By Peter F. Stevens
Special to the Reporter

Three hundred and seventy-seven years ago, Dorchester's first English settlers sat at rude wooden tables not to feast, but to stay alive… barely.  Ancient methods of survival as winter loomed - and hit - were close at hand if the settlers looked to the region's original inhabitants, chiefly the Neponsets, led by the great "Sachem" Checkatabot (also spelled Chickatawbit and other phonetical ways in old documents).

Colonist Roger Clap wrote of the Mary and John passengers facing their first brutal New England winter, in 1630-31: "In our beginning, many were in great Straits for want of Provision for themselves and their little Ones." There would be no Thanksgiving in 1630 for that beleaguered band of settlers clinging to their footholds near "Rocky Hill" (latter-day Savin Hill).

Atlantic gusts lashing the rough wooden cabins, "lean-to's," and shelters of Dorchester's early colonists, and dipping temperatures all along the bay heralded a harsh winter. Having arrived too late to plant sufficient crops, the settlers confronted winter with meager stocks of "salt junk [meat] and hard-tack [rock-hard biscuit] left over from the voyage." With barely enough food for their own families, "Dorchester's Freemen" had to "turn loose [their indentured servants] to fend for themselves."

With winter's onset, the local Native Americans would encamp in the dense woods that bordered the upper stretch of the Neponset River, "at the head of navigation, where the fresh saltwater began to mingle."

The Indians called the site "Unquety," and the nearby falls that provided them fish in the winter was named "Uneataquissett," the later site of Lower Mills.

The beleaguered English settlers would stop when passing along the riverbanks, and watch the Indians paddling through the frigid waters en route to the tribe's choice fishing and trapping spots.

Historian William Dana Orcutt writes: "The Indians remained at Unquety until prevailed upon by the apostle Eliot to settle upon the tract of land at Ponkapoag Pond, which the town of Dorchester so kindly set aside for their use."

The colonists were more than willing to hunt in the dense local forests and to fish the ponds and the ocean, the latter teeming with cod and other fish, but were hampered by a range of problems in any attempt to level a musket at a wild animal or to cast a line into the ocean.

Unlike the English the Neponsets did not claim outright ownership of the land and water &endash; only what they could grow or hunt or fish. 

The English settlers had not been in the region long enough to glean much of the ways and customs of the Indians.  Simple survival stood as the paramount issue for those who had debarked from the Mary and John.

Historian Samuel Eliot Morison notes that the drastic changes in the customary diet of the band from the Mary and John and the other Puritans who had debarked from vessels along Massachusetts' shore was pronounced, weakening them by November and leaving them in poor shape to endure the coming winter of 1630-31.

"But the Englishman of that period considered himself starving without beef, bread and beer," Morison writes. "And even today, if you will try a steady diet of shellfish and spring water for a week, you might feel some sympathy for these Puritan colonists bereft of their stout British fare."

For many of the Mary and John settlers, one of the available foodstuffs -  "Indian corn" &emdash;  wreaked havoc with their digestive tracts.

"There is one and another allusion to the fact that these people, bred to the use of English wheat, rye and barley," records Chronicles of the First Planters, "disliked the bread made of Indian corn. They probably had not yet learned the art, which is not an easy art to this day, of properly subduing that grain by the process of cookery." Cramps and worse bedeviled many settlers forced to rely on the harsh local corn as a staple.

By late November 1630, many of the colonists foraging from the Neponset to "The Neck" for food were taking on a gaunt, weakened collective visage. Thoughts of any day of Thanksgiving were remote to men, women, and children alike. Thoughts of scraping enough food for the daily larder consumed the hours.

On Christmas Eve, temperatures plummeted below freezing, with icy winds roaring in from the ocean. Relentless snowfall soon piled upon Dorchester and the nearby settlements. As John Winthrop and other locals described, "many of the people were yet inadequately housed, living and dying in bark wigwams or sail-cloth tents, 'soe [sic.] that almost in every family, lamentation, mourning and woe was heard, and no fresh food to be had to cherish them."

Clap and many of his fellow Dorchester companions toughed it through the winter, ensuring that the fledgling settlement would survive. In February 1631, Clap and company needed every last source of inner strength upon which they could draw, for their situation reached its desperate worst. Food stores had dwindled to virtually nothing, and profiteering was rampant -- the princely sum of 5 pounds for a single pig and 3 pounds for a nearly starved goat the going rate.

Finally, in that grim February, a relief ship materialized in the waters alongside the Puritan settlements. The Lion, out of Bristol, England, was laden with supplies procured by one of Dorchester's "guiding lights," John White, and other supporters of the colonists. Among the most important items off-loaded from the vessel was lemon juice, "which cured the scurvy." To the delight of the haggard colonists craving a bit of bread and meat, sailors rolled and lugged sacks of grain and "barrelled beef" ashore, as well as peas. Dorchester was one of "the several towns" receiving a share of the supplies. As John Winthrop noted, the Lion's arrival was "the occasion for a February thanksgiving day."

That Thanksgiving day for the settlers of Dorchester and the region was not a "Pilgrimesque" feast, but a day of prayer and reflection.

Roger Clap also offered thanks to another source of aid to the Dorchester Company: "Yet this I can say to the Praise of God's Glory, that He sent poor raven-nous Indians, who came with their Baskets of corn on their Backs to Trade with us, which was a good supply unto many."

This Thanksgiving, as families gather in Dorchester for turkey dinners, they might pause for a moment to ponder how blessed they are. Three hundred and seventy years ago, the town's first colonists truly grasped how precious family and a full table were.  In time, they would reap the land's bounty, as had the Indians for centuries.

Peter Stevens is freelance writer who has written extensively on Dorchester history for the Reporter. He is author of several books including The Voyage of the Catalpa, The Secret Service: The Hidden History of an Enigmatic Agency, and The Mayflower Murderer & Other Forgotten Firsts in American History.