Thanksgiving Legacy Belongs to Hispanic Americans

ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla., November 23, 2007 — In Massachusetts, Michael Gannon says he is known as “the Grinch who stole Thanksgiving.” Gannon, a University of Florida history professor, insists it was a group of Spanish explorers and not the Pilgrims who first celebrated Thanksgiving in the New World. The date was Sept. 8, 1565 — in St. Augustine.

That's when Pedro Menendez de Aviles and 800 Spanish settlers, celebrated a Mass of Thanksgiving and invited the native Seloy tribe who occupied the site, he said.

“It was the first community act of religion and Thanksgiving in the first permanent European settlement in the land,” Gannon wrote in his 1965 book, “The Cross in the Sand.” The Pilgrims didn’t have their first Thanksgiving meal until 1621, 56 years later.

Menendez and his followers probably dined on cocido — a stew made from salted pork and garbanzo beans and laced with garlic seasoning — hard sea biscuits and red wine, said Gannon.

If the Seloy Indians contributed food, then the menu could have included wild turkey, venison, gopher tortoise, mullet, corn, beans and squash, Gannon said.

The first Thanksgiving is recounted by Gannon in “We Gather Together,” an article published in this month’s St. Augustine Catholic, the publication of the Catholic Diocese of St. Augustine.

The 1565 celebration wasn’t even the first Thanksgiving, Gannon said. Numerous Thanksgivings for a safe voyage and landing had been made in Florida by such explorers as Juan Ponce de Leon in 1513 and 1521; Panfilo de Narvaez in 1528; Hernando de Soto in 1529; Father Luis Cancer de Barbastro in 1549; and Tristan de Luna in 1559.

The French, who came to the St. Johns River near Jacksonville in 1562 and Rene de Laudonniere in 1564, also offered prayers of Thanksgiving — well before the Pilgrims, Gannon said. And in Texas, some claim that Spanish explorer Don Juan de Onate celebrated the first Thanksgiving in America in 1598.

“By the time the Pilgrims came to Plymouth, St. Augustine was up for urban renewal,” Gannon said.

So, if the Spanish were first, why do Pilgrims and Plymouth get all the credit?

“It is the victors who write the histories,” Gannon said. “England won out over Spain for the mastery of the North American continent, so the early English ceremonies achieved wide currency in history books and eclipsed our knowledge of the earlier Spanish celebrations on Thanksgiving.”
       
‘GOOD LEG TO STAND ON’

Kathleen Curtin, a spokeswoman for the Plimoth Plantation in Plymouth, Mass., said she has no arguments with anyone wanting to claim the first Thanksgiving on the North American continent and has no problem with Gannon’s claim.

“They have a good leg to stand on,” she said, adding that it was the American Indians who probably had the first Thanksgiving celebrations.

The museum’s Web site states, “The event we now know as ’the First Thanksgiving’ was in fact neither the first occurrence of our modern American holiday, nor was it even a ’Thanksgiving’ in the eyes of the Pilgrims who celebrated it.”

David Nolan, a writer and historian in St. Augustine, recalled the time in 1979 when he addressed the Florida Society of Mayflower Descendants in St. Augustine.

Nolan told the descendants that long before the Mayflower landed, St. Augustine was wrestling with the housing problems of royal officials, the marriage of the governor’s son without permission and the arrest of French and English pirates.

“By the time the Pilgrims scraped together their meal, we were already so far advanced as to have housing, family, and law-and-order problems in Florida,” Nolan said.