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Award-winning raconteur Cary Harrison cut through the noise revealing the murky agendas behind today's headlines through uncompromising journalism, unapologetic advocacy, independent voices and a global audience with live listener call-ins shaping the conversation. caryharrison.substack.com Language: en Genres: Education, How To, News, News Commentary Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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The Pilgrims: God’s Least Enjoyable Party Guests
Saturday, 29 November, 2025
Disclaimer: These events are told from the viewpoint of this descendent of one of the first American families. We settled in Maryland. I’ve just returned from Holland, where the pilgrims spent 12 little-known years before going back to England to then head to the New World. I spent the summer tracing the deranged footsteps of our ancestor pilgrims.Chapter 1: How to Flee Every Country Until You Finally Find One Without NeighborsHistory insists the Pilgrims were paragons of virtue: earnest, long-faced saints trudging forth to build God’s vacation home in the wilderness. That’s the brochure version. The truth? They were a wandering sack of wheezing moral carbuncles who drank like condemned sailors and lectured like unpaid interns of the Inquisition. These were my ancestors—on my mother’s side—proof that genetics carru a sense of humor.They weren’t “religious refugees”; they were walking noise complaints. England didn’t persecute them—it quietly changed the locks.Their first stop on the global Tour of Being Unbearable was Amsterdam, a city that could tolerate anything: hash smoke, sailors with questionable piercings, anarchists juggling flaming pamphlets, and the odor of a million pickled herrings. Yet even Amsterdam—the spiritual capital of “do what you want, just don’t bleed on the furniture”—took one whiff of the Pilgrims’ sanctimony and said, with Dutch politeness, “F*ck No!”The Dutch, who could peacefully co-exist with Catholics, Jews, prostitutes, philosophers, and windmills—all at the same dinner table—took one look at the scowling God Squad and collectively wondered whether Spanish rule might’ve been the better deal.So the Pilgrims lurched onward to Leiden, a lovely scholarly town unprepared for the arrival of Calvinist mildew. Leiden welcomed them with open arms and closed nostrils. “Yes, come in,” said the locals, “start your linen shops, enrich our culture—please, diversify our gene pool! We beg you.”Twelve years later, the same townspeople were reconsidering every decision they had ever made. The Pilgrims refused to learn Dutch, refused to experience joy, and refused to let their children become anything other than junior-grade killjoys. They looked upon Leiden—a quiet university haven with cobbled streets and excellent cheese—and declared it another Sodom, only better organized.So Leiden, in an act of refined civic mercy, escorted them to the exit. Probably with a nice loaf of bread and a pair of wooden shoes to speed their departure. “Thank you for your enthusiastic hostility,” the Dutch likely said. “Please never return. The tulips fear you.”And so, having exhausted the patience of the most tolerant society in Europe, the Pilgrims gazed across the Atlantic—toward a continent where nobody yet knew them, and thus nobody had told them to go away. It must have felt like destiny. It was, in fact, the last refuge for people so irritating that even world champions of tolerance issued a restraining order.Thus these morally inflamed scarecrows boarded the Mayflower and set out to build a land where they could finally be free:Free to punish everyone else for existing.And that is how a band of joy-proof religious auditors fled every civilized country that asked them to leave, only to plant their flag in someone else’s backyard and call the whole thing “liberty.”Chapter 2 — The Great Retreat: How the Pilgrims Fled Holland, Sank a Ship, Terrorized Two Ports, and Still Somehow Made It to AmericaLeaving Leiden wasn’t a “fresh start.” It was an act of pest control.After twelve excruciating years of Puritan spiritual pollution—thick, choking clouds of sanctimony drifting over canals like Calvinist smog—the Dutch finally broke. This is a nation that tolerates everything: weed, prostitution, anarchists riding bicycles naked, and tourists from Ohio. But even they have limits, and those limits were reached the moment the Pilgrims refused to smile, assimilate, or shut up.Amsterdam had already tried to shake them off like a wet umbrella.Leiden lasted longer, because Leiden is polite.But eventually even its famously calm citizens agreed that living near the Pilgrims felt like attending a 12-year funeral