The Man Who Told the Puritans "Up Yours" (1)

ANNETTE TELLS TALES Could Early Colonial New England Have Been More English, More Indian, and More Fun?

How Long Is This Post? 6,000 words, about 30 minutes.

Doesn’t this look like fun? An Early New England that's not full of grim Puritans, but a place where ordinary English and Indians partied! Imagined 19th century drawing of a 17th century party hosted by Thomas Morton. How different things might have been. Image: Public Domain, Wikipedia

Note from Annette:

Today is an example of an Annette Tells Tales post at Non-Boring History, in which I introduce you to the scholarly work of an academic historian (in this case, Dr. Peter C. Mancall) by writing about it in my inimitable chatty style. These are among my best and most labor-intensive posts (I just make it look easy!) Want to read more like this, or simply want to cheer me on? Become a Nonnie today:

Messing With Pilgrims and Puritans

Thomas Morton, living in early 17th century Massachusetts, gave his neighbors a single-finger salute.

Well, not exactly. Actually, worse than that.

Thomas Morton was a party animal. And he set up a maypole on his property. A maypole is the centerpiece of a popular English festival with pagan roots, not that pagan roots ever bothered the overwhelming majority of fun-loving Christian English people. They liked Christmas, too, and Easter eggs, and you won't find them in the Bible. But Morton wasn’t in England. He was living in colonial New England. He just thought it should be more like England.

The ultra-religious English people—not yet Americans— who ran the early New England colonies, tiny Plymouth (pop.200 at most) and, later, Massachusetts Bay, weren't normal by 17th century English standards. Thomas Morton was.

I'm trying to persuade my American readers to consider something new for most of you. Ultra-religious New Englanders have long been regarded as national founders. We’re talking especially the little handful of Mayflower people who, to avoid confusion, we will call Pilgrims, even though “Pilgrim” is a bit loaded. They settled in what we’ll call New Plymouth to avoid confusion, since we will also be talking about Plymouth, England.

The Pilgrims themselves are often confused with the very similar Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and no wonder: They were all English. They dressed like each other. And their official beliefs (no, people didn't always stick to these, not even ministers) were very strict and basically the same. The biggest difference is that the Puritans still hoped to “purify” (reform) England and the Church of England in their own image, while the Pilgrims (aka Separatists) thought the Church and England were lost causes, and had given up to do their own thing.

The Pilgrims-and-Puritans-as-Founders myth has persisted, even though we know Indians were the original people in America, and that the Spanish were the first European colonizers. Good grief, even the first permanent English settlement was the very different Jamestown, Virginia.

The tiny band of Pilgrims stick in our heads though. They have long been seen as righteous rebels against England’s rulers, the advance guard of the American Revolution (nope, sorry, not a direct connection, a bit misleading). They crossed the Atlantic to practice religion as they saw fit, right? But let's be clear: Religious freedom was only for them, and “them” was a very small group indeed, one that didn't even include everyone in Plymouth.

This is hard enough for many of my American readers. Now I'm asking you to consider something even tougher: Most 17th century English people saw the Plymouth Pilgrims and Massachusetts Puritans not as a brave oppressed Christian minority, but as, um, how to put this tactfully . . .

Weirdoes. Loopy. Out to lunch.

I’ll say it again: Most English people considered Puritans and Pilgrims, when they thought of them at all, at best irritating bores, and at worst, absolutely bonkers.

In 17th century England, moderate Anglican (Church of England) Christianity and maypoles were normal.

But early New England’s leaders thought they were on missions from God, and saw themselves as true Christians, only happy when calling out other people's alleged failings (and, okay, maybe their own). To them, putting up a maypole was an insult to them, and to God. And any of my lovely readers who assume that Pilgrim and Puritan leaders really were qualified to decide who was properly Christian might want to consider why they assume that!

