asque stage with “Proteus” in the greatest of shows for Elizabeth in 1594---Gesta Grayorum. See “Reading the Revels” for a look at how much Morton learned there.
Without land of his own, Thomas took up horseback-lawyering between West Country circuit-courts and London. One brief later record mentions “Axbridge” as some kind of refuge. Morton was angered by the sufferings of displaced countrymen who filled new tent-cities, “furnished” prisons and gallows, and learned himself that “Hell is in Westminster under the Exchequer Office.”
Merchants of the West Country ports like Bristol ran a “permissive frontier” (Canny), and kept shipping transatlantic guns into Puritan times. Gosnold (another Inns man) marked a year in New England by 1603. Sir Ferdinando Gorges, governor of nearby Plymouth, was learning to seek out “landsmen” to take his business into America in some lasting way, as Morton reached his late thirties.
The rise of the middle-class foreign investor connected Morton’s abilities to American enterprises. Late in life he had the skills to be arguing for Gorges in England’s high courts: evidently early-on he proved himself. By these years he had one eye on an interest recorded, with his name, in a later history of patent-affairs that also lists Gorges’ and Plimoth’s (Gardener 1660). He had also taken up with a widow, Alice Miller, whose home lay between the West and London. After June 1623, when Morton’s chances for a family life were ruined by household conflict with her Puritan stepson, he looked seriously toward America.
What I had resolved on, I have really performed; and I have endeavored...to be the means to communicate the knowledge which I have gathered...unto my Countrymen; to the end that they may the better perceive their error who cannot imagine that there is any country in the universal world that may be compared unto our native soil….
Middle Years, 1624-1630
Listen below to Thomas Morton’s words on the beauty he found in New England:
Click to read the full text of New English Canaan, Book II ,
which 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 Tyle