for someone who wasn’t dead yet.The message was universal, unmistakable, and delivered with a complimentary pair of wooden shoes:“Please leave before morale collapses and the windmills unionize.”So the Pilgrims waddled down to Delfshaven to board the Speedwell, a ship whose very name was an act of historical satire. This pathetic little craft looked less like a vessel of destiny and more like the punishment a shipwright receives for being drunk at work. If the Speedwell had been an animal, the humane thing would have been to put it down.But no — the Pilgrims climbed aboard, packing it with their belongings, their grievances, and enough religious judgment to sink the Spanish Armada.Enter: The Speedwell’s Suicide AttemptsBefore they even cleared the harbor, the Speedwell began leaking like a colander with a drinking problem. The Pilgrims prayed, naturally. The ship begged for death. Water poured in. Psalms poured out. Neither effort improved conditions.Still, the Pilgrims declared it a “test from God,” because God, apparently, was a part-time ship inspector with a grudge.They tried again. The Speedwell began hemorrhaging water with biblical enthusiasm.It didn’t just leak — it exorcised itself.By the time they limped into Plymouth, the crew had had enough. Forced to endure a week trapped with human fogbanks who believed smiling was idolatry, the sailors whispered what everyone already suspected:The Speedwell wasn’t broken. The crew tried to kill it. On purpose.Sabotage was not just understandable — it was heroic. Imagine sailing across the Atlantic while being forced to listen to men who believe dancing leads to eternal damnation. Sabotaging the ship wasn’t wrongdoing. It was a mercy killing.The Pilgrims Respond in Their Favorite Way: Blame RealityEventually the Pilgrims realized the truth:* The Speedwell was not seaworthy.* The crew hated them.* God was clearly trying to keep them in Europe.* Literally every sign pointed to “stay home.”Naturally, they ignored all of this.They sold the Speedwell to some unlucky fool, then squeezed the entire congregation of frostbitten zealots onto the Mayflower — transforming a single ship into a floating monastery of despair.There they were:102 sour-faced fundamentalists, one leaky ship, zero self-awareness, and an entire ocean worth of people praying they’d never come back.And England’s Reaction?England watched them leave the way a landlord watches rats crawl into someone else’s apartment.A sigh of relief so deep it disturbed local weather patterns.And thus the journey began—Not by courage, not by divine command, not by destiny,but because two nations screamed “NO” loudly enough that the Pilgrims mistook it for a call to adventure.Chapter 2a: What the English Thought When the Pilgrims Came Back Begging for a Boat—Or—”Look Who’s Crawling Back in a Doublet”And so, America’s great founding myth didn’t begin with trumpets, angels, or divine revelation.It began—quite predictably—in a pub that smelled like God’s armpit after a long jog.England at the time was a cheerful penal colony masquerading as a kingdom. Criticize the king’s haircut and you could lose your head. Criticize his theology and you could lose the rest. Privacy was a rumor; dignity was a luxury reserved for people whose shoes weren’t infested with mildew. The monarchy owned its subjects the way a butcher owns hogs—completely, unromantically, and with dinner plans.Into this fragrant swamp of monarchy and misery waddled the Pilgrims—professional buzzkills, spiritual hall monitors, faces puckered by decades of religious constipation. Rain lashed the thatched roofs of Rotherhithe as they sloshed into the Mayflower Pub, a tavern so foul it could’ve been designated a public health hazard by a blind inspector.Inside, the air was a swirling cocktail of stale beer, boiled cabbage, wet wool, human sadness, and an undertone that suggested several of the walls had once been alive. The floor clung to boots like a spurned lover. The tables had not been cleaned since before the invention of hope. Even the rats in the doorway took one look and muttered, “No thanks.”At a beer-stained plank masquerading as furniture sat the future founders of the United States—each one looking as if God had personally insulted their mother. It's important to point out that they weren't simply sitting among sloshing ale, they were sloshing it themselves, right down their gullets.Bradford, hunched over his mug, wore the expression of a man preparing to sue heaven for breach of contract.Brewster looked pinched and puckered, as if he had been clenching his theology since birth.Winslow, too young to know better but too Puritan to enjoy life, brooded like an apprentice undertaker.Nearby, the pub “ladies” loitered—corseted