I definitely ate too much turkey last week. In an effort to subdivide the classic Thanksgiving meal into only four parts rather than the usual dozen or so, our family consumed a lot of that strange large bird that has become the signature of the day’s feast. Perhaps we would all feel better if we had stuck to the traditional foods that the early settlers would have eaten at this time of year — foods like clams and lobsters.

In a year where people have decided to switch things up a bit, there was an opportunity to do things differently. A friend who is a vegetarian, but whose family usually does a turkey dinner, proposed eating lobster with her nuclear group this year and they were surprisingly open to the variation. Another friend who was celebrating with just her husband and two older children opted for scallops and pesto made by a neighbor from his garden. Our family’s nod to the sea was to have oysters — both as an appetizer and smoked in our stuffing.

The unusually small size of our Thanksgiving feast this year, combined with the discovery that my 11th great grandmother was apparently Mary Chilton, the first woman to set foot off the Mayflower onto Plymouth soil 400 years ago this year, caused our family to ponder our feast a bit more deeply. I wondered what this young girls’ life was like, traveling across the Atlantic Ocean at age 13. And, what her experience of the ocean was both during her trip and once she arrived on the opposite shore.

While most of the voyage was in the summer months, I can’t imagine that the trip was anywhere near smooth given the open stretches of ocean they had to cover. The Mayflower was a schooner designed to carry cargo, not people, and those traveling aboard had to build their own bunks to create a living space during the multi-week journey. None of the accommodations were luxurious or particularly comfortable. In addition, most of the passengers, including Mary, had not experienced life at sea before, which meant many of them didn’t feel so great during the journey.

That aside, it must have been amazing to be entirely surrounded by water — to see the stars above and phosphorescence below, fish thrumming the water, sea birds coasting along the waves, and whales and dolphins accompanying them on their journey. That was the Atlantic Ocean 400 years ago. It is hard to say how different the open seas were then versus now, but the shores where they landed would probably be unrecognizable to us aside from the recreated village of Plymouth. They would have been wild and undeveloped — and the waters along those shores would have been full of life. That provided the settlers an accessible source of food when they first arrived. They likely ate it fresh as well as smoked it and salted it to keep into the winter. Things are a little different these days.

We are fortunate to have fresh seafood available year-round in Maine with the advent of all kinds of technology — including refrigeration. Intrepid fishermen go out in some blustery conditions to haul traps, pull up nets, and dig up clams. Through a series of hoops and checks of many sorts, what they bring in gets sorted, processed, packaged, stored, and made accessible to those of us who like to eat it. Most people who live along the coast haven’t ever caught the types of seafood they eat and may not even know how it was caught and less likely who caught it. This disconnect between people and the food they eat has grown over the centuries. But, there are some laudable efforts being made to re-establish those connections. Our unexpected family connection to the Mayflower provides one more link to the sea and to the heritage of the first Thanksgiving feasts in New England. Maybe next year, we’ll have a lobster bake.

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