The First Pilgrims Actually Went to Canada

 by Clifton Bertram

October 12, 2026

 Across the Medicine Line: Tales From the 49^th Parallel.

The articles in ‘Across the Medicine Line’ are written in hopes of learning more about how North America came to be. How our peoples lived, ate, drank, travelled, loved, fought and thought during the time between the discovery, founding and solidification of our long partnership and our current society. We believe that learning these stories can further strengthen the many ties that bind our two nations and better understand – or even heal! -- the divisions that still separate us.

  

We’re all familiar with the American story of the first Thanksgiving. We’re told it took place in the autumn of 1621. The Puritan Pilgrims gathered with the Wampanoag First Nation for an autumn feast, celebrating their first harvest after their arrival at Plymouth Rock aboard the Mayflower. It is said they wished to cement their alliance with the local natives by sharing with them the food that the Wampanoag had helped them plant, grow and harvest.

The First Thanksgiving 1621. Oil on canvas, by Jean Leon Gerome (1899). This heavily fictionalized depiction of the feast is typical of the holiday’s mythology today.

But what if I told you that pilgrims arrived in Canada first, even though they didn’t stay?

The Canadian Encyclopedia tells us that the Martin Frobisher and his crew are credited as being the first Europeans to celebrate Thanksgiving in North America in 1578, but the website Indigenous Corporate Training, Inc. takes issue with this claim: “In reality, it was more of a thanks for getting across the Atlantic Ocean alive than it was a thanksgiving for a bountiful harvest.” They make the point in that article that the indigenous peoples had been holding harvest festivals for millennia.

Much later, the first November feast of the Ordre de Bon Temps (1606) took place in Nova Scotia, as part of one of Samuel de Champlain’s earliest expedition. But, we’ll talk about that in its own separate article because we’ll want to look deeper into the astonishing Theatre of Neptune, which staged the first theatrical production in North America, as part of the seasonal festivities. So, we’ll leave that aside for the moment.

In any case, neither of these two early harvest festivals had the traditional connection to the pilgrims that characterizes our current understanding of Thanksgiving. But there is a Puritan voyage to Canada that took place nearly 25 years before the Mayflower anchored off Massachussetts.

The first thing we need to be reminded of is that the Puritans were reformers who rejected the English state region of the day. In their estimation, Anglicanism – with its ceremonies and vestments – was too similar to Catholicism. They advocated for a more austere form of worship, centred heavily on preaching the bible, and felt they had a special covenant with God. An important sect of Puritans were the Brownists, who rejected the mainstream puritan concept that the church could be reformed within, and became separatists, under the leadership of Robert Browne. The Brownists – who made up the majority of the later Mayflower pilgrims – were officially outlawed in 1593, and Browne himself was imprisoned 32 times before falling ill in prison and dying in 1633.

The day after the Seditious Sectaries Act which outlawed their church, two of its leaders, Henry Barrow and John Greenwood were arrested and subsequently executed. In response, a large part of the underground church moved to the Netherlands.

Seditious Separatists! An artist’s depiction of the execution of Henry Barrow and John Greenwood before the North American transport scheme was conceived.

History Today takes up the narrative as follows:

“The more dangerous members, however, including their pastor Francis Johnson, were kept in prison in London. They petitioned the government for release, to no avail, until in March 1597 they came up with a new plan. The imprisoned Brownist leaders proposed to the Privy Council that they should be released into colonial expedition to Canada. The colony would claim fishing and hunting territory for England, the Separatists said, and ‘greatly annoy that bloody and persecuting Spaniard’, ensuring that the Americas did not fall entirely into the hands of the Catholic empire.”

Their arguments to the Privy Council emphasized the benefits to England, but they had their own motives for the expedition. They hoped to establish a colony in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, on the St. Magdalen Islands which lay in between Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island.

Just as did the later Mayflower pilgrims, they wanted to be free to pursue their own religious practices without interference from the state. They were well aware that in so doing, they would be travelling to an austere destination rife with hardship, but it’s clear that – unlike the later Pilgrims – they had no idea just how big a challenge would be ahead of them.

Replica of a Typical Bark of the Era. This replica, named The Half Moon, is representative, being slightly larger than the Chancewell, but smaller than the Hopewell.

