e done less, supply would have ended. Still, William Bradford colorfully recounted Morton’s first set of crimes:
“This Morton…having more craft than honesty…in the others’ absence, watches an opportunity; and commons being but hard amongst them, got some strong drink and other junkats, and made them a feast; and after they were merry, he began to tell them, he would give them good counsel. You see, saith he, that many of your fellows are carried to Virginia; and, if you stay until this Rastall return, you will also be carried away and sold for slaves with the rest. Therefore, I would advise you to thrust out this Lt. Fitcher; and I, having a part in the plantation, will receive you as my partners and consociates. So you may be free from service, and we will converse, trade, plant, and live together as equals, and support and protect one another….” (History 2: 47-8)
Morton’s words may have reached Bradford through one of the young men, Edward Gibbon (a man with quite a colonial future between Merrymount, Plimoth and Boston). Lt. Fitcher found his way back to England. And so they were on their own.
Soon Morton had two first encounters --- one with Native America, and one with “Pilgrims” of Plimoth Plantation.
“Reading the Revels” provides the best clues we have about Morton’s first Massachusetts meeting. His “Poem” hints that somewhere along the “bold shore,” possibly near Squa Rock (above), he met a Massachusett woman sitting “solitary on the ground,” “in form of” both “Scilla” and Niobe” --- that is, a mother grieving her children, whom Morton came to identify with plague-stricken America itself. This was in fact a Native funerary custom at burial sites.
Wampanoag Sachem Massasoit orchestrated his 1621 meeting with Plimoth. Neponset Massachusett Sachem Chikatawbak must have been waiting for his “bold” Squa Sachem to bring Thomas Morton’s company to a council, trade, and terms.
They had to bring more than trade if they wanted to plant at Passonagessit, the site of Chikatawbak’s mother’s grave. By these times --- only 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, an