Latest / Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People / Who Were The Pilgrims? (Thanksgiving Special)

Transcript

Who Were The Pilgrims? (Thanksgiving Special) · Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Go when you're ready.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, everybody.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome again to another episode of Dirtnap City.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: This is the show about interesting people who happen to be dead.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: I'm the host for today, Alex, and I'm here with my friend Kelly.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: How are you doing, Callie?
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: Doing great, man.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely excited to be here.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a little um excited about this today, but I'm a little nervous as well.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: I think I might have broken some of the rules that we originally had for DirtNap City.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to be talking about anybody who's alive, but I did take some liberties with this one today.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: So hopefully you'll like who we're talking about today.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: The first thing I'm going to do is break the rule.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: When I give you a clue, I'm actually going to give you the person's name.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'm going to right the row tell you who we're talking about.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: But you guess going to guess who it is, who that is, who that what that means, okay?
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm intrigued.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, you should be.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: You might hate this.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and you might say, why did you talk about that person?
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: But I don't know.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: We'll see.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the person's name is John Howland.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: Do you know who that is?
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: John Howland.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: I do not.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: I've never heard that I don't ever recall hearing that name before.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um he was, this might help you.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: He was born in 1592.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: John Howland, 1592.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: Moved to Dirtknap City in 1673.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, was he a was he a Puritan?
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: Like uh like a uh someone over in the pilgrim times.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna have a special Thanksgiving episode today.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: I was inspired by your Halloween episode of Harry Houdini.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: Today we're gonna talk about the pilgrims.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: One in particular, John Howland, um, who I know, uh who I came to know as the boy who fell off the Mayflower.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: No, this is all news to me.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: I'm excited.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: A little history lesson.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think every week on Dirt Nob City is a little history lesson.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: True.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but but today, yeah.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: So if let me just start with that.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: So if you are a history professor, and if this uh is your area of specialty, uh back off.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: We're not gonna try and uh put you out of a job or anything here.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like I've said before, I think this is the perfect podcast for somebody in uh junior high, middle school.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um, maybe you have to write a paper tomorrow.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: Just listen to this, uh, write as fast as you can, and you'll be fine.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: We've done all the work.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: You could you could even uh you could even use us as a source.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: You could uh put put a footnote or a citation that says uh from Dirt Knap City, according to Alex at Dirtnap City.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: So let's talk about the Mayflower.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: First of all, the Mayflower itself, they were saying, oh, this is the Mayflower, and this is a big deal to come to uh the New World.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it turns out a lot of ships back then were called the Mayflower.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: I think at the time there were like 26 English ships called the Mayflower.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know why everybody was calling their thing the Mayflower, but it wasn't that um different than any of the others.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: And there were lots of ships kind of going back and forth between uh England and the New World.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but um this one is kind of uh became iconic.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: I think because of all the problems that they had, but then also because uh some of the notable people that ended up going on that voyage.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: And but most importantly, I think it became iconic because the people took really good notes while they were there, and so it's the one that we know the most about.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't like it's the first ship to go to the new world, and it wasn't the last, it wasn't like um um flying to the moon or anything like that.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: It was um it was just a very uh one that was very heavily recorded.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: Well documented.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: Do you know when it was though?
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: What year are we talking?
