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A true Thanksgiving tale.

The first Thanksgiving celebrated in the so-called “New” world was in Florida. So was the second. So why do we celebrate the one that came much later as the “first”?

Well, that’s an interesting story. And for more than 200 years of our Euro-American history, the United States did not, in fact, celebrate a November holiday honoring the pilgrims.

The reality is, Pilgrims were awful.

The Pilgrims only left the Netherlands and came to the North American continent for economic reasons. They were not Puritans; Puritans came to the so-called “New World” about a decade later. The Pilgrims, like the Puritans, owned slaves.

According to the Catholic Church, Thanksgiving is a Protestant celebration of tolerance which, the Catholic Church notes, was not exactly a hallmark of the Pilgrims in 1621.

The Pilgrims had divorced themselves from the Church of England because it wasn’t strict enough. They had to contend with religious persecution because of this, and so fled to the Netherlands, to Leiden. In 1620, two ships — the Mayflower and the Speedwell — left for the transatlantic voyage, but when the Speedwell started to take on water, some passengers decided to stay in Europe while others joined the other Pilgrims on the Mayflower.

In total, 102 passengers and 30 crew sailed across the Atlantic. They arrived in November 1620, but didn’t have a Thanksgiving that year; they didn’t have much to give thanks for, it seemed. Half the passengers would die by the end of that winter. They would, however, hold a feast of Thanksgiving the following year.  

But that wasn’t the first Thanksgiving.

The First Thanksgiving Was French

Unlike both the Pilgrims, and before them, the Spanish conquistadors who had reached Florida first, the French who came to Florida  had no enslaved people, and didn’t seek to enslave the Americans. Led by Jean Ribault, they simply wanted to create a religious sanctuary.

Ribault did this under the direction of the French admiral Gaspard de Coligny. In 1562, Ribault leaves Le Havre, France, with two ships and 150 Huguenots. It takes them about two-and-a-half months to reach the mouth of the St. Johns River.

They claimed the land in the name of France, but continued north to Port Royal Sound in South Carolina. There, they built a fort called Charlesfort on Parris Island.

Ribault left 27 men there and returned to France to get more Huguenots — and supplies — but the French Wars of Religion had begun, so he fled to England, where he was accused of being a spy. He gets imprisoned at the Tower of London.

In the interim, Coligny appointed Ribault’s former lieutenant, René Goulaine de Laudonnière, as Ribault’s replacement. Laudonnière returned to Florida in 1564 and found the soldiers left at Charlesfort mutinied and killed the captain in charge, and that a fire destroyed most of the supplies. The survivors tried to build a boat to get back to Europe, but most of them died en route. 

First Thanksgiving: Fort Caroline

Laudonnière decided to rebuild at the mouth of the May River, today known as the St. Johns River, at what they would call Fort Caroline.

On June 30, 1564, Laudonnière celebrates a feast of Thanksgiving on St. Johns Bluff at Fort Caroline.

“We sang a psalm of Thanksgiving unto God, beseeching Him that it would please His Grace to continue His accustomed goodness toward us,” Laudonnière would later write in his journal. 

He also wrote that the Timucuan — ancestors of the Seminole and Miccosukee —contributed food. 

The colony didn’t last, because the Spanish also wanted to lay claim  to Florida.

Second Thanksgiving: St. Augustine

Ten days after Ribault returned to Florida, the Spanish conquistador Pedro Menendez de Aviles landed in St. Augustine, roughly 50 miles from Fort Caroline. He had five ships and 600 Spaniards, all Catholic, of course.

This was not a coincidence. Menendez landed here to assert control of Florida.

He also would ensure everyone there converted to Catholicism, by force or reason. (Catholics, historically, have not been fussy as to one’s motivation for conversion.)

The Spanish Thanksgiving took place on September 8, 1565. The Spanish reportedly had five ships, and this Thanksgiving — the second one in what is now the United States, and the first Catholic one — reportedly included cocido, a stew with salted pork, garbanzos, and garlic; red wine, and hard biscuits. The Americans might have contributed beans, corn, deer, drum gopher tortoise, mullet, saltwater catfish, squash, and wild turkey.

We now recognize St. Augustine as the oldest city in the U.S. and historians call this the first Thanksgiving, enraging the WASP  northerners and also pretending the French never really landed here.

History is complex.

Thanksgiving wasn’t a holiday until the Civil War

We didn’t always celebrate Thanksgiving in November. It was only when the U.S. was facing division, the likes of which the young country had yet to face, that President Abraham Lincoln tried to designate Thanksgiving as a federal holiday, as a day to offer “Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.”

But he didn’t talk about Florida.

“By the time the Pilgrims came ashore at Plymouth, St. Augustine was up for urban renewal,” Florida historian Michael Gannon wrote, adding, “It was a town with fort, church, seminary, six-bed hospital, fish market, and about 120 shops and houses. Because La Florida stretched north from the Keys to Newfoundland and west to Texas, St. Augustine could claim to be the capital of much of what is now the United States.” 

The problem was, if Lincoln talked about the real history of Thanksgiving celebrations, whether it was the one in the ill-fated French colony or less-enlightened Spanish one, he’d have to talk about the South. And Florida. Small problem: Florida was among the first states to secede in 1861, and in 1863, the war was still raging.

To give Florida the honor of being the site of the first Thanksgiving and all the jingoism and patriotism for which it stood would have flown in the face of what the president hoped the designation would achieve.

But the war ended. Why didn’t we change the narrative?

So why, then, do we hear about the Pilgrims and green bean casserole and cranberries and not the Huguenots, or the Spanish even, and a seafood buffet? 

History gets written by the winners. The Spanish defeated the French, which is why the Spanish Catholic Mass of Thanksgiving gets more press than the Huguenot celebration. And, of course, when the two Florida colonies refuse to rebel agains the British during the War if Independence, the Pilgrim feast takes Thanksgiving away from Florida, too. 

The Jacksonville Historical Society has a great take on this, though:

“In fact, Lincoln may have popularized the theme of Pilgrims and Indians eating happily together as a metaphor for how the divided Union and Confederate states might once again achieve unity. Despite such efforts, several southern states refused to celebrate Thanksgiving because they thought it was an abolitionist plot. Indeed, Thanksgiving didn’t become a national holiday until World War II.”

So, today, if you choose to celebrate Thanksgiving, don’t feel bad if you don’t want turkey. Go get you some oysters, some shrimp, and a nice glass of red wine.

And raise a glass to history.

(Let me be clear that none of these groups were great for the first Americans, and that every Thanksgiving happening, from Key West to Maine to Alaska to Hawaii, is taking place on land that we took from someone else. So there’s that, which is a pretty compelling argument to say we maybe shouldn’t be celebrating it at all.)