nly a year since the same Massachusetts had fought and died against Englishmen in March, 1623 --- they had to bring advantage.
Morton knew his several guns, their powers and limitations. He was no “Martialist” or man of war, so he had to listen to the Massachusetts, and think on his feet again. Guns, as these Time Lines show, had been spreading into New England. The Massachusett Pecksuot had asked for them a year ago. Of “middle” means, Morton never could have financed firearms for fur-trade by himself. Colonial papers published by Pennington (186) showed high-level endorsement of making Native people “factors” in trade partly by giving them guns --- if guns helped to bring in the profits, or assisted the “conquest” of hostile tribes. Bristol never could say No.
In the eyes of Chikatawbak’s villages, sore with loss and grievances, guns meant shows of force amongst their cousin Narragansetts and Nipmucs. Rhetoric aside, no record marks a single injury. Chikatawbak’s Neponsets took advantage of a well-connected straggler’s company to hold onto Nittauke: “My land.” Morton, completely vulnerable in their midst, somehow gained the confidence to comply.
Its basis had to be genuine shared time and some common values --- reflected in Canaan’s Book I. He blamed England for “plague,” and likened the abandoned villages he saw full of skulls and bones to “Golgotha,” the place where Christ was crucified. He got to know their words, their families and ways with their children; saw their reverence for elders, their “perfection in the use of the senses”; ate and slept in their homes, watched duels and funerals, understood their management of the land, some of their religion and pastimes, their trails and their cousins --- their “philosophical life.” Summing up Book I, Morton found that ideally at least, both English and Native Americans aspired to “Plato’s Commonwealth.” His own Devon ways of hospitality and code of “quietness” proved serviceable. It remained to see what more fair means could do.
“He that played Proteus best, and could comply with her humor, must be the man that would carry her” (140).
Listen below to Morton on the “Subtlety” of Massachusett Sachem Chikatawbak, in New English Canaan Book I, Chapter XIV ---
“While our houses were building,” Morton’s second first encounter (likely in 1625) was on a visit to Plimoth Plantation, where he found and praised much “industry” by William Bradford, Edward Winslow, Myles Standish, Isaac Allerton and others of the mixed “Saints and Strangers.” He must have seen the Native head(s) atop Plimoth’s fort, for he wrote a Book III chapter on the “Massacre” at Weymouth too, criticizing that and treatment of Weymouth investor Thomas Weston. Come over “in disguise” to see “how things were,” Weston was shipwrecked, stripped to his shirt by Merrimack Natives, and reached Plimoth with “things boiling in his mind.”
Here, where Morton’s and Plimoth’s (Time Line 3) stories join, Weston was helped out of town. But Morton, though served “fresh butter and a salad of eggs in dainty wise” there, made few friends among his fellow but “Separatist” countrymen. He considered their fort and watch-house “needless.” Its effects on trade had made them “Princes of Limbo.” Did he then outwit a Plimoth plot to strand him on an island, using a feast and “claret sparkling neat” to win back fellows tempted by Plimoth’s pious order? Before long the “notorious gun-runner” answered back:
“And this, as an article of the new creed of Canaan, would they have received of every newcomer there to inhabit; that the Salvages are a dangerous people, subtle, secret and mischievous, and that it is dangerous to live separated, but rather together, and so be under their lee; that none might trade for Beaver but at their pleasure….Nay, they will not be reduced to any other song yet of the Salvages to the southward of Plimoth, because they would have none come there….
“But I have found the Massachusetts Indians more full of humanity than the Christians….The more Salvages, the better quarter: the more Christians, the worser quarter, I 