Oh, and did I mention that Thomas Morton invited local Indian girls to his parties? 😱

Maypoles, parties, cavorting with Indians, that’s all there was to Thomas Morton, as far as your US history class was concerned, wasn’t it?

Not so fast.

Historian Dr. Peter C. Mancall, in The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England, argues that Morton is so much more than a momentary blip in New England history,

That’s the book I’m riffing on today!

Thomas Morton, One-Hit Wonder?

When I taught American history to hungover freshmen at 8 a.m., Thomas Morton was comic gold. A quick mention of man and maypole makes a nice break while trying to excite said hungover freshmen about depressing and confusing Puritan religious ideas. Hey, I’m not insulting the beliefs of anyone today: 17th century New England Puritanism soon faded away, morphing into the much less agonizing Congregationalism. The original really was too hard for people to handle: From the start, even the most devout Puritans had unofficial and even forbidden beliefs in the supernatural, including folk magic (that's a subject for another day!)

Thomas Morton’s cameo appearance let me show my students in one swoop how determined Pilgrims and Puritans were to preserve their impossibly “perfect” visions for New England. And Morton also helped me impress upon my students that, back in England, Puritans were regarded as fanatical and joyless loonies, and that this is not irrelevant: New England was claimed by England. New England colonists were still English. That's why they were there. But it was not inevitable that fringe religious minorities would call the shots in English America.

So who was Thomas Morton? Peter Mancall mines archives to show us a glimpse of Morton’s past, and a context for his life.

So what, Laing? Who cares about this obscure Morton guy? Isn’t this trivial?

Hey, us not having heard of something doesn’t mean it’s trivial! This is significant. Dr. Mancall offers us a tantalizing vision of how very different New England could have been. For one thing, Morton did his darndest to make Massachusetts more fun. Hey, that could have been his motto: Morton = More Fun! In the right accent, that rhymes!

But there’s more to Moreton than that. The winners write history, we’re told, and in the case of the shallow history that the public is carefully trained to believe from childhood, that’s mainly true. So: Maypole, Puritans kick out Morton, end of.

But . . . Ya know, it has always struck this Brit as odd that the people of early New England became national icons, and remain so, thanks to Thanksgiving, only a national celebration since the 19th century.

Odd? Sure. Early New England doesn't strike me, or any historian I know, as a happy place to live. Their religion is a bit boring and stressful, isn’t it? Joyless, honestly. If you were doing it “right”, that meant worrying constantly about whether you were saved. And if you saw any signs in yourself that you were saved, this was actually a bad sign: It made you guilty of the sin of pride, for thinking you knew you were saved. Ack. No wonder people soon began quiet quitting this faith.

I mean, that’s why their iconic status today depends on a fanciful mental snapshot we have of a tiny group of Mayflower Pilgrims holding a dinner party with Indians. The dreary reality of New England life isn't very appealing. We would rather remember them for this imaginary moment than for anything else.

And as I said, Pilgrims blur together in most people's brains with the thousands of Puritans, who came to start the Massachusetts Bay Colony ten years after the Mayflower, and whose colony ultimately absorbed Plymouth. Their best -known accomplishment, came suddenly in 1692, when hundreds of innocent Christians, mostly women, were accused of being witches, and 19 were even hanged. Not coincidentally, this happened during a stressful time of war, epidemic, economic change, and the disruption of their society's most basic institutions, including government and the courts. Not that anything like that could happen now, of course. Cough. Moving right along . . .

Suppose early New England hadn’t been the Pilgrims ‘n Puritans Show? Suppose there was another path, a road not taken, to steal a phrase from New England poet Robert Frost?

Suppose New England had been more like old England? And suppose, just suppose, those New Englanders could have had a better understanding of and more tolerant attitude toward their Indian neighbors? Suppose this was Thomas Morton’s vision, one he shared with like-minded and powerful people back in England?

Was this even slightly a thing? Yes.

Could a different New England have actually happened? We will never know. We only know what did happen. Period.

So why bother, then?

