They were hardy, clearly. Industrious, ditto. But were they really bedecked in buckles?

Were they truly so serious? 

And just how did local beavers come to their rescue?

On the eve of Thanksgiving, historians offer Pilgrim-era insight — and surprising Maine ties.

So make like 1620, kick back with an Adam’s Ale, pet your mouser (that’s old English for cat) and give our quiz a gander.  

1. Where does the word “Pilgrim” come from?

a) From King James VI, king of England, in a disparaging remark in 1619.

b) From Myles Standish, who included the term in the Mayflower Compact.

c) From U.S. Rep. Daniel Webster, who included it in an 1820 speech.

2. The first Native American to make contact with the Pilgrims came from present-day Maine. His name was:

a) Piscataqua

b) Samoset

c) Waldo

3. Very little was written down at the time of the first Thanksgiving at what became Plymouth, Mass. This much historians do know:

a) It took place on Nov. 1, 1621.

b) It fed about 140 people and lasted three days.

c) It took eight days to prepare the feast, which included roasting 25 turkeys.

4. What present-day Thanksgiving staple was definitely not on the table:

a) Apple pies

b) Pears

c) Mashed potatoes

5. What about the underlying narrative that the Pilgrims invited the Native Americans over to share their harvest and give thanks?

a) Hogwash.

b) Potentially true.

c) Fact.

6. The original Pilgrims could not wear enough black clothing with buckles.

True or false? 

7. Why, exactly, had they left England in the first place?

a) To escape religious persecution from the Church of England.

b) A zest for adventure.

c)  To retrace Christopher Columbus’ original path.

8. Even with gaps in historical record, it’s likely Adam’s Ale was served at that first Thanksgiving. What’s Adam’s Ale?

a) Rudimentary beer brewed with rain water.

b) Grape juice mashed from local grapes, strained with cheesecloth and fermented.

c) Water. Just water.

9. The Pilgrim’s most successful trading post was in present-day Maine.

True or false? 

10. When did Thanksgiving become a federal holiday in the U.S.?

a) President George Washington created it in 1789.

b) President Theodore Roosevelt created it in 1902.

c) President Abraham Lincoln created it in 1863.

Answers

The origin of “Pilgrim”?

1. C. Mostly. 

Massachusetts U.S. Rep. Daniel Webster, preparing for a speech on the 200th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing, picked up a copy of “A History of Plymouth Plantation” written by Gov. William Bradford, according to Dr. Allan Whitmore, a professor who teaches colonial American history at the University of Southern Maine.

“He happened to come across a phrase in the book that said something of the order of that when the people came over to New England they were coming ‘on a pilgrimage of faith,'” Whitmore said. “Webster kind of liked the ring of that so he used the word ‘pilgrim.'”

It stuck.

First Mainer to greet the Pilgrims?

2. B. Samoset.

He first said good day in March 1621, according to Jason C. Libby, an adjunct instructor at Central Maine Community College and vice chair of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission.

“It kind of surprised them, he just kind of walked into their village and started speaking broken English to them,” Libby said.

Samoset lived in the Monhegan Island/Bristol area in Maine where Europeans had been fishing for 100 years. He’d picked up some of the language from that limited contact.

“He ended up bringing several other Native Americans back with him, one of them being Squanto,” Libby said. “Samoset introducing these other folks to the Pilgrims certainly was a benefit to them.”

Bonus fact: Libby can trace his roots back to 1636 and has nine — count them nine — Pilgrims in his family tree. 

Known about Thanksgiving?

3. B. About 140 people and three days.

Those are among the sparse details tucked in a letter written in 1621 by one of the Pilgrims and sent back to England with other reports, said Kathleen Wall, a historian and period actress at Massachusetts’ Plimoth Plantation. She plays Sarah Jenny.

That letter was printed in 1622 in a publication known as “Mort’s Relation,” then largely forgotten until the 1820 bicentennial, she said.

According to Wall, in the letter, under the heading “Our harvest being gotten in,” the Pilgrims “‘gathered as much fowl as could feed our company for a week’ and then ‘Massasoit arrived with 90 of his men and they bring five deer and they stay for three days,'” Wall quoted the letter. “If you put these all together, then you have Thanksgiving, and that’s pretty much what we know: Wild fowl. Venison. Three days.”

The rest is a mix of supposition and wishful thinking. The meal was likely held sometime between mid-September and mid-October; it had already happened when a supply ship arrived in November.

There’s a chance they dined indoors, unlike the outdoor picnic scene popularly pictured.

For food, they probably had cornbread; there could have been squash. The wild fowl would have been any combination of ducks, geese, turkey, swans, passenger pigeons, quail and little shore birds, Wall said.

“I wish I could say we have the menu,” she said. “I would love to find Mrs. Brewster’s recipe book from 1621.”

