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Was the First ‘Thanksgiving’ in Spanish Florida?
On September 8, 1565, curious and perhaps a bit bemused members of the indigenous Timucuan tribe watched 800 newly arrived white European colonists gather around a makeshift altar. Father Francisco Lopez, who was also a captain of one of the ships in the tiny fleet, then performed the first Catholic mass in North America, a mass of thanksgiving, for their safe crossing of Columbus’ tempestuous and unpredictable “Ocean Sea.” Father-Captain Lopez then christened their new settlement “St. Augustine.”
Trumpets and booming artillery fire had only hours earlier accompanied Don Pedro Menéndez de Avilés as he came ashore. That Spanish Admiral commemorated the moment with a cross lifted heavenly by the fleet’s captain-priest. Then both men “claimed” and “took possession of” Florida for God and country.
Almost as an afterthought , Menéndez invited the Timucuans to join the newcomers in a communal meal.
A number of Florida historians claim that this feast — and not that held by the Pilgrims some fifty-years later with the Wampanoag in Plymouth, Massachusetts — was the true North American first Thanksgiving.
“It was the first community act of religion and thanksgiving in the first permanent settlement in the land,” wrote the late University of Florida professor emeritus of history Michael Gannon…
