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| Landing of the Pilgrims by Michele Felice Cornè, circa 1805 (displayed at the White House) |
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The video posted below is from a religious celebration of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee (60 years on the throne) on June 5, 2012.* I'm posting it on November 9, because it was on this day in 1620 that the passengers on the Mayflower sang this song (probably to the same tune, since this one—Old 100th—was straight out of 16th century Geneva) to thank God for sighting land. They'd been at sea for over two months. The land was Cape Cod. They'd intended to go farther south, but they still insisted upon calling it Virginia.
At first they tried to turn to their intended destination (somewhere near the mouth of the Hudson), but couldn't because of shoals. And so by November 12 they were anchored in what is now Provincetown Harbor.
*I've always thought that this would be the hardest part of being a monarch. Everybody wanted to celebrate the anniversary of her accession on February 5, but perhaps what the Queen remembered most about it is that that was the day her father died while she was thousands of miles away from him in Kenya, and she wasn't even told about it until hours after it happened.
