Death of a Turkey Legend
William Strickland died on 8 December 1598. He was said to have introduced the turkey to England, but the truth followed him to his grave.
The earliest representation of the turkey in Europe is ‘a turkey-cock in his pride proper’, requested by the Yorkshireman William Strickland when he applied for his family’s coat of arms in 1550. Can it be true, as tradition has it, that it was he who introduced the bird to England?
Strickland was the son of a sea captain from Marske in the North Riding and he is said to have sailed himself as a captain with Sebastian Cabot and brought the turkeys home. Strickland’s date of birth is unknown, but he died on 8 December 1598 at an advanced age. The only possible Cabot voyage, then, is that of 1526 to La Plata.
But that fleet sailed from Sanlúcar de Barrameda, near Cádiz. How and why might Strickland, in later years deeply Puritan, have ended up in Spain? He certainly wasn’t a captain: aside from Cabot himself, all those roles were taken by Spaniards. And while the Spanish only made up around half of the fleet’s crew, and a handful of Englishmen were on board, Strickland’s name doesn’t appear in any surviving list.
It was in the 1520s, however, that the first turkeys appeared in Europe after the fall of the Aztec Empire. What else could Strickland’s connection be? A puzzle to ponder, perhaps, over a Christmas meal.
