In September 1620 a determined band of British citizens filed down worn stone stairs to board the Mayflower, moored in Plymouth harbor. The ship set sail from England carrying 102 men, women, and children, along with their hopes, their convictions, and their dreams. Crossing the Atlantic, beset by autumn storms, took 66 days and claimed two lives.
They intended to plant a colony in Virginia, but storms drove them north and landed them at Cape Cod. Two hundred years later, famed orator Daniel Webster described their situation with these words: “A new existence awaited them here; and when they saw these shores, rough, cold, barbarous, and barren, as then they were, they beheld their country.” 1 Undeterred, they made a home of those rough shores and laid the foundation for a grateful nation.
The words of William Wordsworth remind us of their great legacy:
Well worthy to be magnified are they
Who, with sad hearts, of friends and country took
A last farewell, their loved abodes forsook,
And hallowed ground in which their fathers lay;
Then to the new-found World explored their way. . . .
Men they were who could not bend;
Blest Pilgrims, surely, as they took for guide
A will by sovereign Conscience sanctified. 2
Every year at Thanksgiving we honor the Pilgrims; but more than that, we learn from them. “By contemplating their example and studying their character,” Webster suggested, “[we] mingle our own existence with theirs.” 3
We too can be bold, even daring, in pursuing noble desires. We can be courageous in living our beliefs, show the fortitude to stand by them, and patiently persevere in spite of troubles. We can live in thanksgiving daily, even if some days that simply means acknowledging the blessing of one more day of life. In doing so, we take part in the inspiring legacy left to us by those “blest Pilgrims.”
Program #4080
1 The Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster (1914), 35.
2“The Pilgrim Fathers,” The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth (1892), 700.
3The Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster, 26.