THOMAS MORTON CAME TO New England in the mid-1620s, founded an outpost he called Ma-re Mount (or Merry Mount), raised a maypole, and made merry with the Natives. After accusing him of selling guns to the Indians, the Pilgrims shipped Morton back to England, and the Massachusetts Bay colonists—who began arriving in 1628—chopped down his maypole and burned his house.
A maypole. A trade war. Dancing and poetry. Guns and Indians. Thomas Morton has provided generations of novelists, poets, and historians with an irresistible counterpoint to the puritans who usually dominate narratives of seventeenth-century New England. In his short story “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” Nathaniel Hawthorne narrates a struggle between “jollity and gloom,” and gloom scores a decisive win when Morton’s maypole crashes to the ground. William Carlos Williams later praised Morton as a “New World pioneer taking his chances in the wilderness.” Long after puritans had lost control of New England’s churches and governments, it became easy to see Thomas Morton as an early embodiment of America’s future, a man whose free-spirited mirth was crushed by petty puritan despots who would go on to execute Quakers and alleged witches.1
Both Thomas Morton and his Pilgrim opponents sought liberty, but of very different sorts. Morton wanted to live where he pleased, trade where he pleased, sell what he pleased, and party as he pleased. Pilgrim leaders understood Morton’s liberty as licentiousness and recklessness, a threat to their colony’s economic viability and ultimately to their cherished Christian liberty. In the rise and fall of Merry Mount emerged two very different visions for the colonization of New England.
The place and date of Thomas Morton’s birth remain unknown, though several scholars have suggested he hailed from Devon. He described himself simply as a “gentleman” and the “son of a soldier.”2 Morton was proud to be of Clifford’s Inn, one of the Inns of Chancery, schools at which young men prepared to become lawyers and made the social connections that might make their fortunes. Morton became fluent in both law and rhetoric, both of which he later wielded against his puritan antagonists. He also drank deeply from the wells of irreverence and merriment characteristic of the Inns of Chancery and the Inns of Court, which the playwright Ben Jonson termed “the noblest nurseries of humanity and liberty.”3
By liberty, Jonson meant something entirely different than the Christian liberty of the Pilgrims. In this context, explains historian Philip Finkelpearl, liberty meant “revelry, rebellion, uninhibited satire, relaxed playfulness, libertine wantonness, licensed fooling, and political freedom.” Aspiring lawyers understood their knowledge of the common law as essential not only to securing wealth but also to safeguarding the political liberties that belonged to England’s propertied elite. At the same time, many students set aside serious concerns for the future and enjoyed being young in London. They found pleasure in literature, entertainment, and sex. The inns themselves organized revels, over which a “Lord of Liberty” or “Lord of Misrule” might preside. In this spirit, students attended masques, dances, feasts, and plays. They visited brothels. They frequented taverns and rubbed shoulders with barristers and poets.4
Morton’s career as a London lawyer never amounted to anything, but in the late 1610s he met a wealthy widow who lived in the Berkshire village of Swallowfield. Alice Miller’s first husband’s will provided her and their many daughters with considerable income from his estate. At the same time, their son George became the master of the house in which his mother still lived. An awkward situation became worse when both Alice Miller and her son decided to marry. As a precaution should Thomas Morton turn out to be interested only in her money, George Miller persuaded his mother to lease her interest in the estate to him. According to Morton, however, the son promised to leave the lease in his mother’s hands so that she could destroy it should her second husband prove honorable.
After Alice Miller became Alice Morton in November 1621, family relations quickly descended into a messy pottage of lawsuits. George Miller asserted that just before the wedding, his mother broke into his trunk and destroyed the lease. He further alleged that his mother, stepfather, and several others entered his residence, brandished pistols and warrants, and evicted everyone save Miller’s pregnant wife. Morton then returned, broke down the wife’s doors, and dragged her “out of her naked bed.” On the Sabbath, no less.
Morton countered that George Miller denied his mother and his many sisters their rightful income and marriage portions. Morton also claimed that when George beat his mother in an attempt to shorten her life, he caused her to miscarry the child that she and Morton had conceived.