In April 1597, four Brownists boarded two vessels bound for Newfoundland on a cod-fishing voyage, with possible privateering opportunities as might present themselves. On board the Hopewell, with a burthen of 120 tons, was Francis Johnson, the surviving leader of the movement. Accompanying him was Daniel Studley, who had been an elder in the congregation of the executed Barrow’. Studley had been sentenced to death, but reprieved and languished in prison until the government assented to the Brownist petition. Francis Johnson’s brother George was embarked on the Chancewell, with a burthen of 70 tons, and was accompanied by a fellow separatist, John Clarke, a farmer from Norfolk who had been in prison since 1590. The latter’s agriculture skills were thought imperative to the goal of establishing a settlement.

The Hopewell, equipped with a pinnace, and the Chancewell with two shallops, left the harbour at Gravesend on the Thames on April 18.

Broad-beamed, bark-rigged vessels with a shallow draft ideal for coastal navigation, they would have been manned by somewhere between 20 and 30 crew.  They would have been equipped with three masts including a mizzen with a fore-and-aft sail. Anywhere from six to 10 four-pounder carriage guns would serve as defence at sea, along with several swivel guns along their rails. 

English Ships vs the Spanish Armada, August 1588

Such capability was mandatory in the late 16^th century. While the so-called ‘Golden Age of Piracy’ would not begin for another 50 years, both piracy and privateering were still already rampant. The first Anglo-Spanish war was ongoing, and the defeat of the Spanish Armada had taken place less than a decade earlier. An English vessel that ventured too far south in an attempt to exploit the trade winds risked encountering a Spanish man-of-war, or worse, the entire Spanish plate fleet.

And while the English and French were nominally allies against the Spanish, points of friction were innumerable. For example, an English expedition in 1597 attempted and failed to oust French and Basque walrus hunters from the Magdalen Islands. Privateers were above all entrepreneurs, so alliances notwithstanding, any ship of any nation would be a tempting prize for a crew so far away from home and beholden only to those laws in force on the high seas.

Even if you could avoid being captured or sunk, the voyages were anything but a pleasure cruise. As many as 2/3 of Atlantic crossing attempts failed, either because of piracy or shipwreck, or being forced to turn back by weather or sickness. Crossings took from 6 to 8 weeks or longer, and cramped quarters, heavy reliance on salt meat, hardtack, and foul-tasting water made scurvy, dysentery, and malnutrition constant hazards.

The two ships were owned by London merchants Charles Leigh and Abraham van Herwick, with Leigh himself being on board the Hopewell as the overall expedition leader and Captain, along with William Crafton as master. Leigh’s partner Abraham was represented by his brother, Stephen Van Herwick, as captain of the Chancewell, with Stephen Bennett as master.

As a quick note, unlike today, captains of that era were not necessarily skilled in navigation or seamanship, but were more often ship owners or their appointees. In contrast, the master was a professional mariner responsible for all aspects of sailing and maneuvering a ship, although when nearing their destination, they would sometime relinquish ship handling to a pilot, an experienced mariner familiar with local coastal waters. But the captain retained absolute authority on board, and their word was law.

Frequently separated by fog, adverse weather and naval action against the French, they arrived at the Grand Banks of Newfoundland on May 18, and rendezvoused at Conception Bay on the west side of the island, on May 20.

On June 5, while coasting Newfoundland’s Cape Race in thick fog, the ships were separated. On June 18th, off Ramea Island on the south coast of Newfoundland, the Hopewell encountered French ships. For reasons unknown, the crew of the ostensibly allied ships began to quarrel, and actual combat broke out, possibly in an argument over fishing grounds. The Hopewell got the worst of the encounter, losing their pnnace and an anchor and cable, and were forced to retire.

From there, the Hopewell, which we are told had an experienced pilot on board, reached the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St Lawrence, albeit without her sister ship. It is said that they found the fishing incredible, and the crew is reported to have caught 250 cod in an hour using only four lines. They also tried walrus hunting, which the Basques had great success with. The English, however, having no experience in such a hazardous task, were forced to flee from the fury of the massive beasts.

Too Dangerous for the English. The Hopewell’s inexperienced crew were too indimidated to continue the walrus hunt, even though the Basque – and the Inuit before them – had been successful for many years.

