Researcher: First Thanksgiving occurred here
Michael Gannon says he is known in Massachusetts as "the Grinch who stole Thanksgiving" after declaring it was the Spanish and not the Pilgrims who first celebrated Thanksgiving in the New World.
Gannon, a University of Florida history professor, said the first Thanksgiving in a permanent settlement occurred on Sept. 8, 1565, in St. Augustine. Pedro Menendez de Aviles and 800 Spanish settlers, celebrated a Mass of Thanksgiving and invited the native Seloy tribe who occupied the site, he said.
"It was the first community act of religion and Thanksgiving in the first permanent u215BEuropeanu215C settlement in the land," Gannon wrote in his 1965 book, "The Cross in the Sand." The Pilgrims did not have their first Thanksgiving meal until 1621, 56 years after the Spanish.
Menendez and his followers probably dined on cocido -- a stew made from salted pork and garbanzo beans, laced with garlic seasoning -- hard sea biscuits and red wine, said Gannon, based on what the Spanish had aboard their five ships.
If the Seloy Indians contributed food, then the menu could have included wild turkey, venison, gopher tortoise, mullet, corn, beans and squash, Gannon said.
Father Francisco Lopez de Mendoza Grajales celebrated the first Mass on that day and he reflected in his personal chronicle that "the Indians imitated all they saw done."
The first Thanksgiving is recounted by Gannon in "We Gather Together," an article published in this month's St. Augustine Catholic, the publication of the Catholic Diocese of St. Augustine.
The 1565 celebration wasn't the first Thanksgiving, Gannon said. Numerous Thanksgivings for a safe voyage and landing had been made in Florida by such explorers as Juan Ponce de Leon's in 1513 and 1521; Panfilo de Narvaez in 1528; Hernando de Soto in 1529; Father Luis Cancer de Barbastro in 1549; and Tristan de Luna in 1559.
The French, who came to the St. Johns River near Jacksonville in 1562 and Rene de Laudonniere in 1564, also offered prayers of Thanksgiving -- well before the Pilgrims, Gannon said.
In Texas, some claim that Spanish explorer Don Juan de Onate celebrated the first Thanksgiving in America in 1598.
"By the time the Pilgrims came to Plymouth, St. Augustine was up for urban renewal," Gannon said.
So, if the Spanish were first, why do Pilgrims and Plymouth get all the credit?
"It is the victors who write the histories," Gannon said. "England won out over Spain for the mastery of the North American continent, so the early English ceremonies achieved wide currency in history books and eclipsed our knowledge of the earlier Spanish celebrations on Thanksgiving."
In 1979, David Nolan, a writer and historian in St. Augustine, had the opportunity to address the Florida Society of Mayflower Descendants in St. Augustine.
"I went back through our historical records to let them know we had done considerable more than just stepped off the boat at the time," Nolan said.
Nolan gave the Mayflower Descendants details of housing problems of royal officials in St. Augustine; the marriage without permission of the governor's son and the arrest of French and English pirates.
"By the time the Pilgrims scraped together their meal, we were already so far advanced as to have housing, family, and law-and-order problems in Florida," Nolan said.
Kathleen Curtin, a spokeswoman for the Plimoth Plantation in Plymouth, Mass., said she has no arguments with anyone wanting to claim the first Thanksgiving on the North American continent and has no problem with Gannon's claim.
"They have a good leg to stand on," she said, adding that it was the American Indians who probably had the first Thanksgiving celebrations.
The museum's Web site states, "The event we now know as 'the First Thanksgiving' was in fact neither the first occurrence of our modern American holiday, nor was it even a 'Thanksgiving' in the eyes of the Pilgrims who celebrated it. It was instead a traditional English harvest celebration to which the colonists invited Massasoit."
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