In June 1623, the chancery judge tasked with enduring the sordid tale ordered mother and son to take possession of separate farms. The judge observed that Thomas Morton “had nothing in the premises but in right of his wife” and added that if Morton chose to live elsewhere, he “should suffer her to enjoy her own estate.” Morton had already made that choice. No one had seen or heard of him since February. The judge reported that Morton had sold all of Alice’s goods, including her clothing. Alice Morton died a few years later.5
Still without a fortune, Morton sought yet another path to riches. He became a minor investor in a venture organized by two erstwhile pirates, Humphrey Rastall and Captain Richard Wollaston. Rastall was a merchant who had spent two decades trafficking in various sorts of human cargoes. He carried African slaves around the Mediterranean and to Spain, and he was convicted of piracy for seizing Turkish ships and their passengers. Wollaston was another sea dog with a dubious past. Back in 1615, he had crossed paths with John Smith while the latter was a prisoner on a French corsair.6 Two years later, Wollaston joined Walter Raleigh’s expedition to Guiana, then deserted to chase French prizes off the coast of Newfoundland. By the early 1620s, the merchant Rastall and ship’s captain Wollaston had joined forces to merchandise a different sort of human commodity. They planned to purchase the indentures of servants, sail to New England, trade with the fishing outposts there, and sell the servants in Virginia.
Rastall, Wollaston, Morton, and around thirty servants left England aboard the Unity and reached Cape Ann in June 1624. Rastall chartered a smaller ship and transported a number of the servants to Virginia. Wollaston stocked the Unity with cod and oil, purchased some provisions at Monhegan Island, and set sail for Virginia, only to encounter winds that forced a return to England. Morton and some servants remained behind under a Lieutenant Fitcher at an outpost that became known as Mount Wollaston, only several miles removed from Thomas Weston’s failed Wessagussett colony. Wollaston and Rastall never set foot in New England again; they were both dead by 1627.7
According to William Bradford, once Wollaston and Rastall were gone, Morton organized a mutiny. He gave the remaining servants “strong drink” and “junkets,” sweetened curds. Then he warned them that they would “also be carried away and sold for slaves” in Virginia. If, however, they thrust out Fitcher, they would be “free from service” and could “live together as equals” and partners in trade. Fitcher left.8
Morton rechristened the outpost Ma-re Mount. Because he so relished wordplay, scholars have perceived many possible references in the name: the Virgin Mary, marriage, and even a horse (being mounted). Most obvious, though, remains Charles Francis Adams Jr.’s interpretation of “hill by the sea.” The Latin mare means “sea,” and the outpost enjoyed a commanding and visible position above the bay.9
Little is known about the servants whom Wollaston and Rastall had brought to the New World, but Bradford employed the term slaves for good reason. In a London teeming with starving migrants from the countryside, constables periodically seized poor children and confined them in Bridewell Prison. In 1619, several hundred of these children were indentured to Virginia Company investors, who transported them to colonial tobacco fields. Many well-to-do men in England praised such schemes. John Donne, the poet turned dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, told the investors of the Virginia Company that colonization would “sweep your streets, and wash your doors, from idle persons, and the children of idle persons.” The human cost of this cleansing was high. By 1622, nearly all of the three hundred “servants” shipped to the Chesapeake had died. One succumbed after her master punished her with a reported five hundred blows. Over the course of the century, English authorities shipped thousands of Irish rebels, religious dissidents, criminals, and vagrants to North American and Caribbean colonies. Many of them went as servants for life. Perhaps their children would be free, but in every other respect, they were slaves.10