Food missing from the first Thanksgiving?

4. Trick question! None of them.

Apples, pears and potatoes aren’t indigenous and weren’t in New England yet.

“Suddenly, Johnny Appleseed makes a whole lot more sense,” said Wall.

Were they sharing the bounty and giving thanks?

5. B. Potentially true.

It’s one of the questions Wall gets a lot from school kids. She has to tell them there was no invitation extended to the Native Americans that people know of (see prior answer about the general lack of details).

And to provide a little context: There had been heavy losses of life on both sides by the time they met that first spring.

A few years before, the Native Americans in New England had experienced either a major plague or illness, Whitmore said. “So much so that some of the early settlers found the equivalent of bodies almost stacked on the ground.”

Chief Massasoit had a lot of territory to protect and not a lot of people.

For the Pilgrims, 102 people had set sail from England and 50 died that first winter. They clearly could use a hand.

Massasoit and Pilgrim Gov. John Carver met and worked out a mutual defense treaty in March 1621 “that remained in effect for the better part of 50 years,” Wall said. 

Whitmore believes Native Americans did provide tips on which crops and fertilizer worked best in New England and the harvest that fall was really bountiful. It would have made sense to give thanks.

“There was at least somewhat a spirit of harmony at that time,” he said. “Over the years, though, the cultural differences, the religious differences, the greed and in some ways the racism as well, tended to cut away.”

Dark clothing and buckles galore?

6. False.

“The image of puritans being killjoys is a common one,” said Whitmore. “The general image of a kind of colorless, drab or dark people that have very little interest outside of matters of faith doesn’t reflect the culture from which a lot of these people originally came in England.”

Yes, buckles existed, but so did lots of color and craftsmanship. “They were people of great passion and great feeling, just as people would be today,” he said.

Why leave England?

7. A. Escaping religious persecution (but arguably a little b, too — they had to have adventurous spirits to hop aboard the Mayflower).

“The Pilgrims were a subgroup of the broader Puritan movement,” said Whitmore.

In Europe they were called “separatists,” he said, having separated from the church to form their own congregation. (At the time, it was illegal to belong to any church but the Church of England, according to Plimoth.org.) 

“There was a feeling that churches were losing their vitality,” Whitmore said. “They (Pilgrims) were radical in the sense they felt there was no hope for the Church of England, whereas the larger group of Puritans in England and the larger group of Puritans that came over were people who felt there needed to be reforms.”

What’s Adam’s Ale?

8. C. Just water.

“It’s a lovely euphemism,” said Wall. “If you were drinking water in England, you were too poor to buy beer and beer was really cheap, and that means you were pretty poor. Because poor Adam didn’t have beer in paradise.”

Most successful trading post in Maine?

9. True

The Pilgrim’s most successful trading post was in Cushnoc, near present-day Old Fort Western in Augusta. They traded corn with the Native Americans for beaver pelts, which they sent back by the thousands to England.

It came in really, really handy after they were hit by pirates.

Pilgrims had borrowed quite a bit to finance their original trip overseas, money they had to pay back.

When the ship the Fortune visited Plymouth Colony in November 1621, “they were able to put on it — between fish and timber and pelts — 800 pounds sterling-worth of goods, which would have paid off all their debt and given them money so they wouldn’t have to borrow money for future shipments,” Wall said.

Then the Fortune and its bounty were captured by French pirates and held for ransom.

“So you have the interest on the initial money that wasn’t paid off, you have the money that has to be borrowed to take the ship out of ransom and then you have the money that has to be borrowed to get the next ship out with provisions,” she said. “In one year, they thought, ‘Look, we have seven years to pay this off and we paid it off in the first year, yeah us!’ Six months later they find out they had three times more debt than they had a year earlier, and it only gets worse from there.”

Enter the Maine beaver.

“There started to be this beaver fad that lasted for several decades (back in England),” Libby said. “Within five years, they paid off this enormity of debt. I don’t know how they would have frankly paid it off otherwise. It was really on the backs of beaver.”

Who created the federal holiday?

10. C. President Lincoln. 

Lincoln set the fourth Thursday in November as the annual day of Thanksgiving in 1863. Turkey and fixings were served to Union soldiers embroiled in the Civil War, Libby said.

It’s about that time that the modern-day version of Thanksgiving started to take root, he said.

The original Pilgrims themselves might be a little embarrassed by the hoopla in their name, according to Wall.

“These are people who didn’t like to celebrate anniversaries, they liked to celebrate events,” she said. “The point I’d like to make is these people didn’t just have one meal in their entire history. They ate every day. They began each meal with a prayer that was a ‘grace before meats’ but they ended each meal with a prayer that was a ‘thanksgiving after meats.’ So thanksgiving was something they did every day, it wasn’t just a holiday.”

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