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I thought the Mayflower was uh I was gonna say 1492, but that was that was uh that was Columbus.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um he didn't come to America anyways, he just came to like uh El Salvador or something.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: Well, he came to South America.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Central America.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um wasn't uh wasn't there an Italian guy named Vicece Americanus that was actually first.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um and then the Vikings, of course, had been here before that.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I was gonna say there's not like there weren't people here, yeah.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so so no, uh I I'm not really sure.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: I guess the the pilgrims were kind of uh late late 1500s.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: 1620.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: 1620, 1620, and in fact, um they had a big they were gonna have a big 400-year celebration in 2020, but COVID messed that up.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: Oh um, so in fact, they were built, they were had this project called Mayflower 2020, where they were gonna have a bunch of people, a bunch of descendants of the pilgrims get on this new ship, the new Mayflower, and make the exact voyage, but the whole thing kind of got scrapped because of COVID.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: Like everything else in our world gets ruined.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: So now we gotta wait another hundred years for another celebration, I guess.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: The word pilgrim, though, it's funny because they didn't call themselves pilgrims.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, we didn't start calling these people pilgrims until a couple of hundred years later.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it was like the 1850s, um, and during um and and like during civil, I think it was the civil war around the time where uh Lincoln was trying to hold the country together, that he really started talking about, well, let's think about the people that started this thing and trying to get people kind of on the union side or remember why how this whole thing started.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: But prior to that, the 200 years before that, 250 years before that, people weren't really talking a lot about the pilgrims and didn't definitely call them pilgrims.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: So um did they have a name back then?
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um, yeah, they called themselves separatists.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: Ah um they didn't like the king, um and that was King James, by the way.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: And that's it's the same King James that has the Bible from his his version of the Bible, and they weren't into that version.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, they were actually from uh um a religion called uh they were called the Brownists, and it was a break from the Church of England.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: And at the time the Church of England was like very um, it wasn't just about what they learned in church or what they talked about, they're very uh kind of in your face about everything.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, you get fined if you didn't go to church.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: You got fined a shilling, which today is about 20 pounds, which is about 20 bucks um for um you American listeners out there.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: So every time you didn't go to church or a holiday, if you miss church, you get fined um 20 bucks.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: But if you if you went, you probably had to put that much in the till anyway, right?
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, exactly.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: So oh, that's good.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's a little utilitarian thing you're saying.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, yeah, you're either gonna go and pay 20 bucks or not go and pay 20 bucks.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: So I guess it depends on what football game was on that day, right?
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's that's a good call.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: So originally they didn't decide they were gonna go to the new world.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: That was way too much of an adventure and too far.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: They originally just decided to go live in Holland, so they all went to uh what's now the the Netherlands, but then what they noticed is that was making them all Dutch.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um their kids started not speaking English, they would have only speak uh Dutch, and uh Holland was about to go to war with Spain, so that was kind of a dicey place to be at the time.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: So they decided to go to Virginia instead.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: Now you may know that Plymouth Rock is not in Virginia, right?
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they finally land on Plymouth Rock.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: Someone said we're home.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: It may not look like much, but at this point I don't care.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: I thought you were gonna do the Malcolm X quote about how we didn't land on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Black Plymouth Rock landed on us.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: That's a good one.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: No, I was trying to quote uh schoolhouse rock.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there is a there is actually a there is actually a schoolhouse rock called No More Kings.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: I think schoolhouse rock, uh, as great as it was, I think it might have contributed to all the myths that we have about a lot of a lot of things we know about history today.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: True.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: Kind of uh uh um I don't know, they they didn't dumb it down necessarily, but uh there was a lot of things that they kind of sanitized.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it had to rhyme, right?
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: So they had to change, they had to take some liberties to make it rhyme.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: So they decided to go to Virginia, and um and you know, people like John Howland, he was actually an indentured servant, and they had a lot of those back then.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: So, in order to pay for the trip, he had to go to work for people and like three years would pay for a trip across the Atlantic.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: So you would work, and then in return you'd get to go on this ship.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: And there was a lot of did you work before you went or did you have to work once you arrived?
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh well, both, and then it depending on how much money you owed.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: So I think for John Holland, he was working before he got there, and then once he got there, and then his goal was once he was free of all that, then he was gonna go back to uh London now that he had some money.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: He was gonna make some money then and then go back to London and start a life over there, but he never did that.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, how long do you think it took to get to um to the New World?
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: They were leaving from Plymouth, England, and um trying to arrive in Virginia.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: How long do you think that jury was?
