Journal

The first Thanksgiving celebration by Euro-peoples in North America was not in New England but in Newfoundland by Martin Frobisher, 42 years before the Pilgrims.

Frobisher's Thanksgiving was not for harvest but homecoming. He had safely returned from a search for the Northwest Passage, avoiding the later fate of Henry Hudson and Sir John Franklin.

Given the fierceness of Arctic winter and the tragedy of these other expeditions, we can understand why he was grateful to come out alive. But why a special thanksgiving?

Frobisher sailed under Elizabeth I, whose reign was marked by gratitude from beginning to end. For her first 20 years she held public thanksgiving simply for having lived to ascend the throne -- having escaped the fate of her mother, Anne Boleyn, at the hand of her sister, "Bloody Mary," in the previous reign.

Ten years after Frobisher's return, England gave thanks for delivery from the Spanish Armada. And in her last speech to Parliament the great Queen began "We perceive your coming is to offer thanks ..." and went on to return those thanks to her subjects.

It was in this spirit of thanksgiving --for being alive, protected, and appreciated -- that the English language and culture flowered in the works of Shakespeare, Spencer and Ben Johnson. England was very different then -- it was known as "Merrie Englande: its grown men laughed, cried, danced and loved exuberantly -- like their Sovereign." This was the context of Frobisher's 1578 Thanksgiving in Newfoundland.

We don't know much of that tradition in Canada. That's because most of Canada that was colonized then was under French rule -- except for Newfoundland, which had been discovered in the name of Elizabeth's grandfather, Henry VII.

The Thanksgiving we know began on a different rock under a different sovereign and in a different spirit. The Puritans were refugees from Elizabeth's successor, James. He and son Charles's insistence on the divine right of kings brought England to revolution and civil war a century before the American Revolution and two centuries before the U.S. Civil War. From Puritan rule in Britain came the unemotional Englishman with the "stiff upper lip."

Thirty years before they banned Christmas carols, feasting and dancing in Britain, the Puritans established a stern upright rule in New England. Having fled from persecution themselves, they persecuted others who believed differently. With the exception of Rhode Island, the New England colonies were driven by a sense of self-righteousness that grew from the grievances their leaders felt they had suffered in their homeland.

This eventually fired the American Revolution. Two-thirds of the Declaration of Independence is a list of grievances. Later this spirit pitted Americans against each other in the Civil War. It was this sense of rightness and others being wrong as much as slavery that led to the split in America as it had in England earlier.

Canada has followed a different tradition. Through the paternalism of the French regime and the British rule that followed it, Canadians have been seen as more colonized and less democratic than our southern neighbour. Yet that became an umbrella for pluralism.

Peace, Order and Good Government is a framework where native and immigrant, Catholic and Protestant, French and English could live side by side. To have adopted Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness here would have set our peoples at each other's throats.

This co-existence was possible in a spirit of gratitude: to God, the Queen and the benefits believed to flow from both. Gratitude is the foundation of society and ultimately of life on Earth. Frobisher's 1578 service of Thanksgiving is a milepost on a planetary journey to wholeness.

The difference between Elizabethan gratitude and Puritan grievance can be seen in the symbols of the societies that grew from them. In the north a beaver chews the branch of a fallen tree. To the south, an eagle carries a different load and message in each of its talons: in the one an olive branch, in the other a bundle of arrows.

Our lack of this ambivalence in Canada is something we have to be thankful for.