In the United States, the "landing of the Pilgrims" is somewhere in between history and myth. To keep things simple, I'm just going to tell the mythic story, the way I learned it in elementary school. (NONE of the details are historically very accurate). The Pilgrims were a group of people who had been persecuted for their religious beliefs. In 1620 the sailed to American in search of religious freedom, on a ship named the "Mayflower." A trip made for a religious purpose can be called a "pilgrimage." In the 1800s people began to refer to them as "the Pilgrim Fathers" or "the Pilgrims." They named their colony "Plimouth Plantation." They first set foot on land on a specific rock that is called "Plymouth Rock." In Plymouth, Massachusetts there is a structure like a little Greek temple surrounding that rock, which has the year 1620 carved on it. The Pilgrims--they don't tell the story this way!--were completely unprepared and didn't know the first thing about agriculture (and picked a bad place for it) and almost did not survive the first terrible winter. Two friendly "Indians" (native Americans) named Squanto and Samoset made contact with them and helped them out. Samoset taught them how to grow "corn" (as we call it; that is, maize) successfully by the Native American method of making little mounds in the soil and burying a small, rotting fish in the mound along with the seeds. That fall, after a good harvest, the Pilgrims invited the Indians to a big Thanksgiving dinner, the "first Thanksgiving," where they all ate turkey and pumpkin pie and cranberry sauce.

The pilgrims were early settlers (early 1600's) who came to what is now the United States to escape persecution for their religious beliefs. The reason fish were buried with seeds is that the fish decayed and provided fertilizer to the plants that grew from the seeds.