Here’s a Turkey Day treat for you, and it’s all true.
As we’ve all been taught, the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620. Their leader, in spiritual and temporal matters, was William Brewster, who guided them through those first two decades in the New World, including that terrible first winter when half of them perished from cold and starvation. As it happens, his direct descendant, Bill Brewster, lives in Orinda.
“He wasn’t ordained, but he assumed that role,” says Bill about his ancestor, whom the Pilgrims called Elder William. “There were two boats that left England that day, and the ordained minister, Reverend Robinson, was on the other one, the Fortune, which sprang a leak and had to turn back, and the Mayflower had to go on by itself.”
Elder William got away just in time.
“There was a price on his head for heresy, and the king’s men were conducting an international manhunt for him. If they had caught him, he would have been burned at the stake.”
The voyage lasted a hundred days.
“It was awful. They were running out of water. They were supposed to land in Virginia and start farming to pay back the investors who had put up the money for the two boats and wanted a return on their investment. Very little is known about whether it was paid back.”
When they landed at Plymouth Rock, Elder William got many of the passengers to sign the Mayflower Compact, which he is believed to have co-written, before they left the ship.
“They had to promise to work together and pool their resources for the good of the group. That promise lasted only a year, after it became obvious that some people were working harder than others. That, plus that there were 3,000 miles of open land to the west that they could claim, was the impetus for people to disavow the Mayflower Compact and set out on their own.”
Two years ago, Bill and his son, Ben, made a pilgrimage of their own to Nottinghamshire, England, to see Elder William’s ancestral home in the tiny hamlet of Scrooby.
“We also visited Sherwood Forest and saw the tree Robin Hood hid in. The Brewster manor house is still standing. The owners are extremely nice people but very private. They had to put up an electric gate to stop people from stealing things.”
After 12 generations, Bill has a family tree that is as wide as it is deep. Did you know that Angela Davis is one of his cousins? So are Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Bing Crosby, Katherine Hepburn, Pete Seeger, Julia Child, Ashley Judd, Nelson Rockefeller, Seth MacFarlane, Buffy Sainte-Marie, George B. McClellan, Oliver Hazard Perry, William F. “Bull” Halsey and the late Yale President Kingman Brewster, who named his son Alden, presumably after John Alden, the man who married Priscilla Mullins in Longfellow’s poem “The Courtship of Miles Standish.”
Speaking of Standish, Bill has also visited the beach in Cape Cod where Standish was walking when he met a Native American named Squanto, who stunned Standish by greeting him in perfect English.
“Squanto had learned the language after he was captured by an English slave trader who took him to London, where he was treated as a curiosity until he escaped and managed to get on a boat that took him back home,” says Bill. “He helped arrange the first Thanksgiving and acted as a translator and go-between between his tribe and the Pilgrims. The chief of his tribe was Massasoit, which is how Massachusetts got its name.”
P.S.: Did you know that there was one time when Thanksgiving wasn’t observed on the fourth Thursday in November? In 1939 business owners lobbied President Franklin Roosevelt to move the date up to the third Thursday to create a longer shopping season, and FDR agreed.
Cue the outrage. Critics called it “Franksgiving” and said it was an attack on tradition. The country with split 50-50. Twenty-two states observed the new date, 23 stuck with the old one and three celebrated both. Two years later, Congress passed a law making the fourth Thursday the official date, and Roosevelt sheepishly signed it.
Cat group fundraiser: In other news, Island Cat Resources and Adoption will hold its annual Pawladay Boutique this Dec. 5-7 in the Alameda Elks Lodge at 2255 Santa Clara Ave. in Alameda. It’s ICRA’s major fundraiser of the year, and every penny will go to the cats. For details online, visit icraeastbay.org.
Martin Snapp can be reached at catman442@comcast.net.