Good question! The fact that this road not taken was even a possibility is important in reminding us that nothing is ever cast in stone. Nothing is certain. Nothing is over until it's over.

The idea that nothing is inevitable is a theme that’s close to the hearts of academic historians. And this way of thinking can be enormously helpful for all of us living in scary times, which, quite honestly, is all times, ever.

Now let’s pop over to 17th century England, and meet Thomas Morton, London lawyer and future maypole enthusiast. Let’s see how he ended up in New England, and why this mattered to Pilgrims, Puritans, and Indians. And let's think about why it matters to us today.

Meet Thomas Morton and His Family from Hell

Thomas Morton was in his late thirties when a recent widow hired him in 1616 to sort out some legal matters related to her late husband’s estate in the West of England. Little did Morton know that he would get personally involved. Very personally involved.

Nor could he have imagined that his involvement would lead him halfway round the world, to remote America, which was only starting to be colonized with the 1607 settlement of Jamestown. NOR could Morton have foreseen that his minor legal gig would become a drawn-out nightmare, AND a valuable lesson in life.

Morton’s client, Mrs. Alice Miller, had eight kids and a ninth on the way when her husband, George, a member of the landed gentry, died in 1616.

George left a will that provided for Alice and his daughters, and gave most of his estate to his only son (George, Jr.)

That was a normal will. So why was there a quarrel over inheritance?

The problem, as it happens, may have been Thomas Morton himself. In 1620, four years after Alice Miller hired him, and coincidentally the same year the Mayflower set sail to New England, Morton married Mrs. Miller.

With a new stepfather on the scene, Alice’s relationship with George, Jr. fell apart over the fate of the estate. Son sued mother, and mother sued son.

We shouldn’t be surprised, because while blood may be thicker than water, gold is thicker than blood. Not surprising that George, Jr. would worry that a lawyer stepfather might well get between him and his inheritance.

Meanwhile, as lawsuits and vicious family quarrels dragged on through the early 1620s, it should also be no surprise that Thomas Morton began looking for a way out.

Family Feud

The quarrel in Thomas Morton’s new family got steadily nastier. According to his stepson George, Morton, armed with a gun, broke into the family-owned house in which George and his young wife lived, and tried to evict them. George’s pregnant wife, who was undressed, hurriedly took refuge in a bedroom, bolting the door. George claimed that Morton broke the door down, and threw his naked and pregnant wife out of the house. George and Morton then brawled on the lawn.

Morton denied this version of what happened. So did all the witnesses in court. They said that most of the events George described (the pregnant naked daughter-in-law being chucked out of the house, etc) never, in fact, took place.

Not to mention that George, Jr. does seem to have been a piece of work: This certainly became the court’s opinion of him. Morton alleged that George Jr’s goons had assaulted him. George Jr., the court later reported to the King, had beaten his pregnant mother, trying to get her to lose Morton’s child, and causing her to miscarry. Case dismissed!

Whoever was at fault, this feud was vicious in the way that only family disputes can be.

Meanwhile, as the case had dragged on, Morton had quietly popped across the Atlantic to visit New England. As you do. Well, actually, as people didn’t in 1622.

Nobody knows why Morton went to America for a visit. Dr. Mancall reckons he was scouting for new opportunities for his talents. I have a hunch that such “opportunity” would not involve his wife or her kids.

For whatever reason, even though Morton was back in England for the next court date, he didn’t turn up in court, and George, Jr. won his case on appeal.

Two years later, in 1624, Morton returned to New England, this time to live.

Quarrels over the Miller estate would continue for another twenty years. By the time they ended, Alice Miller Morton was dead, and Thomas Morton was long out of the picture. He was back in England, but he was no longer interested in the outcome of the Miller family’s inheritance dispute, even though valuable property was at stake for him, too. Morton had found bigger fish to fry: The fate of the entire region we now call New England.