Bradford and other Pilgrim leaders sympathized with servants facing the sale of their labor to Virginia, but they would not sanction the casting aside of indentures. Nor did they think that men should or could live together as equals. Bradford wrote that New England’s planters feared that Morton’s upsetting of the social order would make it impossible for them to keep any servants. “All the scum of the country, or any discontents, would flock to him [Morton],” Bradford complained. Plymouth’s governor added that Morton “inveigl[ed] … men’s servants away from them.” According to Bradford, Merry Mount threatened his colony’s already weak social hierarchy.11
What Morton more immediately threatened was Plymouth’s newfound commercial success. After a half decade of disasters, Plymouth finally managed to ship large quantities of fur to England precisely as the price of beaver skins soared.12 The furs were not coming to Plymouth; no interior river reached the colony. While the Pilgrims had obtained furs on Massachusetts Bay, the richest trading sites in New England lay farther afield. In 1625, Edward Winslow sailed up the Kennebec River (in present-day Maine), traded Plymouth-grown corn, and returned with around four hundred beaver furs. Winslow’s shipment was worth nearly three hundred pounds, and this time it was not lost to shipwreck or piracy.13
Shortly after Winslow’s Kennebec trip, the Pilgrims put themselves on a firmer financial footing. Plymouth’s leaders sent Isaac Allerton to London to work out a new agreement with their remaining backers. A tailor from Suffolk, Allerton, with his pregnant wife and three children, had joined John Robinson’s congregation in Leiden and then had become passengers on the Mayflower. Shortly after the first passengers explored the future site of Plymouth, Mary Allerton gave birth to a stillborn son aboard the ship. She then died during the company’s first months in Plymouth. Four years later, Isaac Allerton married Fear Brewster, William Brewster’s daughter. Each spring, male settlers with voting rights reelected Allerton as one of several assistants to Governor Bradford.14
In London, Allerton met with the remaining Adventurers, who still hoped to recoup some of their investment and were willing to extend additional capital. The investors set aside any claims on the settlers’ houses, land, and livestock, thus extricating the Pilgrims from the conditions Thomas Weston had imposed on them. The settlers then bought out the Adventurers for £1,800, payable in nine annual installments, the last falling due in 1636.
Plymouth’s leading settlers—Bradford, Standish, Allerton, Winslow, and several others—took responsibility for making the annual £200 payments and also agreed to repay an additional £600 in debts. Should the colony default, these “Undertakers” would be personally liable. At the same time, the Undertakers reached an agreement with the rest of the male colonists. In return for their assumption of the colony’s financial obligations, the Undertakers alone would reap the profits of the beaver trade for the next six years. Using these anticipated profits as collateral, the Pilgrim traders obtained fresh loans from James Sherley and two other backers. The rate of interest was high, but so was the current price of beaver. The Pilgrims used some of the borrowed funds to help some of their fellow congregants in Leiden finally come to Plymouth.15
Another development also enhanced the colony’s prospects. During the mid- to late 1620s, Pilgrim traders embraced wampum, which increasingly functioned as a regional currency across New England. The Pequots and several other coastal peoples made wampum beads from the shells of clams and whelks. Belts, sashes, necklaces, and other items made of strung beads were symbols of rank and wealth, used for dowry payments and worn by sachems. The beads also possessed a ritual significance, representing access to spiritual power. In the early 1620s, Dutch traders discerned wampum’s value in their interactions with the Pequots. They obtained large stocks of wampum beads and used them to purchase rich cargoes of furs from outposts up the Hudson and Connecticut Rivers. As Thomas Morton commented, “These beads are current [accepted as currency] in all the parts of New England, from one end of the coast to the other.”16 Through the beaver-wampum trade, some coastal peoples, such as the Narragansetts and Pequots, became wealthier and more powerful.
Portrait of a Native sachem with wampum headpiece, earrings, and necklace, ca. 1700. (Courtesy of Rhode Island School of Design.)
