“The Very Hydra of the Time”: Morton’s New English Canaan and Atlantic Trade

On May 1, 1627, Thomas Morton and the inhabitants of Ma-re Mount—formerly Mount Wollaston and even more formerly Passonagessit—raised their infamous maypole, which in turn raised the ire of the “precise Separatists” at “New Plimouth.” This maypole has become one of the most enduring icons of early British settlement in Massachusetts, trailing perhaps only the cornucopia that has come to symbolize Plymouth-inspired Thanksgiving tradition, but in its day the Mar-re Mount maypole was for the Plymouth Separatists a tangible symbol of the well-lubricated gaiety that accompanied the celebrations linking the Anglican Church with Britannia’s pagan past. The Bostonian Puritans likewise disapproved of these pagan significances, but also saw in the maypole a reminder of the aristocratic hierarchy that sanctioned and lorded over the May Day bacchanal—a view that prompted John Endicott, during Morton’s first brief exile, to chop down the maypole and rebuke those still living at Ma-re Mount. For later historians of Massachusetts, Morton’s maypole continued to justify an interpretation of Ma-re Mount as a place of drunken licentiousness, a pseudoanarchical foil to the rigid Puritanism of Plymouth and Boston. Likewise New English Canaan, Thomas Morton’s account of Mare Mount, was relegated to the status of a second-class counterhistory to William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation.¹ Fiction writers from Lydia Marie Child to Robert Lowell have similarly focused on the jollity represented by Morton’s maypole, for good or ill, as John McWilliams traces in his article, “Fictions of Merry Mount.” Much like the gold coin nailed to the Pequod’s mast in Moby-Dick, the maypole of Ma-re Mount reflects the mind of the observer, unlimited in its significations.

The semiotic flexibility of Morton’s maypole is indicative of the wider trouble New English Canaan has posed to the two-pronged view of British colonization in North America, wherein religious “Pilgrims” dominated New England while Virginian settlements were focused on more secular economic interests.² Morton and his plantation have seemingly always been a problematic reality for the dominant narrative of Anglo-American colonization. Even his plantation’s name, Ma-re Mount, has engendered interpretive controversy. Though Morton never in New English Canaan calls his rechristening of Mount Wollaston anything other than “Ma-re Mount,” the name has come down through popular history as “Merry Mount,” originally a pejorative applied by Bradford and solidified in the American mythos through Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The May-Pole of Merry Mount.” As Karen Kupperman points out, the Puritan influence on American history “is again seen in the fact that their construction, Merrymount, stuck” (662). And while Morton surely knew of the possibilities for punning on the name—he does joke that the Separatists threatened “to make it a woeful mount and not a merry mount” (136)—he consistently resists applying the lighthearted appellation himself. As this homonymic struggle indicates, much like the maypole itself, the settlement’s name presents readers with “a compound title of almost unlimited suggestibility”—one that evokes interpretations ranging from a description of physical location to bestiality (McWilliams 7). But amid the myriad possibilities, perhaps the most basic denotational definition offers the best insight into the rhetorical implications of the settlement’s name.

In 1892 C. F. Adams maintained that Ma-re Mount was evidence of Morton’s playful linguistic “Latinity,” meaning, as McWilliams notes, “Morton had in mind the ablative of mare and the name meant ‘the hill by the sea’” (6).³ In thus naming his settlement Morton seems to point out its ties to the Atlantic; and indeed, many of the attributes for which Ma-re Mount became infamous have distinct ties to the maritime world. Most critical historical and literary studies of Ma-re Mount and New English Canaan dwell on Morton’s connection to the American interior, usually focusing on his advantageous trade and social relationships with American Indians. Recently, Michelle Burnham has posed a persuasive analysis of New English Canaan that reads Morton’s positive portrayal of the American interior in Canaan’s...