Lessons Learned

Dr. Mancall suggests that Morton got very important life lessons out of the Miller family’s legal mess:

How to deal with very difficult people.

And . . .

A winning decision isn’t necessarily the end of a matter. And neither is a loss.

In short, in life as in courts, it ain’t over til it’s over.

Those were the life lessons that Thomas Morton would bring with him when he returned to New England to live in 1624. His adventures would lead him back and forth across the Atlantic, and to a closer and closer partnership with Sir Ferdinando Gorges.

Wait. Who?

Meet Sir Ferdinando Gorges

It’s 1605, more than a decade before Thomas Morton meets Alice Miller. Ferdinando Gorges has a Spanish-sounding name, but he is definitely not Spanish. In fact, he hates Spain. He’s a highly-decorated former soldier, and a member of an elite English family that can trace its roots all the way back to the Norman Conquest of 1066.

Unfortunately, four years ago, in 1601, Gorges got himself in trouble, joining an unsuccessful rebellion, led by his friend the Earl of Essex, against Queen Elizabeth I’s government. Essex was beheaded, but Gorges saved his own head by snitching on others. What can I say? When you’re from an aristocratic family (and he is) you sometimes get a bit of a pass.

Gorges now leads a quiet life, with a much more boring job than that of swashbuckling military commander. He is governor of the port of Plymouth, the original, in the quiet backwater of southwest England.

Safe to say that Sir Ferdinando Gorges, who was knighted for his successes in battle before he dabbled in treason, is now a little bit bored.

In Plymouth, he watches ships coming and going, carrying men who are having a far more adventurous life than he is: Men like Captain George Waymouth, whose ship just sailed into Plymouth harbour, returning from exploring the coast of faraway America. Maine to be exact.

I'm sure Sir Ferdinando Gorges doesn’t expect Captain Waymouth to stop by, bringing him three American Indian houseguests.

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Contingency (don’t be scared!)

In a recent survey, 100% of those interviewed at Non-Boring House in Madison, Wisconsin, didn’t know who Ferdinando Gorges was. Hoosen Benoti (my long-suffering spouse), when I asked if he had heard of Ferdinando Gorges, said “Who?” He then asked me to repeat the name. I did. And again he said “Who?”

All the Gnomes shook their heads, except for two. One was the Quality Control Gnome, who frowned, and asked why I was asking. “Shouldn't you know?” he said quietly. “Why are you asking me?”

The Accounting Gnome thought he knew who Ferdinando Gorges was, but apparently had him confused with a male stripper in Miami. Which was interesting.

And the historian with the PhD in early America and Britain? Of course I had heard of Ferdinando Gorges!

So what did he do, the Quality Control Gnome asked?

Oh, what an interesting question, I replied! Glad you asked! Mumbles something about Maine, quietly consults Wikipedia . . . .

Now, however, thanks to historian Dr. Peter Mancall, I can tell you more about Sir Ferdinando Gorges. And, also thanks to Mancall, and much more exciting, my understanding of early America just changed. That’s normal: Being a historian is all about learning new things and learning to enjoy thinking differently (sometimes very differently) about things I thought I already knew.

Yes, thanks to Dr. Mancall, I’m aware that Ferdinando Gorges planned and tried, repeatedly, indeed amazingly persistently, to develop an English colony in New England that could have been much more like, well, England.

This is a story of tantalizing “what ifs”. Like most historians, I’m a bit leery of those, of what historians call counterfactual history, like imagining “What if Hitler had won WWII?” or “What if Elvis had been president?” I’m an old-school POH, Plain Old Historian, and like to stick with what did happen.

Still. Asking such questions can be a very interesting exercise, because they expose historical contingency.

Wait. Historical what, Laing?

Contingency. Like, what happens is always contingent (dependent) on context, on other things happening. In history, what we know is contingent on lots of things, and especially on the evidence available to us. If more evidence shows up, or if we ask new questions that make more sense of the evidence we know about, then we historians have to reconsider what we think we know. We also fight each other, sometimes quite viciously, over what the evidence and new questions tell us, but that's another story.