In 1626, the new secretary of the New Netherland Company, Isaack de Rasière, complained that the “Brownists of Plymouth come near our places to get wampum.” Plymouth had established a trading outpost at Aptucxet on Buzzards Bay, giving English traders ready access to Narragansett Bay, the Connecticut River Valley, and Long Island without having to sail around Cape Cod and the dangerous shoals to its south. De Rasière wanted to control the access of English and French traders to wampum, “either by force or by spoiling their trade by outbidding them with duffels [a coarse woolen cloth] or hatchets.” Hoping to forestall competition through diplomacy, De Rasière visited the Pilgrims in October 1627.17
While in Plymouth, De Rasière watched the colonists prepare for Sunday worship: “They assemble by beat of drum, each with his musket or firelock, in front of the captain’s [Myles Standish’s] door; they have their cloaks on, and place themselves in order, three abreast, and are led by a sergeant without beat of drum. Behind comes the Governor [Bradford], in a long robe; beside him, on the right hand, comes the preacher [Brewster] with his cloak on, and on the left hand, the captain with his side-arms and cloak on, and with a small cane in his hand; and so they march in good order, and each sets his arms down near him.” The settlers processed with military discipline up the hill to the fort that doubled as a meetinghouse. On the ground floor, the congregation sang psalms and listened to Brewster’s sermons. Above them, six cannons commanded the surrounding country and bay. De Rasière commented that the Plymouth settlers were “constantly on their guard night and day.” While the Pilgrims aimed to impress De Rasière with their preparedness, they were not unusual in carrying firearms to church. Some colonies, such as Virginia, required men to bring guns, swords, and ammunition to worship in order to deter Native attacks.18
De Rasière sold Plymouth’s settlers some £50 of wampum and encouraged them to take it north to the Kennebec. The Dutch gambit backfired. Although Plymouth at first concentrated its attention on the Kennebec, its traders soon visited wampum-making sites along the southern New England coast and discussed ways to encroach on the Connecticut River fur trade. The Wampanoags also became wampum producers. “It makes the Indians of these parts rich and powerful and also proud,” Bradford commented. The Dutch feared English traders and settlers would supplant them. In 1627, the directors of the West Indian Company reported that “the English of New Plymouth threaten to drive away” the Dutch settlers on the Hudson.19
The beaver boom also stoked competition among the English traders along Massachusetts Bay and the upper New England coast. After he gained control of Mount Wollaston, Thomas Morton became one of many men seeking the same sources of furs. As far as Plymouth was concerned, Thomas Morton got more than his share. He made money and made merry. In so doing, he made enemies.
“The more I looked,” Morton recalled his early impressions of New England, “the more I liked it.”20 One part ethnography, one part a depiction of the land and its resources, one part history, and from start to finish a bawdy anti-puritan polemic, New English Canaan stands out among the sermons, sacred histories, and Christian poetry that characterize seventeenth-century New England literature.
When William Bradford described the New England landscape, he stressed its forbidding strangeness. Morton, by contrast, gushed about a lush country ripe for English trade and settlement. New England was “nature’s masterpiece.” It was a “fair virgin” ready to be “enjoyed” and exploited by English “art and industry.” It was a second Canaan, as promising as the land God had given to the ancient Israelites. “If this land be not rich,” Morton waxed, “then is the whole world poor.” With even more hyperbole than Plymouth’s boosters employed, Morton wrote of plentiful fish that practically leapt ashore, trees that bent from the weight of ripe grapes, of boughs and skies thick with birds, and forty-eight-pound turkeys that men could shoot while standing in their doorways. Morton claimed that settlers were immune from colds and coughs and that sick men from Virginia were cured by New England’s pure air.21
Like his English contemporaries, Morton concluded that God had prepared New England for colonization by sending a plague to “sweep away by heaps the savages.” The decimation of the Native population had made New England “so much the more fit, for the English nation to inhabit in, and erect in its temples to the glory of God.” Morton, though, had unusually positive things to say about the survivors of the epidemics. They were intelligent and modest. They treated their elders with reverence. Morton praised their “more happy and freer life, being void of care.” Unlike most other English writers, Morton compared the Indians positively to those English who had settled near them. “I found two sorts of people,” he wrote, “the one Christians, the other infidels, these I found most full of humanity, and more friendly than the other.” The Indians were not dangerous; the Plymouth settlers had no need to huddle behind the walls of their fort. Instead, Morton argued that it was the treacherous Pilgrims who posed a danger to English traders and prospective settlers.22
The marrow of New English Canaan is a sustained satire and critique of New Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, interwoven with Morton’s account of his Merry Mount outpost. Morton wrote in the mid-1630s while working for Englishmen who were trying to topple New England’s puritan governments. New English Canaan, thus, is not a straightforward contemporary account of Merry Mount’s rise and fall, but neither is the account in William Bradford’s history. Both men placed the episode in the context of English debates over merriment and revelry, which King Charles and Archbishop Laud favored and the Pilgrims opposed.
