Morton had first arrived in Massachusetts in 1622, only two years after the Mayflower had made its landing, but he returned to England after expressing dissatisfaction with Puritan governance. A year later he returned and helped to establish a colony with his associate Captain Richard Wollaston, a notorious pirate and distinctly un-Puritan figure who named the settlement after himself. Mount Wollaston would come to an end shortly after its founding, when Morton discovered to his horror that the titular leader of the colony was selling its settlers into Virginian slavery. As a result, at some point in 1626, he encouraged an uprising against Wollaston, and upon the captain’s exile Morton became the new leader, renaming the colony variously “Mount Ma-Re” or “Merrymount”, a play on the Latin for sea, the Mother of God, and an emotion not associated with the Puritans — joy.
As Morton recounts, it was decided to mark, on May 1, 1627, this new naming of the colony with a party of “Revels and merriment after the old English custome”. For the occasion Morton set up a gigantic maypole, a “goodly pine tree of eighty feet long… with a pair of buck’s horns nailed on somewhat near unto the top of it, where it stood as a fair sea mark for directions on how to find the way”. Settlers and local Massachusett alike were encouraged to join in the revelry for which there was “brewed a barrell of excellent beare and provided a case of bottles, to be spent, with other good cheare, for all commers of that day.” Such mixing with Native Americans and drunken carousing around a maypole, with its pagan associations, was a direct affront to Morton’s Puritan neighbours. A repeat celebration the following year, after a further twelve months of Merrymount subverting Puritan norms, saw the Plymouth commander Myles Standish (a short man later slurred by Morton as “Captain Shrimp”) march a garrison into the idolatrous settlement, cut down the maypole, and have Morton sent off back to England in fetters.
Bernard Bailyn, in The Barbarous Years, describes Morton as “one of the strangest, most flamboyant, and most belligerently impious people ever to wander into the coastal scene” — a “nature lover, pleasure seeker, and a Rabelaisian celebrant of secular rites” who seems almost the diametrical opposite of the Puritans and Pilgrims who would exile him from America. Morton’s English background was “vague”, as Bailyn puts it, and his reputation “was said to be rather shady.” Such was the Plymouth leaders’ perception of the Renaissance man who sold arms to the Native Americans and encouraged liquor-fuelled carousing and cohabitation between the natives and his colonists; the classically trained barrister who saw himself as loyal to King and country, but who also invented his own syncretic folk culture born from the merging of Algonquin and Celtic traditions. He appeared to them as a threat to both the souls and fortunes of the Plymouth colonists. Leader of the Plymouth colony, William Bradford, in Of Plymouth Plantation (1651), would ragefully sputter about Morton’s maypole celebrants, whom he saw as “consorts, dancing and frisking together like so many fairies, or furies, rather and worse practices…. Of the mad Bacchanalians.”
