Hampshire, we all started making fun of Massachusetts, which is what we do,” he said.
Robinson’s first attempt to tell the true story of 1623 came in his post-college days, when he authored a satirical article he called “Turkeygate.”
“It was a neat little scam all right,” he wrote. “Just pretend it never happened, pretend that those Massachusetts settlers survived with a little help from the Indians and God. The truth is, right from the start, New Hampshire was bailing the Pilgrims out of a desperate situation.”
The myths surrounding the Pilgrims really get rolling in 1807, Robinson said. That’s when Jamestown, Virginia, the site of an early settlement, celebrates its 200th birthday and “declares itself the birthplace of America,” he said.
That leaves out a few details, Robinson said.
“Well, it doesn’t count the fact that there were French people in Maine in 1590, it doesn’t count the fact that St. Augustine, Florida, was ... years older than that. It doesn’t count anything Spanish, it doesn’t count anything French, it doesn’t count 12,000 years of Indigenous people,” he said. “It’s just about an English guy showing up in Jamestown.”
But it inspires Massachusetts to get into the myth-making business, Robinson said. “In 1820, Massachusetts says, wait a minute, you may be the birthplace of America, but we’re the intellectual and cultural and moral capital of America,” he said.
And, he said, “That’s when we start creating this perfection of the Pilgrims.”
Before then, he said, “The only people that have been celebrating the Pilgrims every year was Plymouth, Massachusetts. Because they’re the only people who even remember who they were.”
It was during the Victorian era that the starched collars, buckled shoes and tall hats became emblematic of the Pilgrims, he said.
J. Dennis Robinson explores — and explodes — some of the persistent myths surrounding Thanksgiving in his new book, "1623."
Harbortown Press
‘Civil War holiday’
As for Robinson, he likes to think of Thanksgiving as “a Civil War holiday.”
Author Sarah Josepha Hale of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” fame — who hailed from New Hampshire — had been calling for a national Thanksgiving holiday for years. In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed an official proclamation for “a national day of thanksgiving and praise.”
“Why did it become a national holiday?” Robinson asked. “Because we’ve just killed 660,000 of ourselves. How would people who have just been through this horrible civil war learn to get along again?”
“So you pick up on these characters that have been largely mythologized through these Puritan histories for the last 200 years and you pop them into the equation,” he said. “And you throw in Hallmark and it’s all over.”
But now more than ever, don’t we need the traditional Thanksgiving story, to celebrate this notion of people who got along and took care of each other in hard times? Can’t he just let people have their stories?
“No you can’t,” he said. “You have to have your stories and then you have to have the facts behind the stories.”
It’s akin to the growing recognition of those who played key roles in the American story but were unheralded or not even acknowledged — women and African Americans, for instance, he said.
“What we’re doing is we’re fleshing out the bones of American history,” Robinson said. “And the bones of American history when I was growing up was White men fighting wars. That was it.”
Robinson insists he’s not trying to ruin anyone’s Thanksgiving. He’s convinced that “people can have two simultaneous thoughts at the same time.”
“We are completely capable of enjoying a holiday that’s based on fiction and mythology,” he said. “And also simultaneously knowing that that’s not what happened. We do it all the time.”
He likens it to Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, which, he points out, have nothing to do with the true meaning of Christmas or Easter.
“Just walk into any store, listen to any TV show, it’s all Santa movies,” he said. “And we know that’s not what Christmas is. We all know that that’s a mythology that’s been created around this thing.”
So go ahead and enjoy your turkey dinner, and your kids’ school plays with the cute Pilgrim and Indian costumes, Robinson says.
“I have no problem with any of that,” he said. “All of that is fantastic, as long as everybody understands that the Pilgrims are the Easter Bunny.”
Oh, and one more thing: “We really should be having codfish for Thanksgiving,” he said.
Share your opinion with New Hampshire. Letters to the editor may be up to 250 words. Longer opinions of up to 800 words can be emailed to opinion@unionleader.com along with a headshot.
