Friday, November 10, 2006

Would there even be a Thanksgiving with out beer?

A Weird News B.N.I. Please don’t steal this Report
On American History

We all know that the pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock in the winter of 1620 but the question that many have asked is why? They were going to have landed in Virginia Colony much earlier in the year.
The answer to why they ended up in America so late in the year has always been easy to answer. The Pilgrims for all their “Holier then Thou” ways were not a patience group. See they were planning to take two ships with them, the Mayflower and the Speedwell. So they started out in both boats from England in August. (Not that August is a great month to leave either, but at least they would have had a few weeks to built houses before it stated snowing.) Anyway the Speedwell started leaking and they couldn’t fix it, so they decided, “Let’s all cram into the Mayflower and keep going, we should get to America in time to not celebrate Christmas” By this time it was September. And the time of some of the stormiest weather in the Mid-Atlantic. So the only logical thing to do would be to winter over in England and start again next year, maybe in May or June when you could get to America in time to prepare for winter. But the impatience Pilgrims sailed on. The answer to why they ended up in icy cold New England instead of nice, warmer, inhabited by the English Virginia has long been a question of Historians. Historically many felt that the pilgrims were blown off course and didn’t know that they weren’t in Virginia. Newer thought has been that they ended up out the jurisdictions of their patent in order to be outside of the English law that they so hated. That it was done on purpose in order to create their own government. But in either case the real reason that they build houses there for the winter was that they were running out of beer. Back then beer was often the drink of choose being safer to drink then water in many places. And on ships special “ship’s beer” was used as it was able to make the long trip across the ocean safely, but was not of a high enough proof that everyone was drunk all the time. So after spotting land, knowing that they were running low they quickly scouted out a couple locations and picked where they would winter over. As to why after spending a winter there and having half of their people die they stayed, well once again one answer might be beer, or lead poisoning, maybe plan insanity it’s hard to tell.

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