More problematic than the walrus, however, was the crowded waters around the archipalego. French and Spanish ships crowded the fishing grounds, and hundreds of indigenous had travelled from the mainland to hunt and fish. After clashes with other European vessels, Captain Leigh decided to try the north coast of the Gulf of the St. Lawrence. By this point, however, the crew, had been through enough and refused to go any further, leaving Leigh no choice but to direct his master, William Crafton, to set course for home.

Meanwhile, the Chancewell had veered off course, possibly because they did not have a pilot aboard familiar with local waters. eventually running aground on rocks and becoming holed on the north shore Cape Breton. George Johnson wrote later that “the ship being through the headiness (recklessness?) of the Master in a faire sun-shine day, run upon the Rocks.”

The crew managed to beach her near today’s Aspy Bay on June 23, where they were discovered by Basque fishermen sailing out of the port of Ziburu in the Pyrenees. The Basque had for generations manned a seasonal cod-drying station at Niganiche (today’s Ingonish), a little to the south, and were probably returning from the fishery with a full hold when they encountered the Chancewell.

They promptly plundered the stranded vessel, stripping the English to their shirts. They took the settler provisions belonging to Johnson and Clarke, and left the Chancewell’s crew nothing but their shallops.

Stephen Van Herwick, the Chancewell’s captain, resolved to use the shallops to attempt to take a Spanish ship as a prize. Before doing so, he offered his separatists passengers, George Johnson and his un-named companion a choice: they could stay with the crew and participate in the dangerous attempt to capture a Spanish vessel; they could surrender to a passing French ship, with the risk that they would be forced by the probably Catholic captain to hear mass; or, they could be left ashore ‘to be devoured by the wild’.

Diagram of a Shallop. Captain Van Herwick hoped to use one of his two small shallops to take a Spanish bark as a prize. It would have been a difficult and dangerous undertaking.

We are told that a frightened Johnson was unable to choose and asked Van Herwick to make the choice for them. Fortunately for both Johnson and Van Herwick, the decision was taken from their hands on June 27.

While Van Harwick’s crew rigged the shallops, he and George Johnson were walking on the shore debating the fate the separatists should choose when “suddenly (being quick sighted) he saw a ship far off in the sea, and said I see a shipp.” Van Harwick sent one of the shallops to make contact with the vessel, which turned out to be the Hopewell, just starting on its homeward journey. Six years later, George Johnson wrote about his feelings at that moment: “yea I cannot now write without teares, remembering such a wondrous providence of God even in a strange land”.

Re-united, the now well-manned Hopewell and her crew approached the Basque and rather forcefully negotiated the return of some of their confiscated possessions. Next, they seized a Breton French fishing vessel, laden with fish and oil, in order that they could return home with as many ships as they had left with.

As for the separatists, the trials they had experienced convinced them that Canada would not be an easy place to settle, especially with only four potential colonists. Upon their return to London, they then moved on to Amsterdam to join the others of their faith and reassemble their congregation.

George Johnson would return to London where would die in prison in 1605, Daniel Studley would die in 1612 and John Clarke would fade from history. But Francis Johnson would lead the reformed church in Holland until his death in 1618. Of Francis Johnson, the Dictionary of Canadian Biography says:

“He is not known, personally, to have revived the plan of moving to America. But William Bradford, the founding father of Plymouth colony, regarded the pilgrims of 1597 as the precursors of the pilgrims of 1620. In his “Dialogue” (written about 1648, and given in A. Young, Chronicles of the pilgrim fathers (2d ed., Boston, 1844), 440–1), he says of the Brownists – ”the truth is, their condition for the most part was for some time very low and hard. It was with them as, if it should be related, would hardly be believed. And no marvel. For many of them had lain long in prisons, and then were banished into Newfoundland, where they were abused, and at last came into the Low Countries, and wanting money, trades, friends or acquaintances, and languages to help themselves, how could it be otherwise.”

The entry concludes by saying that the Newfoundland expedition was a false step on the road to Plymouth.

We, on the other hand, will conclude by saying that it is only through the random chance of history that we celebrate Thanksgiving with a turkey, rather than a lobster boil!

 

 

Across the Medicine Line: Tales From the 49^th Parallel.

The articles in ‘Across the Medicine Line’ are written in hopes of learning more about how North America came to be. How our peoples lived, ate, drank, travelled, loved, fought and thought during the time between the discovery, founding and solidification of our long partnership and our current society. We believe that learning these stories can further strengthen the many ties that bind our two nations and better understand – or even heal! -- the divisions that still separate us.