It was December at the height of the American Civil War, and Jack was under sentence of death. He trembled as the executioner ran his thumb along the sharp blade of his axe, and he struggled against his bonds, desperately trying to break free and run to freedom. Jack was a turkey.
Jack didn’t know it, but he was about to “walk” – the first turkey to receive a presidential pardon. It happened at Christmas, 1863; however, President Abraham Lincoln didn’t declare Thanksgiving a national holiday until the following November.
It’s a poignant story. Jack’s goose was cooked until Tad, Lincoln’s nine-year-old son, miraculously intervened and saved his life. Tad loved animals, and he had quite a menagerie at the White House, including goats, ponies, rabbits, and Jack, a one-eyed turkey. When Tad learned that his feathered pet was to be the entrée for the family’s Christmas dinner, he rushed to his father and appealed for Jack’s life. Lincoln, who loved his youngest son deeply, playfully wrote out a mock pardon and Jack’s life was spared, thus beginning a holiday tradition that endures until this day.
The president felt especially close to Tad, having recently lost his eleven-year-old son, Willie, to typhoid fever, likely from contaminated water in the White House. From that point, he and Tad became inseparable, even allowing him to interrupt cabinet meetings. It is also recorded that Jack, the turkey, was free to wander in and out of such important gatherings. Tad had a speech impediment, possibly a mild cleft palate, and died of tuberculosis at eighteen, another of the many tragedies overcoming the Lincoln family.
After Lincoln’s proclamation of the Thanksgiving holiday, ships across the Navy were ordered to observe it as a day of rest if permitted by operational tempo. By the late 19th century, refrigerated storage and supply ships made it possible to deliver turkeys, cranberries, and even pumpkins to ships at sea. By the time Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet sailed around the world showing the U. S. flag (1907-1909), the Thanksgiving menu read like a grand hotel banquet.
While I make no claim to be a prophet, a seer, a soothsayer, or even flat-out smart, I can predict with utmost confidence and experience what will be on the minds of the approximately 70,000 men and women of the Navy and Marine Corps who will be at sea or in port overseas on Thanksgiving Day: food and home. And this includes the large task force that is now at sea off the coast of Venezuela. I imagine, too, if one were to visit the Mississippi Veteran’s Retirement Home in Collins or the Armed Forces Retirement Home in Biloxi, these two subjects would be front and center with just about everyone. Unfortunately, there’s not much that can be done to shorten a tour of duty and return a person home for the holidays or enable an older person to step back into their lives of long ago; however, we can examine the subjects that unite so many of us on Thanksgiving Day – food and loneliness.
But first, historians would probably remind us that Thanksgiving has been significant in many other ways: the first Macy’s parade was held in 1924 with live zoo animals instead of balloons; Thanksgiving Day in 1963 was declared a National Day of Mourning after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22nd; in 1965, “Broadway Joe” Namath led Alabama to a 30-3 upset of Auburn, etc. Although I’m a graduate of the University of Oklahoma, I have mixed feelings about their victory over Alabama in football last night – Ty Simpson, the Alabama quarterback, is the nephew of a close family member.
No one knows, for sure, what they ate for the first Thanksgiving dinner in 1621. Unfortunately, they did not leave us a menu. The only, first-hand, written record of the three-day harvest festival, recorded by William Bradford in his book “Of Plimoth Plantation” (1856), says that the meal included deer and wild fowl. Everything else is educated guesswork: cranberries and onions grew wild; chestnuts hung from the trees; fish and shellfish were in the bay; pumpkins were in the patch, etc. Bradford’s book was not published during his lifetime. When he died, the handwritten manuscript passed on to his family and was finally published by the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Many years ago, when I was on a ship out of Newport, Rhode Island, I` had the opportunity to take my family over to Plymouth, Massachusetts, near Cape Cod, for the annual traditional Thanksgiving dinner at the historical site of “Plimoth” Plantation. It was an enjoyable occasion, but it struck me as basically a tourist-oriented event. For example, the menu featured several non-Pilgrim items, such as potatoes, which hadn’t yet been brought to the New World in their day and circumstance, and roast beef which they certainly knew from England but was not yet available there. Potatoes, native to South America, didn’t become common in what became the United States until the 1700s. It was exciting, however, just to be in the area where the Pilgrims stepped ashore in 1621. Unfortunately, their “steppingstone,” the famous Plymouth Rock, broke in half when it was moved to the town square in 1774.
It is perhaps not surprising that the idea of setting aside one day in the fall to celebrate Thanksgiving continued as a tradition in the northeastern part of the United States, long before it was recognized as an official holiday. After all, this is where major settlement began and then gradually moved westward. As a sailor, I tend to look at history from a nautical perspective, and the evolution of Thanksgiving into the national consciousness has been duly recorded in various ways, many unintentional, such as ship’s sea logs. I have written in these pages earlier, for example, of the long-standing tradition of writing a poem in the ship’s sea log during the mid-watch on New Year’s Eve, such as this one from the New Bedford, Massachusetts (not far from Plymouth), whaling ship, Nauticon, while hunting whales in the Pacific in 1848:
This year begins as last year
ends:
Salt pork, hard sea, and sailor
friends.
