ich contains Morton’s detailed chapters on every aspect of New England nature. They include:
1) The General Survey of the Country
2) What Trees Are There & How Commodious
3) What Pot-Herbs Are There & for Salads
4) Of the Birds of the Air & Feathered Fowls
5) Of the Beasts of the Forest
6) Of Stones & Minerals
7) Of the Fishes & What Commodity They Prove
8) Of the Goodness of the Country & the Fountains
9) A Perspective to View the Country By
10) Of the Great Lake of Erocoise
Click below to discover how American Poetry began:
Aboard the Unity under Captain Wollaston, “with 30 servants, and provision of all sorts fit for a plantation,” Thomas Morton sighted New England on June 25 (then, New Year’s Day) 1624. Thanks to local historian H. Hobart Holly, we have many details on how Unity met her mission to resupply small scattered stations, including Roger Conant’s failing one at Naumkeag/Cape Ann (future Salem). Also aboard were a Lt. Fitcher and Mr. Rastall, the latter a shady Bristol merchant with the usual discretion to “improvise” in order to make the voyage pay --- including where to assign the indentured men. (Examples of their contracts, rights, and hopes in Ford’s “Wollaston,” and Mass. Historical Society Proceedings XIV [1875-6], 359-381.)
Between Gorges and Morton, who talked whom into putting Thomas’s skills into the mix? Gorges wanted profit --- Morton too --- but at age 38 Morton still had no home. Gorges needed a landsman qualified to site and (by planting) create, with luck, a sustainable fur-trading post for King James I’s Council for New England. The criteria? High dry ground, fresh water, good soil, and easy access between “up country” Native inlands and the sea.
In their first weeks they fished and took on stores of processed whale or “train” oil. No detail mentions Native contact or fur-trade. Soon, Rastall hired a boat and took some of the young men south, to be sold to Virginia colony --- where, at the time, it was known that “at least half died every year” (Letter of Don Diego de Molina in Tyler ed., Narratives of Early Virginia). For eight more weeks, Morton’s company somehow, somewhere awaited Rastall’s return. But Rastall sent a letter in August instead, demanding that Wollaston bring Unity’s human capital to Jamestown.
Without “vittles” for that voyage, Wollaston gained some at Monhegan Island --- which may suggest that they still lacked much connection to the land. (Morton had been “cloyed” with plentiful lobster “the first day I went ashore,” 87.) Or, Morton and a smaller group might have encamped to scout the land while waiting on Unity. Whale-bones and hill-sized heaps of clam-shells marked Native presences. Beyond question they were being watched. In any case, Unity tried for Virginia through a month of autumn’s “contrary winds,” then turned for home.
Somewhere that summer, Lt. Fitcher, Thomas Morton and his “consociates” disembarked and were set up at “Mount Wollaston,” on the southerly rim of Massachusetts Bay. He first referred to their household as “nine persons, besides dogs.”
Though the harbor at the foot of the “mount’s” rise was shallow for ships, it was protected and serviceable with coastal boats. Fresh brooks and streams bubbled everywhere. The view of the bay showed Brereton’s “white sandy and very bold” island-shores, a little half-moon sand-isle right in front of them (sometimes there, sometimes not); herons and sanderlings, ducks, geese, turkeys and deer plentiful, more than ever. A short walk away was “great store of plain ground without trees” (Wood 57): the Massachusetts’ fields, or what might have remained of their Three Sister gardens, since “plague” had swept away nine of out ten Native people (1616-18).
When adventurers “broke up” on the land, men had “liberty to shift for themselves” until new arrangements. Fitcher, at his duty, must have held to the undesirable hope that next year they’d all be in Virginia. There was no roaring trade here (yet). Morton saw more. As connected with The Council as any man, he easily could have arranged to keep indentured youths here. Had h