Contingency: All knowledge is contingent on what we know. That can change. The past doesn't change, but history does, because history is not the past: It's the interpretation of the past, and if it's being done right, as academic historians are trained to do, it's based on evidence and argument. (I can't speak for people trained in other disciplines who claim to do history, or historians who go down Theory rabbit holes, but we Plain Old Historians tend to look askance at them).

Look, think of medicine, which like all science, works much the same way: All knowledge is contingent. It can and does change. If it didn't, you'd be looking forward to your next medical appointment with a leech therapist. Or to your next surgery with a barber.

This also means that nothing in human events is entirely predictable. That’s why I say unto you again, don’t trust a historian—or anyone— who claims to the public that they have crystal balls through which they understand the present, and can see clearly into the future. Balls, I tell you. Not to be trusted. Maybe their analysis and predictions are right. But we don't know, not this soon, and it's very naughty of them not to point that out to you. We won’t know for a long time, in part because a lot of crucial evidence is still stored privately in texts, emails, and possibly bathrooms. We don’t yet even know all the questions to ask. Indeed, right now, we might even get canceled for asking the “wrong” questions. Meanwhile, if historians do act as pundits, there’s a serious danger of us creating self-fulfilling prophecies. Yikes. Keep an open mind, everyone.

Contingency seems scary, but it can make us feel less doomed. Once we understand that things could always have turned out very differently in the past, then we realize that the same applies to the future.

So let’s consider the possibility that a very different New England could have existed. Since historians, until forty years ago, presented New England as Ground Zero of early American history (uh-huh, sure), and most of the public still thinks this, that would also mean imagining for ourselves how there could have been a very different America.

Let’s talk about how New England appeared on Ferdinando Gorges’s radar.

Two Years Before Jamestown: Gorges Gets Guests

Arriving by ship in Plymouth, England, in 1605, Captain George Waymouth knocked at the door of the port’s governor, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, and introduced him to three American Indian men: Maneddo, Skicowaros, and Sassocomit.

I’m sure Maneddo, Skicowaros, and Sassocomit were as surprised to be on Gorges’s doorstep as he was to find them there. It’s really a shame that we don’t have their accounts of this meeting.

George Waymouth had kidnapped these Eastern Abenaki guys during his exploration of coastal Maine. For whatever reason, he now asked Gorges to look after them.

This was 1605. English plans for America were in full swing. Gorges knew that English merchants were rushing to explore commercial opportunities in America.

He could not know that by next year, 1606, King James I, the new King, would greenlight (but not organize or pay for) English people to plan settlement in two areas of north America. One would be in the north of what became the US, and the other in the south. Both areas were then considered part of “Virginia” , the large bit of America that the English had claimed without telling the Spanish, who had claimed it first.

By December, 1606, the Virginia Company of London, a private enterprise with shareholders, which had been making excited plans to develop a profitable colony, launched three ships headed to Virginia. This was the area that we still call Virginia today. There, in early 1607, the people on these ships would establish Jamestown, the first permanent English colony.

Of course, it took many, many years before anyone would have dared call Jamestown “permanent”. A lot of wishful thinking and poor planning was going on. There was much Monty Python incompetence about this venture. Over and over, the colony almost collapsed.

Contingency, you see: At every turn, something different could have happened.

But what about England’s proposed northern colony? It was tentatively named “Northern Virginia”. Not for another ten years would this northern region bear the name it still has today:

New England.

The area called New England is now home to several states, each part of the United States, and each started as an English colony: The biggie is Massachusetts, founded in 1630 as the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It eventually absorbed early New Plymouth, a tiny village, never more than 200 inhabitants, that had been started by the Mayflower people ten years earlier. There’s also Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont.