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: From from England to Virginia, I'm gonna say six weeks.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: Pretty close.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: It took ten weeks.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: Ten weeks at sea.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: Ten weeks.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and that's because the seas were terrible, as we'll get into.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think it might have supposed to have been taking eight weeks, and it took two extra weeks because of uh the rough seas.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: When the Mayflower, the Mayflower, the one we're talking about, came across, it took 10 weeks.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: But a normal trip would have been eight weeks.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so it was right around this time of year where they were out there uh 402 years ago.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um today, if you wanted to make a crossing, uh, like on the Royal Caribbean, it would take uh six to eight days, depending on your itinerary.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and cost you um if you wanted an interior room, which sounds awful.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you can't you don't have a window just on a ship with no window, it costs you about 700 bucks and takes six to eight days to go uh across the Atlantic.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, versus versus uh six to eight weeks.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, if you wanted a nice cabin or a suite or something like that, it'd be about 1,500 bucks on road.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't think the Mayflower had like 24-hour buffets or water slides or slot machines.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: Let me tell you, they had uh do you know how many people were on the Mayflower?
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: 180.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: You're close, you're very close.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: It was 102 passengers and 30 crew, 132 people.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, one person died on the way, but one person was born.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: So they left with 102, arrived with 102 at zero.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but it was so their area that they had, so that's 132 people, and the the living area was uh about 80 feet by 20 feet, so like 1600 square feet for uh over 100 people to just uh it was uh the smell was wretched.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: No state rooms, no no individual uh cabins, none of that.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: No, this wasn't the Titanic.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think the the crew maybe stayed under and under the deck, and everybody else stayed above the deck, but no, I don't think they had rooms.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: They were bunks everywhere.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_01: You think they had bunks to sleep on?
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think so.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: I I've seen some of the pictures, and I saw when I was there, I was at Plymouth Plantation in 2019, and they were gearing up for the Mayflower 2020 thing, and they had a kind of a mock-up of it.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: It didn't look like they had individual rooms.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe the captain probably had a room.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: You know what the captain's name was?
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh John Smith.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: No, you might have heard this name before, but you didn't know who he was.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: Miles Standish.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: I have I have heard that name.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: Miles Standish.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: You might know him from I think they mentioned him in um This is America, Charlie Brown.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Miles Standish.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: I I have heard that name.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh well that's who he was, he was the captain of the of the the Mayflower.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think his middle name was Miles and his first name was Sam, and he went by S.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: Miles.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: So they called him Smiles.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: All right, sorry, we cut that out too.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: Smiles Standish, everyone.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: Hashtag dad joke.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: So the the C's were horrible.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um, just they maybe picked the wrong time of the year to go to this trip, but um they they actually brought two uh ships, and one of them was in was um anchoring them so bad, they just got rid of it, they just left it.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um but um somewhere along the way the ship started to come apart, it was just breaking apart.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: Oh no.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: And um, and they were considering actually turn around and going back.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um uh and and everybody said everybody has to go below the deck.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um and but but uh our friend uh John Holland um who he the air it said it smelled so bad that he had to go up on the deck just to get some fresh air.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: And when he went up there, a wave hit him and sent him overboard.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: Oh no, um, he went about 12 feet underwater, and then um somehow somebody threw him a rope and he was able to get the rope, climb back in.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: But um, but yeah, the interesting thing about that story, and um when you go to Plymouth, um they make a big deal about that story.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: He's called The Boy Who Fell Off the Mayflower.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: There's a children's book written about him.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um he wasn't exactly a boy though, he was born in 1592, and this was 1620, so he was about 28 years old at the time.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um which considering the lifespan of most people at that time, he was actually pretty old.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, he was like middle-aged.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe they called him a boy because he was an indentured servant and didn't have any kind of social standing, so as far as they're concerned, he was just a boy.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: Plus, they probably all dressed the same.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: He was probably wearing short pants.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: He probably just looked like a well, and he might have also just you know put in his email uh signature he him.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: What are you doing, man?
