On Nov. 11, 1620, a small wooden ship dropped anchor in Providence Harbor, just off the tip of the long, hooking spit of land known today as Cape Cod. The crew and passengers aboard the 100-foot vessel had just completed a brutal two-month crossing of the Atlantic in the face of gales and towering swells, and it is hard to imagine the sense of relief they must have felt upon entering the relatively protected waters of the bay.

They spent the next month exploring the coast, and then sailed their tiny ship across Cape Cod Bay. They anchored about a mile offshore — the closest the shallow water would allow — and began constructing a settlement they would call Plymouth Plantation. They felled trees and built crude houses on a hill near a small brook.

By spring, 52 of the 102 settlers were dead.

More than four centuries after it began, the European settlement and conquest of North America has a sense of inevitability about it. Human beings had called the continent home for more than 10,000 years, but within a few centuries after the first Europeans arrived, the entire rich tapestry of indigenous life and culture had been swept away.

So it is easy to forget how tenuous those first European settlements were, how vulnerable they were to bad luck, bad judgment, bad weather and bad or inadequate food and water.

Today's holiday offers a chance to reflect on that frequently overlooked aspect of history.

At Plymouth Plantation in the heart of that terrible first winter, deaths came at the rate of two or three a day. Malnutrition, disease and brutal weather carried off husbands, wives, children, entire families. All this suffering and loss must have been compounded by a crushing sense of loneliness and isolation, for the inhabitants of the tiny colony were 3,000 miles from everything familiar.

Their ordeal played out against a grim backdrop: The open land that had attracted them to the Plymouth location, enabling them to plant crops without first having to hack down the dense forest that crowded to the water's edge elsewhere in New England, had been cleared for cornfields by native Americans, but there were no aboriginal inhabitants to be found. Instead, the ground was littered with their skeletal remains.

"Their skulls and bones were found in many places lying still above the ground," wrote William Bradford, who would later become governor of the colony. It was, he said, "a very sad spectacle to behold."

As many as 2,000 natives had occupied villages on the shore of Plymouth Harbor until just a few years before the Mayflower's arrival. But between 1616 and 1619, an epidemic — likely plague, one of many terrible imports from the Old World to the New — swept through the native population, obliterating it.

So this is how one of the earliest European settlements in America begins: not with a sense of triumph over religious intolerance and political repression, but in the shadow of terror and death and desperation.

But after winter, there was spring and a productive summer, and in autumn a bountiful harvest. Enormous flocks of geese, ducks and other migratory fowl descended upon the marshes, and spawning fish crowded the bay and the area's streams. The tiny, fragile colony held a harvest festival, probably in September or October, no doubt modeled after those common since the Middle Ages in European villages.

One distinction: The 50 surviving colonists were outnumbered more than 2 to 1 by their guests, members of the Pokanoket tribe, with whom the colony had established a prickly political and military alliance. So, what became known in the 19th century as the "First Thanksgiving" (a label whose accuracy is disputed) probably was nothing like the stiffly formal gathering depicted by greeting cards and storybook illustrations. More likely, it resembled a powwow — a type of social gathering common to many North American tribes, in which members of scattered groups come together for several days of dancing, music, feasting, trading and storytelling.

There is much to condemn and regret about what happened in the centuries after the first Plymouth harvest festival. And it may, indeed, have been inevitable that populous, well-armed Europe would eventually depopulate and subdue North America.

But in 1621, all that was far in the future. Long before the trickle of colonists became a flood, the thin edge of European expansion consisted of a handful of frightened, shivering men, women and children, pinned between the wide sea and the dark woods.

— John Krist is a senior reporter and Opinion page columnist for The Star. To read previous columns, visit www.johnkrist.com. His e-mail address is jkrist@VenturaCountyStar.com.