In 1605, this all lay in the future. Not even the Jamestown colony was yet a thing. The first English effort to settle Virginia has happened (twice) in the 1580s, on a coastal island called Roanoke, and both times had flopped miserably. Indeed, the second time, the colonists had vanished.

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Interested in the very first English attempts to colonize America? See what happened when Annette visited the scene of the action:

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Ferdinando and His Abenaki Pals

In Plymouth, England, in 1605, Ferdinando Gorges got talking to his houseguests.

What, you thought he locked the Indians in the dungeon, and threw occasional bread at them, until George Waymouth came back for them?

Not at all. George Waymouth and Ferdinando Gorges thought along similar lines. Waymouth thought he was doing his kidnappees a favor: England was the best country in the world! Look how lucky they were to be here, living as a rich and influential man’s houseguests!

Hey, don’t laugh: Almost all of us around the world think our own countries are the best, especially if we have never spent serious time anywhere else. Waymouth believed that spreading Englishness, and Anglicanism (Church of England Christianity) among American Indians would be awesome for them. Plus, despite kidnapping a few Indians, he had no interest in enslaving them.

I realize this is a lot to take in. Look, remember how I went on and on recently about how American Indians were and are different peoples and individuals who don’t all see the world in the same way?

Surprise! The English don’t and didn’t either! Englishmen who soon began sourcing workers to plant tobacco in Jamestown had no problem exploiting other English people as indentured servants, and it wasn’t long before they also exploited Indians and Africans as slaves.

But George Waymouth thought differently about Indians. And so, it turns out, did Sir Ferdinando Gorges. Gorges chatted with his Indian guests, who, I assume, had already started picking up English on the voyage over. He learned that they all belonged to the same Native people, the Eastern Abenaki, but that they were from different families, and different areas.

Gorges now saw an opportunity to get involved in spreading proper English Christianity to people like these, to plant the English flag in America, AND to stick a fork in the eye of Catholic Spain in the process! This would be a perfect sequel to his successful military career! Sir Ferdinando Gorges had found a new passion in life, and he had the influence to pursue it. That's because he was a member of the Council for New England.

The Council for New England was a joint-stock company (or early corporation), just like the Virginia Company of London which would soon settle Jamestown. The Council for New England was eyeing what was then called “northern Virginia”, but is now called . . .um, New England.

The Council had nothing to do with the Pilgrims or Puritans who would become New England’s most famous settlers. The Council was made up of influential and normal Anglicans like Gorges who literally wanted to settle a New England, based on the old one.

Before they could make plans, Gorges and the rest of the Council for New England needed information about “northern Virginia”. Maneddo, Skicowaros, and Sassocomit had lots of knowledge to share.

The year after Gorges hosted the three Native men, the Council sent Maneddo and Sassocomit on a kind of Star Trek voyage to America. Their role was to help the English crew get familiar with the area and the people who lived in it. But the voyage ended in disaster, when Spanish sailors confiscated the ship. Maneddo and Sassocomit and, I think, the whole crew, survived, however, and Sassocomit soon returned to live at Gorges’s house in Plymouth.

Calling the Council a “Council” obscures the fact that its members sometimes did their own thing. One, England’s Lord Chief Justice John Popham, who was very keen to set up a colony of his own, sent a ship. But all the captain did was survey the coast, and then sail home.

By 1607, with the competing Virginia Company of London settling Jamestown, there was new urgency for the Council for New England to move forward on its plans asap. The Council sent two ships, one captained by John Popham’s son, and the other by the Council President’s brother, because while many Americans today are just waking up to the idea that “nepo babies” limit opportunity for their own kids, nepotism has always been a thing. Also on the journey was Skicowaros, the third of Gorges’s Abenaki guests from two years earlier. This time, they were to start a colony on the Maine coast.

If At First You Don’t Succeed . . .