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: No, but they didn't think he was a girl, they just said it was a boy instead of a man, but he was actually a grown-ass man.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_01: 28-year-old man that they called the boy who fell over.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: I think it also the story sounds more interesting.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: The boy who cried wolf, the boy who you know did this, did that.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's never the man, it's always the boy.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: On this ship, if you were gonna go for eight to ten weeks, um, you know, what kind of food do you think you would bring?
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um from well, you'd want to bring some uh citrus so you didn't get scurvy, right?
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_01: You'd want some oranges.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't know about all that back then, but you're right, a lot of people got scurvy.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I'd probably want to bring some dried meat.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they brought some salted herring, hard cheeses.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't bring any cheese.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: They brought beer, they brought lots of barrels of beer.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's good.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: They brought onions and cabbage, which you know, in a cramped uh 150 people in uh an 80 by 20 space, um, beer, onions, and cabbage.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I don't know.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know how many people you've ever uh roomed with before, but uh that's uh that's a tough, that's a tough ask.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah, I know that firsthand.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: Corn beef.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, no livestock, it sounds like they did actually bring sheep, goats, and chickens, but I it's unclear to me whether they brought them for the voyage or for once they got there.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, those were gonna be like breeding on the other side.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: Definitely not pets, that's for sure.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so they brought sheep and goats and um and and chickens, and um, it was kind of a a very uh class system there.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: You had your your captain and you had the guy that was the the governor that was gonna be the governor when they got there, and they had people in charge, and then you had a lot of indentured servants and and and staff, but it was kind of a mishmash of of people just trying to to make a better life for themselves.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: Men, women, and children.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: Men, women, and children, and um it was just wet and cold the entire voyage, the seas were strong.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and when they got there, they rolled in and it was very underwhelming.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't at all what they had been reading about um in terms of these big cliffs or anything like that.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: And it turns out because they weren't where they thought they were gonna be, they weren't in Virginia, they were in Cape Cod.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: Oh.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so they the um the storm had been so bad it had just took them to Cape Cod, which is hundreds of miles away from where they um so they said, All right, well, um, even though we're here, we're we're land is here, we're supposed to go to Virginia.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: Let's go to Virginia.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: So they turned around, went to uh started going to Virginia.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't get very far.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: The weather got so bad, they said, you know what, Cape Cod sounds fine for us.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: Well, well, so so at the time, were there already people in Virginia?
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, were they going to meet existing people or were they the first?
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: No, there were there were other other people that had gone to Virginia and talked about how great it was.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, talked about how great it was.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: So they and had and those people had set up kind of a little colony.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: So they were trying to go to that.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: So they get here and there's nothing there um for them.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: They decided to call it New Plymouth, since that's the Plymouth is where they left from in England.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: They get to this place, they say, All right, this is Plymouth, and they get there and they notice that there's some kind of uh houses um uh and no people, but no people.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: Like destruction.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: And it turns out yeah, there were places that they could live, but there were no people in them except for some skeletons of some people.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: And it turns out that those were um um those were people from the Patuxet um tribe, native tribe, and they had all been wiped out by smallpox.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, which which the other other um westers had or other Europeans had brought.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: So, right.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: So they probably were some, I don't know, I don't know how we got there.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: Like there weren't any other white people there, but um, they noticed that this town was kind of wiped out, but they had left all this housing for them.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: So they decided to kind of squat there, take their housing, and um kind of a foreshadowing of things to come, I guess.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um they took their corn, and then all of a sudden, um the um another um group, um, the Wampanoag uh tribe showed up and um started kind of having skirmishes with them.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: They weren't happy about about these these folks from Europe moving into their into their territory.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: So but they for the most part they did coexist.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they kind of they were over there, the Wampanoag were they the Wampanoag tribe didn't um really try to go down there because it was kind of a cursed area when you think about it.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's an area where they're gonna be able to do it, and they had been wiped.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: You can have it.