veterans of the local economy—one sporting a loose bosom crowned by a wiry mole so proud and defiant it deserved representation in Parliament.Then in thundered Miles Standish—a compact, muscular storm cloud whose natural resting state was “actively suppressing rebellion.” He walked into every room as though preparing to stab it.Chapter 3: The Mayflower Pub ConspiracyThe gloom at the table was the kind of oppressive atmosphere found only at funerals and Puritan birthday parties. Their conversation dripped with familiar grievances: dancing (wicked), bishops (gaudy), taxation (constant), windows (immoral), sunlight (suspicious), smiling (heresy). England, they agreed, had become an unholy carnival run by perfumed popinjays and clerics wearing hats large enough to provide shade for livestock. Taxes had grown so absurd that, had the regime lasted another year, citizens would have been billed for blinking.And somewhere between the dripping ceiling, the sloshing mugs, and Brewster’s tenth round of theological whining, a plan slithered into being.A colony.Not for glory.Not for strategy.Just a convenient dumping ground where the Pilgrims could complain uninterrupted.Brewster, capable of weaponizing optimism, unfurled a rumpled, ale-stained scroll—a con job dressed as destiny. They would promise London investors riches: furs, lumber, tobacco, gold, and anything else not nailed down. That they couldn’t grow a carrot without divine intervention would be revealed only after several preventable funerals.This wasn’t democracy.It wasn’t divine mission.It was a Ponzi scheme with hymns.Thus capitalism—American-style—was born not in achievement, but in the back corner of a rancid tavern, scratched onto beer-drool parchment by men who couldn’t farm, couldn’t sail, and couldn’t crack a smile without going to confession.Outside, the rain hammered Rotherhithe as if God Himself were shouting, “Don’t do it.”Inside, Winslow fantasized about a land free from bishops and taxation—somewhere he could breathe without being fined. Bradford quietly imagined death as a valid escape route. Standish sharpened his knife on the tabletop, adding fresh wood shavings to Brewster’s drink.By last call, the future had been drunkenly decided:They would flee England not out of courage but because they had exhausted the local supply of things to complain about.And then it happened:The Virginia Company—those proto-capitalist sharks who saw profit in everything from tobacco to human delusion—looked at the Pilgrims and made the most sensible business decision in European history:“Give them a ship. Actually, give them two. Wherever they’re going, it sure as hell won’t be here.”And so, with barely suppressed glee, they unloaded the Mayflower like a pawn shop dumping a cursed heirloom. England watched them load their black hats, their salted meat, and their colossal sense of moral superiority onto the creaking deck. The entire nation leaned on its elbows and gazed at the departing vessel the way one watches rats crawl into someone else’s cellar.The Pilgrims waved bravely, convinced they were embarking on a sacred mission.England waved back, convinced it was witnessing the greatest export of public nuisance in its history.When the Mayflower finally disappeared into the horizon, England released a sigh so mighty it created measurable meteorological distortions.Behind the Pilgrims lay Holland, still airing out its linens from the Great Puritan Dampening of 1609–1620.Ahead lay an ocean, a continent, and several million unsuspecting inhabitants soon to meet history’s worst houseguests.Thus ended the night that changed the world—not through inspiration, or faith, or destiny—but through hangovers, lies, and a bar-tab misunderstanding.The Mayflower Pub returned to normal: serving warm beer to spiritually exhausted Englishmen and quietly midwifing the next great catastrophe.Chapter 4: The Voyage of the Self-Righteous Sardines(Or: How to Turn 66 Days at Sea Into a Floating Psychiatric Emergency)History, in its infinite talent for lying to schoolchildren, calls it “The Mayflower Voyage.”Let’s call it what it was:Sixty-six days trapped inside a leaking wooden coffin filled with 102 humorless zealots experiencing shared gastrointestinal trauma.Picture stuffing a congregation of doom-addicted Calvinists into a wine barrel, shaking it violently for two months, then declaring the survivors “founders.” That’s the Mayflower.The ship itself was not a vessel—it was a damp, worm-chewed warning label. It was built to haul barrels, not Bibles. It had all the charm of a medieval prison and half the ventilation. The moment they shoved off the dock, the Mayflower began to emit the unmistakable aroma of damp Puritan: a bouquet of