Let those Pilgrims hiss; just don't spill my brew

A maker of merriment and mischief, and his 80-foot Maypole, inspired a springtime rite

Thomas Morton is all but forgotten now, but two things are certain: He loved Massachusetts and he threw one heck of a party.

Morton arrived in Massachusetts in 1624, just four years after the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth. He stood out. While others prayed, Morton was busy "frisking" with Indian "lasses" and hosting beer bashes. His perceived transgressions so offended the Pilgrims and Puritans that he was repeatedly exiled to England, only to return again.

Morton's spirit is celebrated this month with the tradition of the Maypole - a colorful bit of local history that is often overlooked.

It was Morton who introduced the Maypole to Massachusetts in 1627, and quite a Maypole it was - 80 feet tall, with a set of buck horns on top, rising above what is now Quincy's Wollaston Beach in the Merrymount neighborhood. Attached below was this inscription: "The first of May/At Ma-re Mount shall be kept holyday."

With that, the party began.

"[We] therefore brewed a barrelll of excellent beare and provided a case of bottles, to be spent, with other good cheare, for all commers of that day," Morton wrote in his book, "New English Canaan."

He also included the lyrics to the "songe" they sang at the party: "Drinke and be merry, merry, merry boyes . . . Lasses in beaver coats come away, Yee shall be welcome to us night and day. To drinke and be merry."

Ma-re Mount's multicultural bashes were more than the Pilgrims could stand. In 1628, Pilgrim Governor William Bradford sent a squad of soldiers under the Pilgrims' military leader, Miles Standish, to arrest Morton and his pals. According to Standish, the partygoers were too drunk to put up a fight.

The Pilgrims shipped Morton back to England to face charges that included "abusing the Indian women most filthily, as it is notorious." While he was gone, Puritan leader John Endicott marched down the coast from Salem and cut down the Maypole.

By 1643, Morton would be tossed out of Massachusetts twice more - the last time at least in part for writing a book in which he called the vertically challenged Standish "Captain Shrimp."

But Morton so loved Massachusetts - he called it "Nature's Masterpiece" - that each time, he returned.

Morton's story is laid out in "New English Canaan," which he wrote in 1637. From it, readers can provide their own answers as to whether Morton was a New Age sort of guy ahead of his time by almost four centuries - or, as so long portrayed, just a criminal libertine living between the austere Puritans and the equally dour Pilgrims.

A lawyer and poet, Morton arrived in the New World aboard the Unity as a partner in an English trade expedition under Captain Wollaston. The adventurers set up a settlement in what is now Quincy and named it Mount Wollaston. After one New England winter, the captain left for Virginia. Morton renamed the settlement Ma-re Mount (today's Merrymount), a play on the Latin word for sea and on the good times he and his followers would soon be having.

By 1628, Morton had angered the Pilgrims in Plymouth and Weymouth, and the Puritans in Salem, by freeing his indentured servants and partying with Native American men and women around the Maypole. He also angered them by being far more successful in the fur trade than they were.

Morton said he found the native people - especially the few members of the Massachusetts tribe who had survived a 1617 plague brought by early European traders - among the most admirable and moral people he had ever met.

Evidence of how much Morton's free spirit and his beer bashes galled the Pilgrims, who spent much of their time in three-hour church services, can be found in Bradford's account of Ma-re Mount in his "History of Plimoth Plantation":

Those who frequented the Maypole "led a dissolute life, powering out them selves into all profanenes," he wrote. "And Morton became lord of misrule, and maintained (as it were) a schoole of Athisme [Atheism]. And after they had gott some good into their hands, and gott much by trading with ye Indeans, they spent it as vainly, in quaffing & drinking . . . 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 . . . and worse practices."

Most historians have not treated Morton much better. They often paint him as a lascivious rascal or - as Bradford called him - a "thirstie murderer" and "traytor" who endangered the Colonists by selling guns to Native Americans.

But historian Jack Dempsey of Stoneham, editor of a 1999 annotated version of "New English Canaan," argues that historians who buy the Puritan party line are unfair. Dempsey said Morton was actually much more in step with the liberal English values of his day than were his New World antagonists.

In a biography that accompanies his edited "New English Canaan," Dempsey wrote that Morton was doing business with Native Americans in the same way European traders had been doing business with them for a century, and the same way the Native Americans had been doing business among themselves for a millennium.

"Cohabitation with Native American women, the trade of contraband items between the races and cultures, and 'revelry' had been normal components of life in the America now being shared by such radically different peoples," Dempsey wrote.

In 1630, with the great migration of English Puritans to Boston underway, Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts Bay Colony saw Morton as a threat. He ordered him arrested and had Ma-re Mount burned to the ground.

Winthrop sent Morton back to England, where he was jailed without charges and then released without penalty - again. He stayed in England for a dozen years and wrote "New English Canaan," describing Massachusetts with poetic language and parodying the Puritans, Pilgrims, and Captain Shrimp with deft satire. He referred to the Pilgrims as being as blind as moles and wrote that the Maypole party "put their noses out of joynt."

In 1643, almost 70 years old, he sailed once more across the Atlantic. When Morton reappeared in Massachusetts, the governor ordered Morton thrown into jail for slander, and he remained there for the winter. He then left for the wilds of the Maine coast, which was outside the reach of the Massachusetts governor. There he lived until his death in 1647.

Dempsey will lead the seventh annual Revels at Merrymount, a celebration of Morton's life, at the site of the Maypole on May 10. The festivities will start at noon at Merrymount Hill, off Samoset Avenue. At 4 p.m., the Morris Dance Group will perform traditional English dances and songs. At 5, the group plans to "adjourn to a nearby establishment for more feasting, excellent beer, and merriment," said Dempsey. "All comers are of course invited."

Paul Della Valle of Sterling is a Quincy native and author of "Massachusetts Troublemakers: Rebels, Reformers and Radicals from the Bay State," scheduled to be published by the Globe Pequot Press in the fall.