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and in fact, though, that um I mentioned that only one person died on the Mayflower, but pretty much half of them died in the next year.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: That the by the by a year later, there was only 53 people left.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so every day you were burying somebody practically, and they would bury them at night though, because they didn't want the natives to uh see their see like that they were they were weak, that their numbers were their numbers were falling, dwindling, yeah.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, so they were bury them at night.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um and then but then they would have to trade with the natives every night, so they coexisted.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then they uh found a guy named uh Samoset, a native named Samoset, and um he actually knew English.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um and then they found another guy named Squanto.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now you may have heard Squanto, also from the Charlie Brown um show.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um there there was a Squanto, I think he uh hung out with Pig Pen, maybe um the uh Charlie Brown show.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: Again, not historically accurate.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_01: Never never heard of Squanto.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: I've never heard of Squanto.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_00: Well, he was.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: A native who was actually a put from the tribe that had been wiped out, the Patuxet tribe.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and he actually decided to, I'm gonna stay with the pilgrims because that's my home.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: So he kind of lived with them and he knew English too, because earlier in his life, he was actually stolen, brought to Spain to be a slave.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: And when he got to Spain, um, he was bought by some monks who decided that that was gonna be their thing.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: They were gonna buy slaves and like civilize them, teach them to read and teach them language.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and then um, so they taught him Spanish, and then kind of, but he wasn't a slave anymore, so he decided to go to London and he learned English.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_00: He was a really smart guy and he learned English, and he actually they said he talked like a Londoner.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: John Holland didn't talk like a Londoner because he was brought up in in um in the Netherlands, or you know, he had a Dutch accent.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: So um, they used to joke about how he had a Dutch accent, and uh the Indian guy had a had a uh a London accent.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: But um, but anyways, he knew English and he was able to kind of negotiate between the the um the Wampanoag tribe and the pilgrims whenever they wanted something.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um there was a king, they had a king in the Wampanoag tribe, king um Massasoit, um, where uh you know you hear some of these names, and I don't know if you know Massachusetts, but Potuxet is like Potucket, Massachusetts.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_00: Massa Massasoit is like Massachusetts.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_00: I mean you these these names Samoset, I think, became you know something.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: So um and so he wouldn't help them negotiate between um be between the two tribes.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_00: And like I said, they existed pretty peacefully.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: And when they had been there a year, so the next November, like 50 of them left.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_00: There were 50 of them that had died, and um, they decided that they were gonna have a special three-day celebration marking the year that they had been there.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and they invited the natives to come to the celebration.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: They brought deer, they brought five deer, the pilgrims served quail, and um now we know this as the first Thanksgiving.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, and maze.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: Now we nobody in the U.S.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: really celebrated Thanksgiving, like I said, until Abraham Lincoln kind of brought it up uh a couple of hundred years later.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: They mentioned that we should have a Thanksgiving to commemorate 200 years ago when uh the the pilgrims uh did this too.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it wasn't until the the 100 years after that where FDR um kind of federalized the Thanksgiving holiday in the 1940s.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: Thanksgiving was always on November 30th prior to that, and FDR backed it up a week so they could people could get to make it like a pre-Christmas holiday, like it is now, and give seven more days to to shop for Christmas, and the Thanksgiving we know now is um is kind of modeled after that.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: So it wasn't like they said, This is gonna be Thanksgiving, and for years everyone's gonna have turkey and commemorate us.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, in the natives' writing, there's barely anything that they it wasn't very remarkable.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, if you read the the writings of um uh Squanto, um he mentions it like in passing that, yeah, and there was a time where we brought five deer and they brought some pheasants, but he didn't say this was the greatest festival or anything like that.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so it wasn't even as memorable as today's music festivals, probably.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so so at the time though, uh they probably the the the Europeans who had come over probably really needed the natives to be their friends, right?
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_01: Because they were dwindling, they didn't understand the the land, you know, they didn't necessarily know how to grow things as well, they were still learning about that.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: It was a totally different environment, and so it made sense for them to have this um peaceful relationship with them, and this maybe was one of those times when they actually uh did something smart.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_00: And let's give props to the natives who kind of put up with them just arriving and kind of squatting on uh their land and trying to make it themselves.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they could have just as easily chased them out and said, get out of here.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_00: But like I said, they were kind of living on cursed land and they, you know, were just kind of watching them fail at this stuff.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_01: They also probably didn't realize uh what was gonna happen, right?