wet wool, salted misery, and theological halitosis.William Bradford, default historian because he was the only one who could spell without hallucinating, kept a journal full of piety, fortitude, and other lies. Noticeably absent were the rats (too numerous to count) and the smell (too powerful to forget), both of which multiplied daily like biblical plagues.Meanwhile, Elder Brewster turned every bodily function into scripture. A sneeze became a metaphor. A bowel movement became a moral parable. He sermonized over diarrhea with the gravity of a funeral. By week two, half the passengers prayed for death, and the other half prayed for Brewster’s larynx to collapse.Edward Winslow, still clinging to optimism like a drowning man clings to driftwood, confessed he missed windows. Even taxed windows. Even the gossiping neighbors behind the windows.That’s how bad it was.Miles Standish, whose natural instinct was to stab anything that moved or preached, spent the voyage sharpening knives and muttering Latin curses. He claimed it was prayer. The rest suspected he was auditioning to be shipboard Grim Reaper.The food situation was catastrophic.Meals consisted of:* moldy hardtack* fermented despair* pickled things that were crimes against God* and dried fish that tasted like it had already died twiceBy comparison, starvation was considered “the good option.”And because the universe has a sense of humor, storms arrived—plural—each one eager to peel the Pilgrims off the deck like God flicking lint. Sails tore, beams cracked, and grown men shrieked Psalms at the sky in tones suggesting the Almighty had ghosted them.At one point, a main support beam snapped. The ship groaned like a man discovering dancing for the first time. Bradford recorded that “God provided means for our preservation.” Translation: someone jammed a giant iron screw under it and prayed the beam wouldn’t crush them in their sleep.Thus was born the American tradition of improvised engineering under panic.And then there was the beer.Beer was the colony’s only functioning institution. The drinking water resembled something skimmed off Satan’s koi pond—green, shimmering, and pulsating with unknown life. The Pilgrims drank beer not for joy (joy was banned), but because it kept them alive when everything else, including God’s alleged plan, seemed determined to kill them.Each pilgrim—including infants—consumed a gallon a day. Not as indulgence, but as triage. Their livers did more for their survival than their theology ever would.Then—blessedly, stupidly—land appeared.Not Virginia, where their investors expected them to die productively.But Massachusetts—a slab of frozen hostility so bleak even glaciers had rejected it as unfit for habitation.Captain Christopher Jones, one of history’s great realists, announced with ice-cold pragmatism that the remaining beer was reserved for the crew’s return trip.The Pilgrims, therefore, could either:* Sober up* Or die of thirstJones didn’t care which.Thus began America’s first Alcohol Prohibition, prompted not by morality but by a captain who refused to share.With no beer in their veins, the Puritans stumbled ashore as pale, trembling, scripture-muttering wreckage—like a doomsday cult experiencing its first hangover. Bradford, in the understatement of the century, wrote they were “much spent, especially of their beer.” That’s like describing the Titanic as “a boating inconvenience.”So there they were:* freezing* sober* underdressed* unwelcome* and somehow still convinced they were chosen by GodAnd thus, in a flourish of delirium, nausea, bad navigation, and moral superiority, the Pilgrims completed their journey: a maritime disaster carried ashore like sanctimonious flotsam.America’s founding, ladies and gentlemen, was not a triumph of courage.It was a triumph of stubbornness, beer deprivation, and the world’s most weaponized self-importance.The nation was born not in glory, but in a mass headache.Chapter 5: Provincetown Ahead: Uh, Oh(Or: The Moment the Pilgrims Accidentally Discovered Fabulousness and Fled in Terror)The first glimpse of the New World should have filled the Pilgrims with awe, gratitude, and purpose.Instead, it filled them with something far more natural to their species:Suspicion, indigestion, and the faint hope that God had finally arranged a painless death.They dropped anchor at Cape Cod—a place they absolutely had not intended to reach—which is the Pilgrim way: aim for Virginia, land in the Arctic, and declare victory. History later called this “divine guidance.” The sailors called it “rank incompetence.” The Pilgrims called it “God’s perfect will,” because nothing says Providence like a navigation error large enough to qualify as a felony.Before stepping off the