Thanksgiving

In the modern age of Western history, the [...] ordeal of migration across the sea has brought [...] compensation to all those victims of religious persecution in Europe who have found freedom of worship in the New World.

Where the remote Bermudas ride
In the ocean’s bosom unespied,
From a small boat that row’d along,
The listening winds received this song:

“What should we do but sing His praise
That led us through the watery maze
Unto an isle so long unknown
And yet far kinder than our own?
Where He the huge sea-monsters wracks
That lift the deep upon their backs,
He lands us on a grassy stage,
Safe from the storm’s and prelate’s rage;

. . . . . .

And in these rocks for us did frame
A temple where to sound His name.
Oh! Let our voice His praise exalt
Till it arrive at Heaven’s vault,
Which thence (perhaps) rebounding may
Echo beyond the Mexique bay!”

Thus sung they in the English boat
A holy and a cheerful note;
And all the way, to guide their chime,
With falling oars they kept the time.

The English seafarers in whose mouth this song of thanksgiving has been placed by a seventeenth-century poet were Presbyterian emigrants who had been rewarded for braving the perils of the Atlantic by being led to an earthly paradise in the Antilles.

Bermuda is not, in fact, in the Antilles, and its climate is sub-tropical, not tropical.

Their compensation was, indeed, in both kinds; and the physical delights of a tropical island which are depicted by Andrew Marvell in the loveliest lines of his poem [footnote: These lines have been omitted in the quotation above.] had the same enervating effect upon these English navigators that we have seen them have upon Polynesian navigators on the other side of the planet.

But the islands were uninhabited, unless by a few Spanish or Portuguese. There were no voluptuous natives or lotus-eaters.

To-day the song sounds only faintly off the coast of the Bermudas; yet the singers’ pious hope has been fulfilled; for their voice has indeed rebounded from “Heaven’s vault” till it echoes now “beyond the Mexique bay” in stentorian reverberations. The song of these English Presbyterian seafarers who found freedom of worship in an earthly paradise in the Bermudas has become the song of their kinsmen and co-religionists who have likewise crossed the Atlantic to find the same religious freedom in a prosaic eldorado (sic) on the North American Continent. And voices from every quarter of the overseas world are singing in chorus: the voice of French Huguenots who have found freedom of worship in South Africa, and the voice of Irish Catholics who have found it in Australia and in Spanish America as well as in the United States.

The lines which Toynbee omits read:

“He gave us this eternal Spring
Which here enamels everything,
And sends the fowls to us in care
On daily visits through the air:
He hangs in shades the orange bright
Like golden lamps in a green night,
And does in the pomegranates close
Jewels more rich than Ormus shows:
He makes the figs our mouths to meet
And throws the melons at our feet;
But apples plants of such a price,
No tree could ever bear them twice.
With cedars chosen by His hand
From Lebanon He stores the land;
And makes the hollow seas that roar
Proclaim the ambergris on shore.
He cast (of which we rather boast)
The Gospel’s pearl upon our coast;”

The poem must refer to the settlement of Bermuda by English visitors en route to Virginia in the years 1609-12. The real American Thanksgiving (today, on the fourth Thursday in November) commemorates a harvest reaped by Virginians in 1621. Local festivals gradually turned into a national one. Marvell lived from 1621 to ’78. His poem, called Bermudas, which Toynbee calls a song of thanksgiving, is not, as far as I know, about that incipient festival – but the omitted lines deal with a harvest of sorts.

The real American Thanksgiving is a thanksgiving not only for a harvest, but for living in America. Copland’s ballet Appalachian Spring tells the story of a spring celebration of nineteenth-century American pioneers as they build a new Pennsylvania farmhouse, and is also a song of thanksgiving.

A Study of History, Vol II, OUP, 1934