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, if they could see 50 to 100 years into the future, it would have been a different story.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_01: But at the time, it was just like, oh, this is 50 people, no big deal.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's plenty, plenty of land, like lots of space, right?
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I think from their perspective, land is not something that you own.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: Right, right.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: You know, land is land is is here for all of us.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's not the concept, the European concept of owning land, I think was kind of foreign to them.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, true.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, John Howland, um, he was gonna his intention was to go back, and there was a ship called the Fortune.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, ships were coming and going all the time between the New World and um and England.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_01: So they they weren't as isolated as as you might imagine.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, the Mayflower went back.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so they were kind of every time one would come, then it would go back and pick up more people, and it was kind of always uh always that wasn't something that I really got a sense of when I was in school learning about this.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: I got the sense this was like the moon landing that people decided to come and set up a new land, and that those were the only people, and that we descended from those hundred people.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't really like that at all.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so he was gonna go on this boat called the fortune.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and um, but he fell in love along the way.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, and um Elizabeth Tilley was her name, uh Lizzie, as he called her, and she um said, I'm not going back to England, I got nothing there.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: My life is here, and um, like all of us, um, you know, we listened, uh, listened to her.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, she was smart though in uh telling him to stay because the fortune ended up getting raided by French pirates.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_00: He probably would have been killed.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_00: Oh um, and actually he ended up living uh till he was 80 years old.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, he was one of the oldest people that came on the Mayflower.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: They ended up having 10 children, 88 grandchildren.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: And here's what's cool, Kelly.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the cool part two million people today living in the U.S.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_00: are descended from John Holland.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, including Humphrey Bogart, nice, um, um uh Alec Baldwin and Yours truly.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: Really?
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's I am a descendant of John Holland, and um which is you know the the way I started knowing about this guy was when we went to the I've always known that I was know that I was the descendant of the Mayflower, never really knew much about the story, but when we went there, um I found out who it was, and then I saw the children's book called The Boy Who Fell Off the Mayflower, and um probably no coincidence that I'm related to the guy that fell off the Mayflower.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_00: The boy.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_00: My wife never yeah.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_00: My wife uh thought that was hysterical, actually.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_00: She said, All the people to be related to, you're the one you're related to the one who, you know, had to cause a ruckus and uh had to via the drama.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_00: That's awesome.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: The big question I had if I had a a pilgrim here in front of me and I had to ask him questions, I'd probably ask him about the journey.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, probably ask him about the kind of food they had at Thanksgiving.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_00: But I also would probably ask him about what's the deal with the buckles on the hats.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, because those well um didn't seem to make a lot of sense.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_00: Was it a religious thing?
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_00: No, it turns out it was a myth that they didn't have buckles on their hats.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: Oh they were so poor, they were so poor their pants didn't even have buckles.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't have buckles.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_00: Some of the statues that are made of the pilgrims have the buckle on the hat, but the statue the statues were made like a hundred years later when that kind of thing was that was more in fashion.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, they didn't dress very nice.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_01: I I don't think people can always um imagine what people were really like back then.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_01: And and also because it's such a big span of time, we've just sort of amalgamated people from you know everything from 200 to 800 years ago, you know, just sort of they're they're an amalgamation of that time period.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I was reading something that said that it said, why in all the pictures are they so dressed up?
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_00: And they said, Well, whenever somebody was was drawing a picture of them, they would make sure to get dressed up.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: And it said it would be like 400 years from now if they assumed that all high schoolers wore tuxedos every day.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because in the senior pictures, they're always wearing a tuxedo.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_01: That that's a good, that's a good analogy, yeah.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, so so um John Howland, um, he lived to be 80 something years old.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, 80 years old.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, wow.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I think his wife ended up uh even older than that, or maybe I think she was younger, but she lived longer.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: She lived into the uh uh like 16 uh I think the 1690, 1699 or something.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_01: She lived did they still call him uh boy when he was that old?