ship, they drafted the Mayflower Compact, a document that began as a holy covenant and ended as a passive-aggressive homeowner’s association agreement for people who hated neighbors, noise, and joy. It was signed by 41 men, most of whom already fantasized about mutiny, baths, and indoor plumbing.But then they actually looked around.Cape Cod—with its rolling dunes, glittering coastlines, and breezes that didn’t smell like bilgewater—was… pleasant. Suspiciously pleasant. The kind of place Mother Nature designed while sipping wine and listening to harps.The Pilgrims were horrified.Pleasure was their kryptonite. If a thing looked enjoyable, it was either sinful, Catholic, or both.The women complained that the sunsets were “indecently vivid.”The men complained that the air felt “frivolous.”The children complained simply because they were Puritan children and complaining was their only inheritable trait.And then, as if on cue, Elder Brewster—that ambulatory raincloud of moral panic—stepped forward, sniffed the horizon, and froze. His eyes narrowed like a man detecting heresy at 500 yards.“This place,” he declared, “shall one day fall into the hands of peculiar folk!”He didn’t say the words but we know what he meant. He foresaw men in silk and a future full of sequins, cocktails, and unregulated dancing—enough joyful decadence to send a Puritan into spontaneous combustion.The Pilgrims, horrified by this prophetic vision of fabulousness, did what any rigid, repressively joyless sect would do:They fled immediately.Yes—the very first recorded instance of straight people fleeing Provincetown out of pure instinct.They clambered back onto the Mayflower like frantic raccoons escaping a scented candle shop.Cape Cod’s natural beauty offended them.The fresh air insulted their theology.The sunsets personally attacked their worldview.And that faint prophetic glitter of coming future fabulousness?Absolutely intolerable.So off they went, further along the coast—seeking someplace uglier, colder, and more appropriately miserable. Somewhere that matched their spiritual interior: bleak, drafty, and profoundly hostile to fun.They found it, of course. Plymouth. A place so inhospitable even the local rocks seemed irritated to be there.Thus the Pilgrims left Provincetown—America’s soon-to-be capital of gay joy—and instead chose Plymouth, a site so grim it would have made a crow reconsider its life choices. And that is how America came this close to having its founding myth set in a seaside paradise—and instead ended up with a slab of stone and a colony built by people allergic to beauty.Chapter 5a: Land Ho! Again!(Or: The Moment America Was Founded by a Hangover Wearing Wool)After months of puking, praying, and scrupulously avoiding marital intimacy (as per the Pilgrim Constitution), our brave founders finally made landfall—not in triumph, but in the sort of collective gastrointestinal distress normally associated with county fairs and bad shellfish.They staggered off the Mayflower like a squadron of dehydrated scarecrows—wool-wrapped skeletons held together by barley fumes and stubborn calvinist spite. These were not pioneers. These were religious leftovers, scraped from the bottom of a transatlantic casserole dish.They had survived storms, starvation, their own cooking, and the psychological torture of one another’s company. But now they faced a far greater crisis than the ocean ever mustered:the beer was gone.Their faith wobbled.Their courage wilted.Their intestines whimpered like pets abandoned in a thunderstorm.Civilization teetered—not because of Native warriors, nor the harsh New England winter, nor the universal law that starving people die—but because the Pilgrims had finally sobered up long enough to perceive the horror of existence.And what did these paragons of righteousness do the moment they hit land?Build houses?Store food?Prepare for winter?Offer thanks?Seek peace with the locals?Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous. They built a brewery.Before housing.Before sanitation.Before prayer.Before pretending to thank God for preserving them through their own incompetence…they began brewing.Civilization’s first structure in Plymouth was not a church, but a monument to dehydration-induced panic—an emergency ale bunker hammered together by trembling zealots on the brink of spiritual collapse.This wasn’t just a brewhouse. It was an omen—a prophecy delivered in suds.From this sacred keg sprang the entire American character:Improvisation. Self-deception. Reckless optimism. And the unshakable belief that anything a constitution can’t fix, alcohol surely will.Thus, for want of beer, the Pilgrims lurched into the historical record—not as noble founders, but as history’s first Americans to justify atrocious decisions under the banner of divine purpose. They arrived sanctimonious and sober—a combination so dangerous it would haunt the continent for centuries.The great American experiment began not in freedom, nor faith, nor resolve…but in a hangover so severe it engraved itself into history.