Did you know that thanksgiving is the celebration of English colonists arriving in America? These English colonists also referred to as pilgrims, settled in northern America. More specifically mount Plymouth, now present-day Massachusetts. When the pilgrims landed on mount Plymouth in 1620, after a few years of getting settled as a stable colony, they celebrated by having a three-day long feast where people ate and ate to the point their stomachs exploded! But this celebration was not until tuberculosis got on board the mayflower, being one of the most feared and potent diseases of the time less than half of the people on board either starved to death or died to an illness, over the long sixty-six-day travel over the Atlantic Ocean. You would think dehydration would be a problem for the sailors of the mayflower, yes? Well, to a degree it was, after most of the way through the journey the sailors had to start relying on beer to keep them hydrated, this was because rumor had spread that their main drinking water resin was contaminated. This resulted in the adults and children drinking beer. One of many reasons why they had left Great Britain is they did not have religious freedom, but when they got to America, they had not only able to study their own religion but also pay less tariffs to the avaricious power of Britain. In the end the pilgrims sailed over the Atlantic Ocean, survived a plague, and got religious freedom in a new world.

Sources: www.history.com, www.hustonmaritime.org, www.plimoth.org