In their dueling histories, Morton and Bradford agree on a few essentials. After Wollaston and Rastall left New England, there was a mutiny. Morton and his men erected and danced around a maypole, which Plymouth’s separatists denounced as an idol. Meanwhile, the two colonies collided as they competed for beaver pelts. In June 1628, the Pilgrims arrested Morton and banished him from his outpost. Bradford and Morton flesh out this story with colorful but contradictory details.
Morton put revelry at the center of his story. According to New English Canaan, the inhabitants of Merry Mount celebrated “after the old English custom.” They cut down an eighty-foot pine tree and nailed a pair of buck antlers to it. Native visitors helped Morton’s men raise their maypole, which served as the fulcrum of their festivities and a signal for others who might find the way to “mine host of Ma-re Mount,” as Morton styled himself. The liquor flowed and merriment ensued. One of the company sang, and the others danced “hand in hand about the maypole.” Morton recorded the song: “Drink and be merry, merry, merry boys … Lasses in beaver coats come away / Ye shall be welcome to us night and day.” All were welcome to join in trade and revelry.23
One of the more curious items in New English Canaan is Morton’s claim to have composed and affixed to the maypole an enigmatically lewd poem intended to confuse his separatist foes. “Rise Oedipus,” it begins, “and if thou canst unfold.” Overstuffed with allusions to Greek and Roman mythology, Morton’s poem describes a rich widow—Scylla—to whom the sea god Neptune has brought “a new paramour,” but one lacking in masculine virtue. The poem ends with a new suitor, as Scylla is pointed to Merry Mount, where “the first of May … shall be kept holiday.”24
Morton reported that Plymouth’s pious “moles” suspected that the verse “was in memory of a whore.” While Morton reveled in erotic wordplay, the maypole poem was about political and economic power rather than sex. The historian Edith Murphy suggests that the “rich widow” is the land of New England itself. The Indians are her late husband, swept away by the plague. The seas have brought the Pilgrims to this land, but they are the unsuitable paramour. Morton presents himself and like-minded gentlemen as fitting replacements for both the departed Indians and the unworthy separatists.25
Morton explained that his maypole was a “lamentable spectacle to the precise separatists that lived at New Plymouth.” According to him, they understood it as an idol, akin to the golden calf worshipped by the Hebrews after the exodus. Merry Mount’s “host” understood his opponents. Bradford explained that:
Morton became lord of misrule, and maintained (as it were) a school of atheism. … They also set up a maypole, drinking and dancing about it many days together, inviting the Indian women, for their consorts, dancing and frisking together (like so many fairies, or furies rather), and worse practices. As if they had anew revived and celebrated the feasts of the Roman goddess Flora, or the beastly practices of the mad Bacchanalians. Morton likewise (to show his poetry) composed sundry rhymes and verses, some tending to lasciviousness, and others to the detraction and scandal of some persons, which he affixed to this idle or idol maypole.
