Thankful I wasn’t a Pilgrim
Of course, they called themselves “Saints,” not Pilgrims, but as it is Thanksgiving (and a snowy white one at that), I can’t resist sharing a little bit of Bill Bryson’s take on the most famous early colonists. From “Made In America,” ostensibly a book on American English, a couple of quick excerpts:
It would be difficult to imagine a group of people more ill-suited for a life in the wilderness. They packed as if they had misunderstood the purpose of the trip. They found room for sundials and candle snuffers, a drum, a trumpet and a complete history of Turkey. One William Mullins packed 126 pairs of shoes and thirteen pairs of boots. yet they failed to bring a single cow or horse, plow or fishing line. . . They were, in short, dangerously unprepared for the rigors ahead, and they demonstrated their incompetence in the most dramatic possible way: by dying in droves. . . .
Then one day in February a young brave of friendly mien approached a party of Pilgrims on a beach. His name was Samoset and he was a stranger in the region himself. But he had a friend named Tisquantum from the local Wampanoag tribe, to whom he introduced them. Samoset and Tisquantum became the Pilgrims’ fast friends. They showed them how to plant corn and catch wildfowl and helped them to establish friendly relations with the local sachem, or chief. Before long, as every schoolchild knows, the Pilgrims were thriving, and Indians and settlers were sitting down to a cordial Thanksgiving feast. Life was grand.
A question that naturally arises is how they managed this. Algonquian . . . is an extraordinarily complex and agglomerative tongue . . . clearly this was not a language you could pick up in a weekend and the Pilgrims were hardly gifted linguists. They weren’t even comfortable with Tisquantum’s name; they called him Squanto. The answer, surprisingly glossed over by most history books, is that the Pilgrims didn’t have to learn Algonquian for the happy and convenient reason that Samoset and Squanto spoke English — Samoset only a little, but Squanto with total assurance (and some Spanish into the bargain).