How’s the Lowcountry connected to the “first” Thanksgiving?

BEAUFORT — The story of the first Thanksgiving in North America nearly perfectly embodies the truism that history is written by the victors.

Representations of the “first” Thanksgiving are rife with English pilgrims and Native Americans celebrating a bountiful harvest in Plymouth, Mass., in the fall of 1621. That’s all true enough.

But according to historical records, the French may have celebrated a Thanksgiving some 57 years earlier and 1,000 miles south of New England. And while that took place in somewhere along the St. John’s River near present-day Jacksonville, Fla., there is a direct line between events on Beaufort County’s Parris Island and that celebration.

In the middle of the 16th century, the seemingly endless resources of the New World were up for grabs among the powerful w