ted value of 1000 English pounds. That was the kind of commerce for which Bristol contraband reached out. It helped the Mount Wollaston men to “sail inside” thick competition, bypassing fishermen, the planters of Piscataqua (who were “threatening” to pursue a land-patent, in Bradford’s History 1: 449); and Plimoth, for all its travail of six long years.
Just as “all planters” were beginning to taste “the sweetness of the country” (Bradford Letters 36), Plimothers reached the Kennebec River in Maine, where Winslow took their first surplus corn to trade with Abenakis, to “good success.” At the same time (Bradford 2: 49), “all the scum of the country” were gathering at Mount Wollaston. By no means could Plimoth allow a new rival to interfere with their sole profitable enterprise (Willison 229). Morton’s deeds and plans “bred a kind of heart-burning” in his neighbors (Canaan 155), and they were bound to act.
From the Inns of Court, Morton brought the skill to “make emblems” that wove together different realities into a language with effect. He went “the surest way to work first” and wove together people’s desires for every kind of human intercourse, for which by tradition a Maypole stood. The Inns had also taught him the immense bonding value of “solemn foolery,” from dance and performance to public oratory, and these too were values in common with Native traditions (see Bragdon, “’Emphaticall Speech’”). Not surprisingly, young men with Morton hoped for wives, but no one wanted to “ship home” for one. Here, then, came the largest open Native-English intermarriage on any credible early record. Spain’s hildagos were doing it for Native land rights, French men often took Native wives: it became much rarer for the English.
Well, the grandest, most infamous new start in early New England was on.
“As if this jollity would have lasted ever,” Bradford croaked.
We recognize every element of this multicultural event. Indeed, Morton was here “like the others,” to colonize. But his “moderate” means meant a world of difference. He gave Native people one free item, salt, to encourage food-preservation and “settling down” --- because that was the least disruptive way for Englishmen to recognize their presences. Morton let readers think he saw “the Lord’s Angel” in New England’s epidemics, but he laced this with irony and pointed The Bible at England. He said Native people had “no religion,” but showed how it was everywhere in their world.
Morton said one race “must rule, or no quietness”; but which race really held the power, he revealed as uncertain. And, Morton was laying out America in his day book in terms of commodities---Book II of Canaan. These kinds of imperial assumptions stripped more than fur-bearing animals from the landscape. Morton’s hand was turned to it. But the entire work he also packed with unmatched feeling for nature, and a demand for “respect”: he flanked it with Native America’s laudable substance (Book I), and then with a How Not To Colonize manual (Book III), whose round comedies are represented here by the tale of “Master Bubble,” below. It stands among the country’s first multicultural short stories. He was trying to educate a juggernaut.
Minimize Canaan’s impact. Deconstruct Morton’s motives. Even when the long Pious-Imperial Period of American History and Literature quarantined both, they had their effects. Hawthorne, William Carlos Williams and later rogue historians and naturalists deployed the man and his work in defense of the continent and its humanity. See Still Here and Revels At Merrymount Today for more.
So what did the new-christened Ma-Re Mount, or Merrymount have to say? First, a solemn, half-intelligible manifesto: a “Poem” proclaiming through a “love story” that the future America needed a day, every year, to remember what was sacred --- by coming to terms with terrible events, by confronting death and choosing life. The Revels are the “medicine” offered from Ma-Re Mount. Then the drinking- “Song”, whose first word in each simple verse spelled out Morton’s formula: Make/Nectar/Give/Give. Sung “wit