He’d learned it from some English explorers and fishing parties up the coast a few years earlier. After greeting the Separatists he returned to them with Massasoit, the sagamore (chief) of the local Wampanoag tribe, some of Massasoit’s braves and a more fluent English speaker named Squanto (Tisquantum).

Squanto, to the Separatists, was a direct gift from God. For sure he is one of history’s finest examples of forgiveness and thus makes a wonderful holiday message.

Squanto was a member of the Patuxet tribe, whose native territories lay north of the Wampanoags. An earlier English exploring party had taken Squanto and several other American Indians to England as examples of the New World peoples. Squanto had lived in England from 1605 to 1614. He then returned home on a ship under the command of John Smith. Details are murky here, but another captain, Thomas Hunt, seized Squanto and 24 others and took them to Spain, where he sold them into slavery. I find no record of what happened from that point onward, except for Squanto. That person was purchased by some Roman Catholic friars (some say nuns), taught the rudiments of Christianity, and somehow eventually found his freedom and passage back to England. In 1619 he returned again to the New World.

At Monhegan Island (off the coast of present-day Portland, Maine) he met Samoset, who had joined the English party. They sailed on south.

At Plymouth, Mass., Squanto found his Patuxet people dead from the European disease. So he and Samoset took up residence with some of the few Wampanoags who had survived the “plague.” And the stage was thus set for the arrival of the Separatists at Plymouth in December 1620.

In the spring of 1621 Squanto began his role as the first agricultural extension agent. He lived with the Separatists and was indispensable in helping them survive. New England had been glaciated during the Ice Ages. The soil was still shallow and rocky, and its fertility was easily exhausted.

Squanto showed the immigrants how to plant corn (commandeered from American Indian caches) with three fish in the bottom of each hole, fanned outward to supply fertilizer and nutrients and to encourage a more spreading root growth.

Again our story runs into contradictions in the historical sources. Some say the harvest in 1621 was plentiful and the English invited the Wampanoags to a three-day feast with them, the first Thanksgiving. Others say it was not until 1622 that the harvest was sufficient for such celebration. However, people all over the world celebrate harvest festivals, including Europeans and Native Americans, so this idea of a fall feast was certainly not invented at Plymouth. But it did initiate the most American and lovely of holidays.

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page B3.