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_01: I think she always called him boy.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_01: The boy, the boy who fell.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_01: That that was her attraction to him.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_01: She was always reminding him that he was now.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_01: John, don't get too close to the edge.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_01: You remember what happened on the way over here.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_00: And that's probably why I'm uh you know, uh generations later, why I'm a little um cautious about things.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_01: You gotta stay away from the edge.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_01: Well, man, that was that was awesome.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_01: I know I I have to say I like that.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_01: I like the liberties you took with this program because it was different to hear about an entire group of people, especially an entire group of people who are significant to the holiday that this episode will come out around, right?
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_01: Thanksgiving.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_00: You know what's cool is when you go to Plymouth, and it was really a pretty cool experience for me.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: Because I, like I said, I already kind of knew that I had descended from um from Mayflower people.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_00: When you go there, you can actually go, and the a lot of the gravestones are still there of these of these um Mayflower people.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the problem was back then when they buried people, it would be like wooden markers, and the wood is deteriorated in 400 years.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: So, like in the 1800s and 1900s, they had put up proper stone, but like in the 1850s, when they'd put up a stone marker, they would put it up, but then you can barely read it from the 1850s.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_00: So they keep putting new markers to show where these people are.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we need titanium or something.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_00: We need we need to yeah, you can visit these people, and it's just you know, a hundred yards from the shore where they landed, you can go up on a hill and read all of these uh names of Miles Standish and um John Howland and Elizabeth Tilley and all these.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_00: So if you make this trip, you go to the Plymouth plantation, they have like a mock-up of what the plantation um looked like.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_00: Then go to the gravestones and you'll kind of see some of the names that you've been hearing about all day.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_00: I definitely recommend it as a uh trip if you're in the Boston area.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's pretty cool.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's uh it's not too far from Boston.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_00: No, it's not far at all.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's like 40 minutes from Boston, it's like near Cape Cod.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_01: I've I've been to Boston a couple times, but never done that.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I will put it on the list for next time.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, they made it there, they did so well.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and they also all ended up in the same place as well.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_01: The place where Mr.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_01: Rogers, Andre the Giant, Evil Kinevil, all our friends live.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_01: Dirtnap City.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: Undefeated.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: Dirt Knap City's undefeated.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_00: I think the uh the thing that blows me away is this idea that there's two million people that exist today that wouldn't have existed if he hadn't grabbed that rope.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_00: That blows my mind.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_00: Like literally, he's there's a 28-year-old guy falling overboard, they throw a rope.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_00: He was 12 feet underwater, the seas are rough, he he doesn't have much of a chance of making it.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_00: They throw him this rope, and because he grabs that rope, there's two million people that exist today that wouldn't have existed.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: That kind of, including me, kind of blows me away.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_01: That that that is definitely the butterfly effect, right?
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_01: The the butterfly flapping its wings halfway around the globe and then changing the world.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's crazy to think about.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_00: Well, hopefully you learned a little bit about um the pilgrims and Thanksgiving and um and some of our uh my uh forefathers for sure.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_01: And and uh for mother, the Tilly lady.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Elizabeth Tilly.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_01: Elizabeth Tilly.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_01: I wonder, have you tried to do any of this on like a genealogy site on ancestry.com or anything like that?
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm pretty involved on Ancestry, and and it's pretty cool to be able to trace it back that far.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_00: I was able to make the the lineage um um pretty unbroken from from me now, or actually my son now, all the way back um 400 years.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's pretty cool to be able to do that.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's awesome.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_01: Well, thanks, Alex.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_01: I enjoyed it and and very apropos to the uh season.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, happy Thanksgiving, Kelly.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_01: Happy Thanksgiving, Alex.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_00: I'm thankful for you.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_00: And thanks to all our listeners, too.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_00: Appreciate it.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_00: Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_00: Until next time.