The Popham expedition’s timing was unfortunate: Maine had a terrible winter in 1607. Popham, Jr. was among those who died. The settlers did manage to build a fort, and also, impressively, a ship, which they named the Virginia. But by summer, they looked at their garden and livestock, and realized, uh oh, they might not have enough food for the coming winter. Local Indians may also have attacked them, not a good sign. So the colonists boarded the Virginia, their home-made ship, and went home. So ended the first English attempt at a colony in New England.

When Virginia finally sailed into Plymouth in 1608, Gorges greeted the survivors, and learned just how bad that Maine winter had been. That must have given him pause.

The following year, 1609, the Virginia sailed out of Plymouth Harbor again, and it was again headed for America. But it wasn’t going back to Maine, or any part of New England. This time, the Virginia was aiming for, er, Virginia, the new colony of Jamestown.

Around now, most members of the Council for New England had lost interest in New England.

But not Ferdinando Gorges! Gorges was one of life’s optimists. He took charge. Gorges, you see, thought in the long term. He knew that the Catholic French were already in north America, and had designs on New England. A great reason for the English to try again!

This time, Gorges would send yet another New England Indian who'd been living in England. Unlike the others, Epenow was not from Maine, but from the island today called Martha’s Vineyard, which is now a posh people place off the coast of Massachusetts.

Epenow had been kidnapped and brought to England, but, unlike those Gorges had hosted, he ended up in London as a sort of sideshow attraction: People bought tickets to come look at an American Indian and hear him speak. As he learned English, Epenow seems to have reveled in his celebrity status, encouraging curious but nervous audience members to come on in by cheerfully calling out “Welcome, Welcome!”

Once the novelty wore off, however, and ticket sales tapered away, Epenow was out of work, and homeless. He was invited to live at Gorges’s house, along with Sassocomit. The two Indian men struggled to understand each other. But Gorges noted that they quickly got up to speed. That's when he realized they were speaking dialects of the same language, rather than different languages.

By now, after three years, Gorges had come to know his Indian boarders well, and have great respect for them. He thought they were much more polite than the average English person, conducting themselves with “great civility”, he wrote, “far from the rudeness of our common people.” They paid their way: They shared a lot of valuable knowledge of their homeland with Gorges, especially about geography, and politics. Gorges was excited that Maneddow and Epenow would be useful middlemen on the Council’s (i.e. Gorges’s) next attempt to settle a colony in New England.

Of course, as Gorges noted, “as in all human affairs, there is nothing more certain than the uncertainty thereof.”

One uncertainty? Maverick Englishmen in America could screw things up. And since the Crown had pretty much stayed out of the American colonization game itself, preferring to give unfunded approval to private ventures while cooing encouragement, English America’s colonization threatened to be a Wild West, full of mavericks.

Gorges and the Council had nothing to do with a voyage to New England by an English captain named Thomas Hunt. Hunt was hired by English merchants to go to New England, and find some way to make a profit. His actions would be a disaster for the Council’s plans.

Desperate to find an easy and profitable product, and coming up empty- handed, Hunt spontaneously decided to go into slave trading. He kidnapped 24 Indians and took them to Spanish Florida. There, he tried to sell them, until Spanish clergymen put a stop to the sales.

News of Hunt’s enslavement of Indians was too much for Maneddow and Epenow, who, Gorges later reported, apparently then decided that the English were basically a bad thing. They planned revenge when they went on yet another Gorges/Council-sponsored voyage to America. Although Maneddow died soon after their ship landed in Maine, Epenow soon persuaded local Indians to attack the English. A small war broke out, and the English retreated to England.

The Council next sent Captain John Smith (of Jamestown fame) to try to colonize New England. But he was captured by the French, and sat in a French jail until someone ransomed him.

Having enjoyed zero success in colonization efforts, Gorges and the Council for New England thought it would be wise to remind the King that they still existed, and still had a claim on New England.

They sent the King a letter to assert their claim, only to realize that men associated with the Virginia Company (founders of Jamestown) were making a competing bid for the colonization rights to New England.