God grant a breeze to set us free,
and bless the folks who think of
me.
It follows, then, that sailors would also record their thoughts about Thanksgiving in the ship’s sea log, which is a practical as well as a legal document. Here are a few interesting examples:
- The whaleship, Charles W. Morgan, 1859 (Pacific Ocean): “No turkey today. Salt pork and hard bread as usual. Crew in fair spirits. Little wind. The men say grace out of habit more than feeling. All hands speak of home.”
- USS Hartford, Admiral David Farragut’s flagship. 1864 (Mobile, Alabama, Bay): “We marked the day as best we could. The cook fashioned a pie from condensed milk and crushed ship’s biscuit. Strange to call it Thanksgiving, but the men laughed over it.”
I can’t let this go by without sharing an anecdote that almost sunk my naval career. About 1976, I was the junior chaplain at the U. S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. As such, I caught all the extra jobs and collateral duties that came down the chain of command. As cynics say: “It always flows downhill.” One Saturday afternoon, when I had rather been watching the ball games, I was tasked with being a tour guide at the academy chapel. It’s really an impressive building, the cathedral of the Navy, with the “Father of the Navy,” John Paul Jones, buried in the basement. The chapel features some impressive stained-glass windows, depicting famous naval battles, including the “Farragut Window,” picturing where Admiral Farragut, disregarding his own safety, at the height of the Battle of Mobile Bay, had himself tied to the mast of his flagship, the Hartford, and uttered the famous words: “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”
Well, I had a tour group, a bus load of little old ladies, members of the “Daughters of the American Revolution,” I think, and I was explaining each one of the beautiful and colorful stained-glass windows. When I came to the Farragut window, I couldn’t help myself and I said: “You know, Admiral Farragut is famous for having said, ‘Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!’ But this is an example of how the passage of time has changed the inflection on his words. What he really said was, ‘Damn! The torpedoes! Full speed ahead!’” Same words; totally different meaning. None of the ladies seemed to appreciate my insight into history.
- The St. Mary, American clipper ship, 1874 (South Atlantic): “Thanksgiving aboard. The steward roasted two hens. The carpenter said it was the first fowl he’d seen since Boston. Crew cheered the toast: ‘To absent friends.’ Seas moderate.”
- American Merchant Marine, 1898 (Off Cape Cod): “Terrible seas. Several sick. No holiday here. I recall Mother’s table and feel the separation keenly. A man grows older on days like this.”
- USS San Francisco (CA-38), 1942 (off Guadalcanal): “Thanksgiving service held forward. Many empty bunks this year. The chaplain spoke of those who did not return. The meal was subdued.”
- Liberty Ship, SS James R. Stubbs, 1943 (North Atlantic Convoy): “Convoy duty. Cold. Gray. Thanksgiving felt like any other day except for the extra scoop of potatoes. Germans quiet today. We gave thanks for that.”
- Destroyer Escort, USS O’Flaherty (DE-340), 1944 (Pacific): Thanksgiving. The galley boys went all out. Turkey roll, mashed potatoes, even cranberry from a can. But talk was of home. A man grows quiet after chow.
Having read incessantly during my twenty-plus years on the water, I’m reasonably familiar with nautical literature, and while there’s been much written about Christmas at sea, I can’t recall any fiction or poems specifically about Thanksgiving underway. Although Richard Henry Dana’s classic book, “Two Years Before the Mast” covers his voyage around Cape Horn from 1834-1836, and was written long before Thanksgiving became a national holiday, there is one passage which might reflect his feelings about such a holiday: “There was something in the quiet of the day, and the relief from labor, which made us all feel more kindly towards one another.”
If you are far from home, regardless of the meal available, holidays are the loneliest time of the year. Although it’s been disproved, it was once thought that a chemical released by eating turkey, the amino acid, tryptophan, made people tired, melancholy, and mediative. I guess it’s true there’s no cause-and-effect relationship, but I seem to have almost total recall of sad holidays spent away from home, while the regular days are just a blur.
A random example: I remember in 1963, just back from three years overseas, I was walking through a deserted Times Square in New York City on Thanksgiving Day. Snow was piled on the sidewalk, and the cold wind was blowing the collar of my pea coat up around my ears. I was enroute to the USO kiosk that used to be there to see if I could score some free remainder tickets to a Broadway play. I stopped for several minutes and stared wistfully through the display window of an automobile dealership at a new Triumph Spitfire convertible. It was blue. I remember thinking: if I had a car like that, I could probably go home for Christmas.
Ironically, my children are now urging me to “downsize” in my old age, and one of the things I should probably get rid of is the blue 1963 Spitfire convertible I bought years ago to compensate for the disappointments of the past. Of all the things that will never happen, this will never happen the most. Regardless of a few down days, I’m thankful for all that I’ve seen and done and the places I’ve been. All along, I knew that I was playing with the house’s money. Happy Thanksgiving!
Light a candle for me.