[Author’s Aside:] The historians—those scholarly taxidermists who stuff the past with cotton and sanctimony—have spent centuries laundering this episode into a morality play. They replaced the brewhouse with a chapel, the hangover with “thanksgiving,” and the dehydration-induced panic with piety. Their textbooks depict Pilgrims as courageous founders seeking liberty, not as beer-starved zealots stumbling into the wrong continent.But the truth, stubborn and obscene, refuses to die: America began with the shakes, a lie about divine guidance, and the frantic construction of a tavern.Chapter 6: Move Over, We’ve ArrivedLet us now peel ourselves away from the Pilgrims’ self-congratulatory mythmaking—their mothball-scented fairy tale about liberty, destiny, and God whispering travel tips into their ears—and consider, for the sake of intellectual hygiene, what the people already living here thought when this floating wax museum of Puritan misery crashed onto their coastline.Imagine the scene: Wampanoag, 1620.You’ve just survived a series of plagues thoughtfully delivered by earlier European guests—men who arrived smelling like goats, left you smallpox, and sailed away congratulating themselves. Half your village has been wiped out by invisible spirits, or as we now call them, “germs on tour.”You’re grieving.You’re rebuilding.You’re minding your business.And suddenly, from the horizon, comes this wobbly wooden coffin vomiting out a crowd of gaunt, wool-wrapped doomsday enthusiasts who look like funeral directors but somehow talk more about death.They stagger ashore dragging chairs, chests, blankets, and their entire emotional baggage like they’re hosting a dystopian yard sale right on your beach.And their first act—their very first gesture upon touching the continent?Not gratitude.Not humility.Not diplomacy.They began rifling through your graves, stealing your stored corn, and declaring with straight, chapped lips:“God gave this to us.”To which any sane observer would reply:“Yes, God gave it to you through theft, bless your heart.”The Native reaction?Somewhere between pity, bewilderment, and a profound, continent-shaking:“What in the fu*k is this?”These weren’t explorers.These were the worst houseguests ever born—a caravan of human mildew schlepping their neuroses ashore like it was portable scripture.And yet, the Wampanoag—masters of political realism—did not immediately push them back into the ocean with long sticks (though history would have greatly benefited if they had).No, their leader Massasoit, the diplomatic equivalent of a crisis counselor with a migraine, evaluated the situation with admirable sobriety:“New players on the board. Keep them alive for now. They might be useful.”Translation:Let’s help them survive long enough to negotiate with them, and pray they don’t accidentally burn down the forest.Enter Samoset, stage left.One fine day, Samoset simply walked into the Pilgrims’ camp—a camp which can be charitably described as “miserable” and less charitably described as “the world’s saddest flea circus”—and greeted them in English.Imagine the shock on the faces of these malnourished sermon mannequins.They blinked, scratched, coughed, blinked again.A man spoke English!A man who wasn’t them!A man who didn’t immediately stab them or lecture them on chastity!For the Pilgrims, this was the closest thing they had ever experienced to a miracle.Then came Squanto, the actual miracle.A man kidnapped into slavery, dragged across the Atlantic, paraded through Europe, dumped back in America, and still somehow willing to help these walking disasters learn how to plant corn, find food, drink water, and not die like confused, starving pigeons.Without Squanto, the Pilgrims would have entered history as:“That weird cult that arrived in winter and died immediately.”Instead, thanks to his patience (and perhaps a cosmic sense of humor), they survived long enough to become a national headache.The Pilgrim–Native Relationship: A Brief TimelineMonth 1:“Thank you so much for helping us survive. We’ll never forget this kindness.”Month 2:“Would you like to attend our awkward feast? It will be aggressively bland.”Month 3:“We now own this land. God said so. Please leave.”Because here’s the truth:The Wampanoag quickly realized these weren’t guests.Guests bring food.Guests say thank you.Guests don’t rifle through your ancestors’ ribcages looking for snacks.These were squatters with a