The New English Canaan of Thomas Morton with Introductory Matter and Notes. Thomas MortonЧитать онлайн книгу.
a-doors, and would suffer him to come no more amongst them; but forced him to seek bread to eat, and other relief, from his neighbors, till he could get passage for England.”[27]
Wollaston’s process of depletion to Virginia had reduced the number of servants at Passonagessit from thirty or thirty-five, as Morton variously states it,[28] to six at most.[29] It was as the head of these that Morton established himself in control at Merry-Mount, as he called the place,[30] sometime, it would seem, in the summer of 1626. He had now two distinct objects in view: one was enjoyment, the other was profit; and apparently he was quite reckless as to the methods he pursued in securing either the one or the other. If he was troubled by his former partners appearing to assert their rights, as he probably was, no mention is made of it. There were no courts to appeal to in America, and those of Europe were far away; nor would it have been easy or inexpensive to enforce their process in New England. Accordingly nothing more is heard of Wollaston or Rasdall, though Bradford does say that Morton was “vehemently suspected for the murder of a man that had adventured moneys with him when he first came.”[31] There is a vague tradition, referred to John Adams, that Wollaston was subsequently lost at sea;[32] but as a full century must have elapsed between the occurrence of the event and the birth of John Adams, this tradition is quite as unreliable as traditions usually are.
Passionately fond of field sports, Morton found ample opportunity for the indulgence of his tastes in New England. He loved to ramble through the woods with his dog and gun, or sail in his boat on the bay. The Indians, too, were his allies, and naturally enough; for not only did he offer them an open and easy-going market for their furs, but he was companionable with them. They shared in his revels. He denies that he was in the habit of selling them spirits,[33] but where spirits were as freely used as Morton’s account shows they were at Merry-Mount, the Indians undoubtedly had their share. Nor were his relations confined to the Indian men. The period of Elizabeth and James I. was one of probably as much sexual incontinency as any in English history. Some of the earlier writers on the New England Indians have spoken of the modesty of the women—Wood, in his Prospect, for instance, and Josselyn, in the second of his Two Voyages.[34] Morton, however, is significantly silent on this point, and the idea of female chastity in the Indian mind, in the rare cases where it existed at all, seems to have been of the vaguest possible description.[35] Morton was not a man likely to be fastidious, and his reference to the “lasses in beaver coats”[36] is suggestive. Merry-Mount was unquestionably, so far as temperance and morality were concerned, by no means a commendable place.[37]
Morton’s inclination to boisterous revelry culminated at last in that proceeding which scandalized the Plymouth elders and has passed into history. In the spring of 1627 he erected the May-pole of Merry-Mount. To erect these poles seems at that time to have been a regular English observance, which even the fishermen on the coast did not neglect. When, for instance, the forerunners of Weston’s colony at Wessagusset reached the Damariscove Islands, in the spring of 1622, the first thing they saw was a May-pole, which the men belonging to the ships there had newly set up, “and weare very mery.”[38] There is no room for question that in England, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, May-day festivities were associated with a great deal of license. They were so associated in the minds of Governor Bradford and his fellows. Christmas was at least a Christian festivity. Not so May-day. That was distinctly Pagan in its origin. It represented all there was left of the Saturnalia and the worship of the Roman courtesan. May-day and May-day festivities, accordingly, were things to be altogether reformed. They were by no means the innocent, grateful welcoming of spring which modern admirers of the so-called good old times—which, in point of fact, were very gross and brutal times—are wont to picture to themselves. “I have heard it credibly reported,” wrote Stubbes in his Anatomy of Abuses, “(and that viva voce) by men of great gravitie, credite and reputation, that of fourtie, three score, or a hundred maides goyng to the woode over night [a-Maying], there have scarcely the thirde parte of them returned home againe undefiled.”[39] All this it is necessary to now bear in mind, lest what Bradford wrote down in his history of Morton’s doings should seem grotesque. He was speaking of what represented in his memory a period of uncleanness, a sort of carnival of the sexes.
Morton’s own account of the festivities at Merry-Mount on the May-day of 1627, which came on what would now be the 11th of the month, will be found in the fourteenth chapter of the third book of the Canaan.[40] It does not need to be repeated here. Bradford’s account was very different:
“They allso set up a May-pole, drinking and dancing aboute it many days togeather, inviting the Indean women, for their consorts, dancing and frisking togither, (like so many fairies, or furies rather,) and worse practises. As if they had anew revived and celebrated the feasts of the Roman Goddes Flora, or the beasly practieses of the madd Bacchinalians. Morton likwise (to shew his poetrie,) composed sundry rimes and verses, some tending to lasciviousnes, and others to the detraction and scandall of some persons, which he affixed to this idle or idoll May-polle.”[41]
Morton’s verses can be found in their proper place in the New Canaan, but the principal charge now to be made against them is their incomprehensibility. Judged even by the standard of the present day, much more by that of the day when they were written, they are not open to criticism because of their “lasciviousnes.” They are decent enough, though very bad and very dull. As to the “detraction and scandall of some persons,” alleged against them—if indeed they contained anything of the sort—it was so very carefully concealed that no one could easily have understood it then, and Morton’s own efforts at explanation fail to make it intelligible now.
The festivities around the May-pole were, however, but Morton’s amusements. Had he confined himself to these he might, so far as the people at Plymouth at least were concerned, to the end of his life have lived on the shores of Boston Bay, and erected a new pole with each recurring spring. The only resistance he would have had to overcome would have been a remonstrance now and then, hardly less comical than it was earnest. The business methods he pursued were a more serious matter. He had come to New England to make money, as well as to enjoy the license of a frontier life. He was fully alive to the profits of the peltry trade, and in carrying on that trade he was restrained by no scruples. The furs of course came from the interior, brought by Indians. In his dealings with the Indians Morton adopted a policy natural enough for one of his reckless nature, but which imperilled the existence of every European on the coast. The two things the savages most coveted were spirits and guns—fire-water and fire-arms. Beads and knives and hatchets and colored cloth served very well to truck with at first. But these very soon lost their attraction. Guns and rum never did. For these the Indians would at any time give whatever they possessed. The trade in fire-arms had already attained some proportions when, in 1622, it was strictly forbidden by a proclamation of King James, issued at the instance of the Council for New England. The companion trade in spirits, less dangerous to the whites but more destructive to the savages, was looked upon as scandalous, but it was not prohibited. Morton cared equally little for either law or morals. He had come to New England for furs, and he meant to get them.
“Hearing what gain the French and fishermen made by trading of pieces, powder and shot to the Indians, he, as the head of this consortship, began the practice of the same in these parts. And first he taught them how to use them, to charge and discharge, and what proportion of powder to give the piece, according to the size and bigness of the same; and what shot to use for fowl and what for deer. And having thus instructed them, he employed some of them to hunt and fowl for him, so as they became far more active in that employment than any of the English, by reason of their swiftness of foot and nimbleness of body; being also quick sighted, and by continual exercise well knowing the haunts of all sorts of game. So as when they saw the execution that a piece would do, and the benefit that might come by the same, they became mad, as it were, after them, and would not stick to give any price they could attain to for them; accounting their bows and arrows but bawbles in comparison of them.”[42]
This was Bradford’s story, nor does Morton deny it. That he would have denied it if he could is apparent. The practices complained of were forbidden by a royal proclamation, issued at the instance of Sir Ferdinando Gorges. In his speech in defence of the great patent, before the House of Commons in Committee of the Whole, in 1621, Gorges had emphatically dwelt on the sale of