Military Contractors Aided the First Thanksgiving

http://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/Thanksgiving/2007/11/21/51246.html

Military Contractors Aided the First Thanksgiving

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

By: Ann Jocelyn and J. Michael Waller

When American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan sit down for Thanksgiving

dinner, private security and military contractors will have guarded the

convoys bringing the turkey and gravy.

If not for the private security contractor (PSC) business, there would have

been no Thanksgiving at all. For it was a PSC whom the Pilgrims hired in

1620 to join them on the Mayflower and provide security for what would

become their new colonial settlement in Plymouth, Mass.

Myles Standish was a former English army soldier who had fought the

Spaniards in the Netherlands. Private investors called the merchant

adventurers financed the expedition of a small group of Puritan religious

dissidents to establish a colony in northern Virginia - a royally decreed

territory that at the time stretched as far north as present-day New York.

Standish was not a Puritan; he was a soldier and a businessman. He prepared

for the Pilgrims' security before the Mayflower left England. Under the

authority of the British government, the merchant adventurers, and the

colony's civilian leader, Standish served the mission for pay.

He certainly earned his money.

According to the Mayflower log and historical documents compiled by the late

historian Azel Ames, the weaponry aboard the small sailing ship was

significant. The private party even had its own heavy ordnance. At least six

cannons were aboard the Mayflower.

The Mayflower was not a warship; it was a freighter for the wine trade that

seldom sailed out of sight of land. The three-masted vessel was not built

for the open ocean. The guns and shot lay at the keel, providing ballast

along with bars of raw iron for forging into tools, and extra chain and

anchors.

John Carver, the leader of the small religious community of English exiles

in Leiden, Holland, chartered the Mayflower and the services of its crew.

Christopher Jones, a part-owner of the vessel, captained the 12-year-old

ship. Carver hired John Alden, a cooper, and Standish, the military adviser.

Apparently Captain John Smith of Jamestown fame, who had mapped and named

New England a few years before the Pilgrim voyage, had sought a contract.

The Mayflower group bought his maps but not his services. Smith ridiculed

them in his 1630 book "True Travels, Adventures and Observations" for being

too stingy, implying that, had they hired him instead of Standish, they

would have avoided many hardships.

Smith wrote of the colonists who "went to New Plimouth, whose humorous

ignorances caused them for more than a year to endure a wonderfull deale of

misery, with an infinite patience; saying my books and maps were much better

cheap to teach them, than my selfe . . ."

Like Smith at Jamestown, Standish led the recon missions to find a safe

harbor for a settlement, establish relations with the local Indians, build

fortifications, and provide the men with military training and organize them

into a militia.

He earned his keep. Gov. William Bradford would chronicle that as soon as

the Mayflower landed on Cape Cod, Standish and 16 men went on a scouting

expedition, armed with "musket, sword, and corslet."

Half of the colonial expedition - Pilgrims and crew, including Standish's

wife, Rose - died by the end of the first winter in Massachusetts. All the

survivors, with the exception of Standish and a half-dozen others, fell ill.

Bradford recalled the "abundance of toil and hazard of their own health"

that Standish and the hardiest displayed. For the sick, they "fetched them

wood, made them fires, dressed their meat, made their beds, washed their

clothes, clothed and unclothed them."

The next year, in the new village of Plymouth, Standish supervised

construction of a wooden fort at the top of a hill overlooking the harbor

and the inland forests, and he mounted the cannons on its second floor. The

first level served as a "meeting house," a combination town hall,

courthouse, and church. Sometime in 1621, tradition holds that the colonists

and local Wampanoag Indians held the first Thanksgiving feast.

Whether due to good relations with the friendly local Indians or the

deterrent effect of the well-organized militia and relatively well-armed

fort, Plymouth never came under direct enemy attack. But other English

colonial towns would. Standish and his men volunteered to come to their aid

when threatened or attacked, and in at least one case they left the invaders

bloodied and dismembered. Some accounts say Standish led revenge raids and,

in one case, used a medieval form of intimidation - mounting an enemy

Indian's head on a pike - to protect the colonists from further attack.

Such operations earned Standish criticism for being too harsh. But the

colonists held him in high regard. They repeatedly elected him military

captain of Plymouth, and, being accepted by the religious community even

though he never joined their church, he held civilian posts as assistant

governor and treasurer.

He returned to England to renegotiate terms with the merchant adventurers

and sell the colony's debts to other investors. On his return to Plymouth,

he remarried in 1623, raised a family of seven children, and founded the

town of Duxbury, where he died in 1656.

J. Michael Waller, Ph.D., is a vice president of the Center for Security

Policy in Washington, D.C. and the editor in chief of Serviam, where this

article was originally published. Serviam, launched in September, covers

national security and global stability challenges.