How the Puritans cast Mine Host of Merrymount into Captivity for Three Hundred Years [Notes]

Thomas Morton's restoration to Nature's Masterpiece was short-lived, for there arrived in New England, a foe more formidable by far than the Pilgrim Fathers: Governor John Winthrop leading the Great Migration of Puritans whose first vessels made landfall at Cape Ann in June 1630, finding “a store of fine strawberries growing wild in the Promised land.”

There would be no quarter for cavalier Morton in the “city upon a hill,” with an elect community charged to be the “Modell of Christian Charity.” At the very court that gave Boston its name, Morton was hauled before Winthrop and his magistrates on charges of stealing a canoe from the Indians “and other misdemeanors.” His house at Merrymount was condemned to be burned, its owner deprived of his goods and shackled until he could be transported back to England.

Banished by a government “as good to live under as Turkie,” Morton sharpened his quill to prick the “sect of cruell Schismaticks.” A self-styled satirist with smarting fangs, Mine Host lampooned Great Joshua Temperwell (Winthrop), Captain Littleworth ( John Endicott,) Master Bubble (Unnamed minister to the heathen,) and his arch-enemy, Captain Shrimp (Miles Standish.)

Morton's New (English) Canaan (1637) comprises three books: Book One describes the “manners and customs of the natives, together with their tractable nature and love toward the English;” Book Two covers the “natural endowments of the country, and its commodities;” Book Three takes aim at the Separatists and “what remarkable accidents have happened since the first planting.”

“The truest description of New England as then it was that ever I saw,” said Morton's friend, Samuel Maverick, resident in Massachusetts Bay since 1623, an “old planter” as colorful as Mine Host, occupying a site in today's East Boston with three African servants (slaves?), one a “Queene of her Owne Countrey.”

Maverick's praise for New Canaan became a long lost lone voice. Other critics almost unanimously reviled Thomas Morton and his work, a drubbing that resounded over the centuries to the belle epoque of Brahmin letters.

Nineteenth-century historian Charles Francis Adams dismissed Mine Host saying “... absolutely nothing to be said in his favor...a born Bohemian and reckless libertine, without either morals or religion...a disreputable London lawyer, fonder of the tavern than of chambers...much more himself when ranging the fields with a hawk or hound than when rummaging law books...This man by some odd freak of destiny was flung up as a waif on the shores of Boston Bay.”

Adams grudgingly conceded that “Morton's strange, incoherent, rambling book contains one of the best descriptions of Indian life, traits and habits, and of the trees, products and animal life of New England, which has come down to us.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne's story The Maypole of Merry Mount saw “jollity and doom contending for an empire” with the Puritans comparing the revelers to “those devils and ruined souls with whom their superstition peopled the black wilderness.” Woe to the youth or maiden who did but dream of a dance! wrote Hawthorne. Dance, they might, around the whipping post -- the Puritan Maypole.

In contrast to Hawthorne's frolic, Longfellow pounded “...roystering Morton of Merry Mount/That pettifogger from Furnival's Inn (=Clifford's Inn)/Lord of misrule and riot and sin,/Who looked on the wine when it was red."

Three centuries of infamy followed Mine Host until historians like Samuel Eliot Morison began to steer a fairer course: “... a gay gentleman with an eye for trade, author of the most entertaining book on early Massachusetts...We are heavily in debt to Morton for the jolliest contemporary account of early New England. If he did not love our people, he at least loved our land.” (Builders of the Bay Colony, 1930)

Modern Morton scholar, Jack Dempsey, devoted ten years to the life of this Renaissance man : “Bring Morton and Canaan back for the new century, and few books will provide better 'whirlwinds' to clear many clouds away...and help to repair some of the foundational lies and willful ethnocentrisms long-presented as fact in the religious, historical, literary, 'entertainment,' and scientific demonizations of Native people, that worked, and often still work to continue colonialism.”

[Images: Governor Bartholomew Gosnold trades with the Powhatan engraving by Theodor de Bry, courtesy Discovering Jamestown; John Winthrop, courtesy American Antiquarian Society; Pilgrims Going to Church, courtesy Library of Congress, Rare Books Division: America Before Columbus, 1893; The Pequot War, courtesy Library of Congress.]