Drunkenness, idolatry, fornication. It was a puritan hell dream, the specter of a sin city on a hill. Three-quarters of a century later, Boston’s Cotton Mather dismissed Merry Mount as a “plantation of rude, lewd, mad English people.”26
The Pilgrims’ decision to apprehend Morton, however, had nothing to do with a maypole. When Thomas Weston’s colonists reached Damariscove Island (off the coast of present-day Maine) in 1622, they found that fishermen had “newly set up a maypole and were very merry.” Plymouth’s leaders did not consider organizing an expedition to destroy it. Phinehas Pratt and Samuel Maverick, contemporaries who wrote brief accounts of Merry Mount, did not mention a maypole. Presuming Morton actually erected a maypole, the Pilgrims left it standing. Nor did the Pilgrims care a great deal about poetry that spring rains would have quickly washed away.27
Although Bradford denounced Morton’s alleged idolatry and immorality, his chief complaint against Morton was the sale of guns and ammunition to the Indians. Plymouth’s governor wrote letters to Ferdinando Gorges and his Council for New England in which he asserted that Morton’s trade in firearms posed a mortal danger to Plymouth and warned that its settlers might have to “quit the country” or “be beaten with our own arms if we abide.” Bradford also obliquely referenced the threat Morton posed to the colony’s prosperity, mentioning that because of Morton’s willingness to sell weaponry, nothing else was “vendible amongst them.” Morton’s guns disrupted the market.28
Morton does not mention the firearms trade in New English Canaan. He simply states that the Plymouth separatists charged him with “criminal things.” If Morton did sell guns to the Indians, he was a small part of a New England trade that was beginning to boom. Bradford’s letters make it clear that other English traders also sold weapons and ammunition to Natives, and the Dutch did so with even fewer restraints.29
Amid his tale of maypoles and merriment, Morton pinpointed what he understood as the real reason for Plymouth’s move against him, one that Bradford had tacitly confirmed in his letters to Gorges. Morton stated that the Pilgrims opposed him because they envied Merry Mount’s “prosperity,” based on its being “in a good way for gain in the beaver trade.” Morton bragged that he and his traders had preempted the trade on the Kennebec River. The Pilgrim traders lost out because Morton’s “boat had gleaned away all before they came.” Regardless of how Morton had outmaneuvered them, Plymouth’s Undertakers could not afford the loss. They had to make the annual payment on their debts.30
The Pilgrims had checked several threats to their colony, and they felt emboldened to snuff out one more. Bradford—with the support of other traders and settlers scattered around Massachusetts Bay—sent Myles Standish to arrest Morton. According to Bradford, Standish’s party found Morton and his men “so steeled with drink” that they could not lift their weapons. The only bloodshed occurred when one drunkard stumbled into a sword and cut his nose. They then found a ship going from the Isle of Shoals and sent Morton to England in the custody of none other than John Oldham, whom New Plymouth had banished several years earlier.31
In Morton’s more uproarious version of the raid, a party led by “Captain Shrimp” (Standish) surprised “mine host” while his men were away on a trading expedition. After apprehending Morton, his enemies drank themselves into such a stupor that their prize slipped away in the middle of the night. A chagrined Standish then pursued him to his “den.” In order to avoid needless bloodshed, Morton agreed to surrender when promised he could retain his goods and his arms. Captain Shrimp agreed, but then stripped Morton of his guns, and the Plymouth men “fell upon him, as if they would have eaten him.” After dragging Morton back to Plymouth, the separatists marooned him on an island without weapons or adequate clothing. Morton received food, liquor, and other supplies from Indians. “So full of humanity are these infidels before those Christians,” he commented. A ship eventually picked him up and brought him across the Atlantic.32
Without “mine host,” the maypole did not last long. Shortly after Morton’s expulsion, around one hundred puritan colonists led by John Endecott crossed the Atlantic and settled just south of Cape Ann. Endecott’s settlers were the vanguard of what became the migration of thousands of English settlers to Massachusetts Bay over the next dozen years. According to Bradford, Endecott (“Captain Littleworth” in New English Canaan) promptly visited Morton’s colony, cut down the maypole, and chastised Morton’s men “for their profaneness.”33
Meanwhile, when he reached England, Morton received not so much as a rebuke from the Council for New England. Ferdinando Gorges and his allies had far more in common with Morton than they did with the Pilgrims, and they were unconcerned about the possibility that Natives with guns would menace puritan settlers.
William L. Sheppard, Endicott Cutting Down Morton’s Maypole, ca. 1885, from Walter Montgomery, American Art and American Art Collections (1889).