persecution complex—squatters who wouldn’t shut up.By the time more ships arrived—each one packed with joyless clones in wool armor—the Wampanoag could be forgiven for expressing a collective, exhausted:“Oh for the love of the Great Spirit…not more of them.”So what did Native Americans think of the Pilgrims?They thought they were weird.They thought they were loud.They thought they were profoundly incompetent.They thought they were the only people on the continent capable of making a funeral out of a Wednesday afternoon.And thus began America’s first cross-cultural encounter:One side patient, practical, and politically astute.The other a colony of damp moral scarecrows convinced God had chosen them to manage the neighborhood.The Wampanoag deserved better.The Pilgrims deserved helmets.Chapter 7: The First Winter of Incompetence and ScurvyIf you ever feel useless, just remember: the Pilgrims landed in November.November.The month when sane people stay inside and insane people try founding nations.They shuffled off the Mayflower as if God Himself had sneezed them onto the shoreline—half-dead, spiritually smug, and wildly unprepared for a climate previously rejected by glaciers for being “too bleak.”The ground was frozen solid. The wind had the attitude of a mugger. The trees looked like skeletal middle fingers pointing directly at them. Any sensible species would’ve said, “You know what? Let’s wait until spring.”But not the Pilgrims.Step One: Survive the ElementsThe Pilgrims took one look at the icy landscape and wisely concluded that the safest place to be was… back on the ship they’d just escaped.So they stayed aboard the Mayflower, crammed like penitents in a holy tin can, marinating in their own breath, while debating how many cubits wide a “godly house” should be. Meanwhile, scurvy moved through the ranks like judgment day with bad dental hygiene.By January, they had built three whole buildings.Two collapsed in the wind. The third caught fire because someone thought it was a great idea to store hay and candles together like they were auditioning for a Darwin Award.Standish: The Only Man Having FunMiles Standish patrolled the perimeter like a man hoping winter would attack him personally so he could stab it. He was built for war, not frostbite, and spent his days polishing weapons, glaring into the treeline, and muttering in Latin—either prayers or threats, no one could tell.He attempted once, heroically, to discipline the scurvy. It didn’t work.The Quiet, Nighttime BurialsDeath came daily.Sometimes hourly.The Pilgrims buried their dead at night so the Wampanoag wouldn’t notice the alarming population shrinkage and conclude they were a limited-edition tribe not worth investing in.They hid the graves under corn so the land looked fertile instead of funereal. It was deception by agriculture:“Nothing to see here—just Christian farming with vaguely human-shaped mounds.”By March, They Had Become GhostsOf the original 102 passengers, only 47 remained upright.Well—“upright” is generous.Most resembled spiritual scarecrows propped up by sheer stubbornness and whatever calories could be scraped from boiled leather.Edward Winslow, whose optimism had somehow survived the voyage, now looked like a hymn book with rickets. He still chirped, “We are building a godly society,” which was adorable in the way a delusional man building a house out of breadsticks is adorable.And Yet They Called It ProvidenceAny other people would’ve admitted defeat, boarded the ship, and begged the captain to return them to the nearest functioning civilization. The Pilgrims? No. They declared the carnage a divine test—as if God Himself had sent a Yelp review:⭐☆☆☆☆“Terrible settlers. Would not recommend.”“Try dying less.”But the Pilgrims doubled down. They interpreted every death, every frostbitten toe, every collapsing cottage as confirmation that they were chosen. Chosen for what?Probably extinction, but they refused to take the hint.Thus Ended the First WinterNot with triumph.Not with camaraderie.Not with anything remotely noble.It ended with:* mass graves disguised as gardens* a colony held together by stubbornness and fever* half the population dead* and the survivors insisting it was all going to planIt was not courage. It wasn’t destiny. It was dumb luck propped up by Native charity and the kind of delusional optimism that would later become known as the American spirit.Chapter 8: The First Thanksgiving — A Meal, a Myth, and a Marketing Campaign —In Which the Pilgrims Throw a Potluck, Contribute Nothing, and Later Take Full CreditSpring arrived, dragging the Pilgrims back from the brink like a bored parent yanking a toddler out of traffic. They stumbled into the sunlight half-alive, half-fermented, and