Homeschool learnings: First Landing vs Plymouth Rock

Recently we visited the number one state park in Virginia: First Landing State Park. So named in honor of the “English colonists” who first landed in 1607. The beach was warm, the cabins were delightful, the bicycling under the fir trees was peaceful and magical, and my brain exploded with the history.

Previous to this visit my American founding story went something like this. The first English Settlement happened in 1607 in Jamestown, VA. But the founding of America as America (land of religious freedom, home of the free, land of the brave, etc) happened when the Puritans landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620 and celebrated the first Thanksgiving with the Wampanoags in 1621.

The Disney Movie Pocahontas always confused me a bit because I couldn’t remember learning whether Captain John Smith and Pocahontas were at the first Thanksgiving.

This is where homeschooling makes me so happy, it is an opportunity for me to revisit areas of my own education I didn’t grok fully the first round.

Let us unpack each of my erroneous beliefs in turn (and obviously, many many well researched books/articles/papers have been published on this subject, this is a very cursory view).

The first English subjects to arrive to VA in 1607 were not sent by King James. They were self directed as a capitalist venture. For 20 pounds (6 months wages for a working fellow) you could purchase stock in The Virginia Company. The motto of the Virginia Company was “God, Glory, and Gold.” Virginia was named after Elizabeth I and stretched from Maine to the Carolinas. King James dissolved The Virginia Company in 1624 and it was at that point the land officially became an English colony.

Thanksgiving did not originate at Plymouth Rock in 1621. Thanksgivings were celebrated in Europe in the 1500’s and many cultures had festivals to give thanks for the harvest.* The first Thanksgiving in the colonies was celebrated in Virginia in 1619 (that same summer the first slaves arrived to Jamestown just in time for tobacco harvest - I doubt they were invited to Thanksgiving).

When the national holiday was described by Kennedy in 1963 he spoke of “our forefathers in Virginia and in Massachusetts, far from home in a lonely wilderness, set aside a time of thanksgiving.”

The Puritans were from England, yes. However, their trip was not direct. They lived in the Netherlands for more than 10 years prior to boarding the Mayflower at Southhampton. They hoped they could find religious freedom in Amsterdam and Leiden but apparently it was deemed too free. William Bradford, the eventual Governor of the Plymouth colony, stated his people needed to leave because they were being “drawn away by evil examples into extravagance and dangerous courses.” Oh my.

Captain John Smith landed on Cape Henry (First Landing) on the 26th of April, 1607 in on one of the three Virginia Company ships (namely the Discovery, the Susan Constant, and Godspeed). Pocahontas was the daughter of the Chief of the Powhatan nation in VA. Neither of them has anything to do with the Mayflower. I falsely assumed the film depicted the Massachusetts coastline.

The Mashpee Wampanoags for sure got the short end of the stick. After feeding the Pilgrims at the lauded Thanksgiving meal in 1621 they were attacked, sold as slaves, and lost their land.

This better sense of the facts has forced me to confront the big question. Why was I so mistaken?

Here is the tricky part because there are two choices. I could choose to blame myself. I could blame it on not paying attention properly or not being curious enough in school. The other choice would be to blame it on my education. To blame it on the School House Rock “No More Kings” that makes no mention of Virginia in this countries founding. It is a short step from blame to conspiracy - which is never the good path.

The better question is this - what to do with this knowledge?

First of all, it is clear that I need to learn more. So that is step number one. Keep on reading and researching and being curious.

The second step is remember that history has two parts.

There is the part of history that is tangible and touchable. History is the iron shackles enslaved children wore. History is the DNA evidence showing the widespread sanctioned rape of enslaved women for hundreds of years by slave owning men. History is the Declaration of Independence, the Magna Carta, the Acts of Paul and Thecla, the Book of Kells, The Canterbury Tales, the Rosetta Stone. This kind of history you can touch, you can smell, you can feel, you can visit in the rare books room of great libraries, you can see in museums, you can see in test tube results. This part of history is objective.

The other part of history is the record of the human experience. The human chronicling of the past. People wrote, or sang, or told, or painted, or drew stories, yarns, narratives, speeches, tales. Human beings crafted newspaper articles, penned letters, recited the Illiad, sang Amazing Grace, and kept journals.** This part of history is subjective. The subject chooses which stories to tell their children, chooses which stories to include in textbooks, and chooses which parts of objective history are worth noting and which are worth ignoring.*** The subject might choose to omit unflattering or embarrassing parts of the story to make themselves appear a certain way.

Both And.

Not

Either Or.

History is both objective and subjective and must be understood within that context.

* Makes so much better sense now why Canadians celebrate as well!

** Children, if you are reading this, I love you. I love you. I love you.

*** The current dustup over The 1619 Project is an argument over the subjective part of history.