In the spring of 1629, Morton crossed the Atlantic again, this time with Plymouth’s own Isaac Allerton. As Plymouth’s representative, Allerton had obtained a patent from the Council for New England, which granted the Pilgrim Undertakers the exclusive right to trade on the Kennebec River. In order to protect their monopoly from competitors, the Pilgrims built a trading house at Cushnoc, about thirty miles up the Kennebec near present-day Augusta. Allerton subsequently obtained another patent, made out to Bradford and signed by the Earl of Warwick on behalf of the Council for New England. This document superseded the Peirce Patent. It specified New Plymouth’s boundaries for the first time, and it empowered the colony’s settlers to incorporate themselves and “to frame and make orders, ordinances, and constitutions.”34
The patent was welcome news, but the other Pilgrims were flabbergasted when Allerton told them that he had hired Morton as his scribe. Perhaps Morton had helped Allerton obtain the patent, or perhaps Allerton thought he could benefit from Morton’s trading acumen. In his history, Bradford alleges that Allerton by this point had grown more concerned with his own trading operations and neglected the interests of his fellow Undertakers.35
Plymouth’s other leaders were angry with Allerton, but they felt dependent on him to manage their London relations. They would not tolerate Morton, however. Bradford was convinced that Morton had come “to nose them,” as a spy for the colony’s English enemies. The magistrates soon sent him away, and he made his way back to “his old nest.” Although Plymouth’s leaders and Morton retained their mutual dislike, Endecott and other Massachusetts Bay leaders became Morton’s chief antagonists going forward. According to Morton, Endecott deputized a party that went to Merry Mount and stole most of the outpost’s corn. Morton wrote that although deprived of his grain, he had no trouble shooting sufficient fowl and venison “in a country so much abounding with plenty of food.” If Endecott and his men had any brains, Morton maintained, they could have found a way to feed themselves without resorting to theft.36
In the summer of 1630, a much larger group of puritans came to New England under the leadership of John Winthrop, now the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Company. Surrounded by puritans and within the Bay Colony’s charter, Merry Mount could not survive. Massachusetts leaders ordered Morton’s arrest and pronounced him guilty of having stolen a canoe from the Indians and of having done them many other wrongs “from time to time.” The magistrates ordered Morton shackled until he could be sent to England, and they ordered his goods seized and his house “burned down to the ground in the sight of the Indians.” It was a rather harsh punishment for canoe theft. Several years later, Morton wrote that the “Brownists of New England” had deprived him of all of his “goods, moneys, and writings.”37
In his journal, John Winthrop made a vague mention that Morton had committed “other misdemeanors.” Several years earlier, Winthrop had recorded a note about a “Thomas Moreton late of Swallowfield” who had murdered a business partner back in the early 1620s. The charge against Morton may have originated with George Miller, who had good reason to smear his father-in-law and continued to repeat the murder accusation into the 1630s. According to Bradford, Lord Chief Justice Nicholas Hyde sent a warrant for Morton’s extradition.38
Morton sat in a Boston jail for several months until a ship agreed to transport him. When the time came, “mine host” apparently refused to go aboard. According to Samuel Maverick, an “old comer” who lived near Thomas Weston’s failed colony, the puritan authorities “hoisted” Morton aboard “by a tackle” and then sailed him “in sight of his house” while they burned it to ashes. The charges of murder did not stick, however. Once he reached England, Morton was a free man.39
“Morton’s ultimate offense,” writes historian Michael Zuckerman, “was simply to insist upon his own liberty, because in early Massachusetts there was no place for such a man.”40 It was not just that Morton lived as he pleased. Since the early 1620s, there had been individuals who moved beyond the tight-knit communities of puritan New England or who lived at their margins. Morton, though, was not content to remain on the margins. He invited others to join him at Merry Mount, and he thumbed his nose at the Pilgrims and at Bay Colony leaders. By making himself conspicuous, he made himself someone that puritan magistrates would not tolerate.
After his second banishment, Morton stayed away from New England for more than a decade. Plymouth had rid itself of a nimble economic competitor, and Massachusetts Bay had swept aside an unwanted presence within its charter. New England’s puritan magistrates soon discovered, however, that Morton posed a greater danger to them in England. By making enemies of men like Morton, Pilgrim and Bay Colony leaders made themselves conspicuous, garnering unwanted attention from English officials and bishops.