wholly unaware that their continued existence had more to do with Wampanoag patience than Providence.They’d buried half the colony, mismanaged the other half, and owed their survival entirely to Native neighbors who should’ve charged an hourly rate.But never mind that.Let’s get festive.A Harvest Worth Bragging About (If You’re Delusional)By autumn, thanks to:* Squanto’s agricultural genius,* Massasoit’s diplomacy,* and the Pilgrims not killing themselves for three consecutive months, they produced a modest harvest—“modest” meaning it wouldn’t sustain a family of raccoons but looked impressive to men who’d been chewing leather belts in February.What did they do? They held a feast. Not out of gratitude—out of sheer surprise.The Pilgrims had expected starvation, damnation, wolves, or all three simultaneously. When none materialized, they declared the miracle worthy of celebration. This, naturally, would become Thanksgiving, America’s first state-sponsored act of historical spin.The Guest ListMassasoit arrived with ninety Wampanoag men, each one bringing actual food—venison, shellfish, corn, and a general sense of competence. The Pilgrims brought:* boiled pumpkin mush,* damp corn porridge,* and the unwavering belief that they had invented agriculture six minutes prior.The imbalance was so stark it bordered on performance art.Brewster Kicks It Off—Ruins the MoodElder Brewster began the event with a prayer so long the sun moved noticeably across the sky. He thanked God for the harvest, for the land, and—without a hint of shame—for “guiding us here,” as though divine will included grave robbing and corn theft.The Wampanoag listened politely, possibly wondering if prayer was some kind of colonial punishment ritual.Standish: Life of the Party (Technically)Miles Standish spent the entire feast polishing his musket, scowling at anyone who smiled, and muttering combat fantasies involving “savages,” “Satan,” and possibly the cranberry bogs. He ate like a man preparing to conquer the corn.The Pilgrims Enjoy the Food—Claim It Was TheirsAs the Wampanoag roasted venison and showed the newcomers how to handle actual ingredients, the Pilgrims nodded sagely, filing away each technique for future use in the cultural appropriation industry.Edward Winslow wrote a glowing report for investors, describing a harmonious feast attended by “friendly Indians” who had happily participated in this celebration of Puritan survival. He left out the parts about:* the Pilgrims stealing their food,* the Pilgrims stealing their graves,* and the Pilgrims preparing to steal their land.Winslow’s letter—vague, cheerful, and fundamentally dishonest—would later become the entire basis of the Thanksgiving myth, proving once again that public relations is America’s second-oldest profession.What Thanksgiving Actually WasNot a sacred communion.Not a moment of unity.Not a Hallmark origin story.It was a three-day diplomatic peace conference held by a tribe trying to prevent these malnourished lunatics from dying on their watch.It was also, in classic American style, a soft launch for a hostile takeover.The Aftermath: Gratitude With an Expiration DateIn the years that followed, gratitude gave way to the standard colonial appetizers:* land seizures,* legal fictions,* accidental epidemics,* and the usual European insistence that the locals should be grateful for being civilized at musket point.Thanksgiving, over time, became a national holiday only when Abraham Lincoln needed a distraction from the Civil War. Nothing says unity like pretending colonists and Natives once got along over turkey that didn’t exist.The Myth Grows Legs—And Walks Off With the TruthNorman Rockwell painted it with sentimental grins.Hallmark added pilgrims with shiny buckles.America declared it sacred tradition.Meanwhile, the historical truth sat in the corner, nursing a venison bone and muttering, “That’s not what happened.”Raise a Glass—Preferably of Something StrongSo let us salute the First Thanksgiving:A heartfelt ceremony of survival-by-outsourcing, disguised as a feast of unity, later repackaged as a national origin story, and finally monetized into an annual festival of overeating, family tension, and football injuries.A triumph of spin.A banquet of denial.A holiday built on the miracle that the Pilgrims didn’t all die before dessert.Look for my complete book “A MAGA history of the United States” coming out in the next months. I perform chapters often on my LA public radio show, the Cary Harrison Files”, Fridays at 10 AM Pacific, KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles.Copyright Audiences United, LLC – all rights reservedThank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit caryharrison.substack.com/subscribe
