To mark Thanksgiving, I am watching the History Channel’s excellent docudrama, “Desperate Crossing.” It’s on Youtube in full here. Through quality reenactments, it depicts the voyage of the Mayflower and the founding of the Plymouth Colony.
I have never related to the Pilgrims — my heart is with my Scotch-Irish and German ancestors in the Allegheny backcountry. But, as this film so well depicts, the voyage of the Mayflower must go down as one of the most courageous, perhaps foolhardy, excursions in history. The voyagers were ill-prepared and under-supplied, they left late in the season, their ship was overcrowded and its main beam cracked halfway across the Atlantic. If one were religiously inclined, it would be easy to interpret their survival of the voyage, and the subsequent survival of the Plymouth Colony, as a miracle.
To its credit, the docu-drama spends almost half of its two-hour running time on the years leading up to the voyage, setting the context of the Pilgrims’ Separatist faith and politics, which would have such a profound impact on the evolution of the American Republic.
Today I’ll raise a glass to the fortitude of the Pilgrims. Though I do not share their world view, I honor their courage of their convictions and their willingness to risk all. And I salute the Wampanoag, who acted with humanity, to their ultimate cost. It is an epic story worth the remembering.
Leave a Reply