 period of Thomas Morton’s life. They left him to die on a naked rock on the ocean called The Isles of Shoals off New Hampshire, and he was back “not so much as rebuked” (Bradford) by Fall 1629. But change had already come. John Endecott, with advance-men of the Massachusetts Bay Company, had chopped down the Maypole at Merrymount, demanding “better walking.” Plimoth sent a boat to Maine and arrested one Edward Ashley, another “notorious irregular trader” whose beaver-trade paid Bristol, not Plimothers’ debts.
Listen below to Canaan’s Book III, Ch. 21, on Morton’s 1629 resistance to John Endecott of Salem’s plan --- that all trade and living be “according to the Word of God.”
Tiny clues suggest that Morton shared out his mock-epic “Bacchanall Triumph” at this time, on his voyage through The Underworld at Plimoth. That winter 1629, as Merrymount kept Christmas, Endecott’s ice-caked boat arrived from Salem. “Captain Littleworth” had traded away their corn for a boon of beaver. His men took all they could of Merrymount’s supplies. After all, Morton was not of The Congregation.
Morton, a few original fellows, lone planters and/or Massachusett friends, watched from the hills in June 1630 as the Arbella and other ships arrived at future Boston (the original “Boston Neck” with its marshes and hills above). Aboard were their governor John Winthrop, a future poet in young Anne Bradstreet, and about 700 Puritan families with a charter acquired from King Charles I. Winthrop’s “Reasons” (Papers 2: 141) had already decided that Native Americans could have no rights in land because, supposedly, they did nothing to “improve” it --- for Winthrop, nothing to increase its profits by development according to the ways of people with cattle.
A mile from plenitude at Merrymount, sickness and hunger afflicted Boston through Autumn. More planters than Morton told of these new Puritans’ refusals of help, advice, fresh water and game from outsiders not acceptable under their ideas of religion. One planter recorded another as saying they had “as good live in Turkey” as under these newcomers.
Listen below to Canaan Book III, Ch. 23, on Morton’s 1630 arrest and exile:
Thomas Morton, “summoned” on August 23, was the first defendant before the Massachusetts Bay Court, on September 7, 1630. (Record in Shurtleff 1: 74). The “city on a hill” held no trial. There was “no color of law whatsoever” (Zuckerman’s phrase), with even a fake murder-warrant that never saw legal light of day. Boston simply ordered the burning of Merrymount before Morton’s eyes; then (December) hoisted him by cow-harness onto a ship whose voyage almost killed him.
The Merrymount threat was its success by Fair Means. The Puritans’ first business was to end those first Transatlantic experiments. Negotiation and compromise were “new creed” sins against The Lord. A new phase of experiment in how to live in America was in their hands.
Massachusetts Bay Company ordered “all males” to be “exercised in arms.” Native people were forbidden at plantations except at assigned times, and a “stiff directive” promised “severe” punishment for gun-trade --- soon carried out when one “Hopkins of Watertown” was “branded in the face” for trading “a piece and pistol” to the friendly Sagamore James, of Saugus (Vaughan Frontier 94-5). Within a year, anyone with Native “servants” was to discharge them, and to forbid Native people in their houses without permission from the Court (Shurtleff Records 1: 83).
“We have great Ordnance,” wrote Rev. Frances Higginson (in Force 3). “But…our greatest comfort is, we have plenty of Preaching, and diligent Catechizing, with strict and careful exercise…to bring our people into a Christian conversation with [those] whom we have to do withal….If God be with us, who can be against us?”
Another ominous development was also preposterous.
Myles Standish and John Endecott were poised to become the “Injun Expert” officers training the next generation of colonists. They were ready to confirm and prosper by every ignorant assumption --- their own, and those of the people they kept