OK, everyone, I’ve got a cocky Canadian “friend” who tells me that Canadian thanksgiving was invented 40 years before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth by an Englishman named Martin Frobisher.
To say the least, I’m skeptical. Could someone please inform me about this “fact” which, I can only assume, is yet another example of Canadian jingoism?
Thanks,
Chris
He’s (perhaps) right if the claim is “Martin Frobisher celebrated the first Canadian thanksgiving, forty years before the Pilgrims.”
He’s wrong if the claim is “Martin Frobisher was the first to celebrate a thanksgiving in the New World” or “Martin Frobisher invented the holiday we now celebrate as Thanksgiving.”
The first thing to realize is that declaring days of thanksgiving was a pretty common European tradition in those days. The government might proclaim a day of thanksgiving, with feasting and prayers, when a great battle was won, or an heir was born to the king etc. etc. There were also traditional harvest feasts. So it’s not surprising that various people kept up the traditions when they got to the New World.
Thing is, Martin Frobisher wasn’t the first to celebrate a thanksgiving in the New World. Here’s a whole page full of pre-Pilgrim thanksgivings. The first two listed are Ponce de Leon in 1513, and Coronado in 1541, both decades before Frobisher:
http://www.plimoth.org/Library/Thanksgiving/alternat.htm
Thanksgiving as we know it today, a fall harvest feast, has nothing to do with Frobisher. Frobisher celebrated his thanksgiving in May. The Canadian holiday is a direct descendant of the Pilgrim-derived New England holiday. After the American Revolution, American Loyalists moved to Canada, taking their fall Thanksgiving feast with them. See:
http://www.sholay.com/stories/canadianthanksgiving.htm
The holiday in the US has a complicated history of its own. See:
Frobisher no more “invented” Thanksgiving than he did the internal combustion engine.
Harvest festivals or thank-offerings (“Harvest Home” or “Muckle Suppers” http://www.orkneyjar.com/tradition/harvest/hairst9.htm) are found in many cultures, and go back probably since homo sapiens began cultivating crops (or even earlier). Your friend is probably trying to claim that Frobisher celebrated the first Thanksgiving on the continent of North America: but chances are the Vikings were the first Europeans to do it in NA: http://parkscanada.pch.gc.ca/parks/newfoundland/anse_meadows/english/history_e.htm
But your friend is overlooking (as so many do) the 10,000-odd year history of the First Nations, many of whom were undoubtedly thanking their creator for abundance in one form or another in North America since sometime after the last ice age, like the Green Corn Dance of the Cherokees, or the welcoming ceremonies offered by many Pacific coastal peoples, on the annual return of the salmon (generally in October-November, BTW).
Leaving aside any yankcanuck squabbling, various feasts of thanksgiving are ancient. I’m not aware of any society/culture which had no feast of giving thanks.
While the colony at Plymouth celebrated a feast of Thanksgiving that made it into the history books, I would be very surprised if similar feasts were not held in Jamestown and the Spanish and French colonies, as well.
Frobisher was in Newfoundland in 1577 and 1578, (43 years before the “Pilgrim” feast), so he might have had a similar event. On the other hand, for all his good capacity for seamanship, he was no great shakes as an explorer or colonizer and his colony did not survive, so they may or may not have had anything for which to feel thankful.
At any rate, the U.S. Thanksgiving does not date to the Pymouth feast of 1621. The first national celebration of Thanksgiving was proclaimed by George Washington in his capacity as President. (And by the wording of the proclamation, it seems he did it under pressure without thinking too highly of the idea.) It then began to be an annual presidential proclamation–suspended from 1801 through 1808 because Jefferson really opposed the notion. During that early period, when there were debates over whether a Presidential Proclamation of Thanksgiving was a a good or a bad idea, someone dragged up Governor Bradford’s old description of their “thanksgiving” feast and claimed “But it’s tradition!”. We’ve been looking back to 1621 (and ignoring the gap from 1621 to 1790) ever since.
Canada adopted their October feast of Thanksgiving sometime in the 20th century, so it clearly post-dated U.S. gluttony. If your friend wants to proclaim a primacy for Frobisher, let him. Maybe he needs the assurance.