Thanksgiving History of Harsh Times for Settlers

Video Transcript

"Hello, I'm Matt Cail and on behalf of Expert Village, I'm here today to tell you all about the history of Thanksgiving. The Pilgrims as we came to call them because they were on a pilgrimage to celebrate and be able to practice their religion in their own way, landed at Plymouth Rock in December, 1620. This was in the middle of what was an incredibly harsh winter. There was around a hundred settlers, although not all of these were Puritans, many of them were like hired soldiers and other people, company's people, to sort of keep a tab on the expedition and also represent some company, or as nowadays we refer to it, corporate interests on the party. But the winter was incredibly harsh and of the hundred and so original people on the party, around forty something of them died throughout the winter. There's a couple of reasons for this. First off the winter was especially harsh, even by current day New England standards, there's a lot of snow, a lot of ice and a lot of subfreezing temperatures. Also, there was some mistaken thinking on what the climate and weather would really be like. In France it was around like, kind of like the same positioning as say Massachusetts area would be but different changes in the climate meant that North America was much colder than Europe meaning that the pilgrims were ill equipped to deal with the cold."