It took the King’s government two years to decide the winner. Meanwhile, Gorges sent yet another ship to have a good look at New England’s coast on his behalf. The captain did that: Took a good look. He then sailed down to Virginia, where he promptly died of one of the many thingies you could die from in early Virginia.

AND YET, Dr. Mancall assures us, and I quote, “Sir Ferdinando Gorges remained optimistic about the prospects for settlement, despite,” and here are Gorges’s own words, “the many disasters, calamaties, misfortunes, opposition, and hinderances we have had.”

Ya think, Sir Ferdinando?

We have to take our hats off to this guy. Ferdinando Gorges was the Positive Pollyanna of Plymouth.

How optimistic? He thought (as, in fairness, many Europeans did) that, because Maine was on the same latitude as Rome, it would share its Mediterranean climate. Hahahahahaha!

He cheerfully asserted that New England soil was good (um, sort of)! That there were lots and lots of trees ! Okay, yeah, true that.

And, best of all, Maine had MOOSE!

Gorges, who had never met a moose, believed that moose could be domesticated! Hey, guys, any volunteers to ride in a moose-pulled wagon? Maybe milk a moose?

Still, give the man his due. He had actually sat down and chatted with American Indians, and how many Englishmen could say that? He firmly believed that if the English were respectful to Indians, the Indians would be respectful to the English. That had certainly been his experience with his houseguests.

New England, he believed, would be perfect for a new England, one that would be just like old England had been, back in the long-ago Middle Ages. It would be a country ruled by feudal landowners. Landowners like, um, Sir Ferdinando Gorges!

It’s Official: Start a Colony, Boys

In 1620, King James I finally decided who would be allowed to settle a colony in New England.

You would think he chose the Virginia Colony, run by the private corporation called the Virginia Company of London, because they now had a track record. Their Jamestown colony was well underway, making money for its landowners and for the King (through customs duties) by growing and exporting tobacco to England.

But no, King James I was not impressed: He did not approve of tobacco, an addictive drug, and its effects on Englishmen. That’s one big reason why he personally got involved in developing silkworm farming, hoping to persuade Virginians to try this less harmful product instead.

Want to read more about King James I and silkworm experiments at NBH? Here you go!

Singing Silky Stories (Part 2: English Version)

So King James turned down the Virginia Company, and gave Ferdinando Gorges and the Council exclusive rights to set up a colony in New England. The main goal, the King insisted, should be to convert the Indians to Christianity, and specifically to the Church of England’s Protestant faith. Works for me! I’m sure Gorges thought . . .

With God and King on their side, Gorges and his colleagues certainly did not think they needed Indians’ permission to settle. Indians, after all, would be glad to have their souls saved! What better than that! Gorges was keenly aware that he still had to worry about other European powers in the region, and especially the French, who were already there. Most of all, he was concerned that English settlers from Virginia and other unauthorized English settlers would come anyway, because controlling Englishmen was like trying to herd cats.

But here’s the terrible, awful, tragic story at the heart of this book, and I do mean that. By 1620, things had changed drastically. While the Council’s ships had fruitlessly sailed back and forth across the Atlantic, an epidemic was sweeping New England (possibly not a coincidence).

Medical historians now think the disease was leptospirosis, brought by rats on English ships. Natives had no resistance, and no chance. In three years of epidemics, Mancall writes, the disease “apparently killed almost everyone.” Everyone Indian, that is. The English in the area, having natural immunity, survived.

This was not a deliberate act. The English, knew nothing of modern disease theory. They did not gloat at these deaths, Mancall tells us. But they believed that God was telling them that, hello, now is a good time for Englishmen to have a go at settling in New England. Gorges, of course, was already in that frame of mind. And with an estimated 95% of New England’s Indians dead, the English in New England would have nothing to fear —unlike the Virginia Company, whose Jamestown colony was almost wiped off the map in 1622, when local Indians finally got fed up of them.

Gorges and his colleagues continued to stress that Indians would benefit from conversion to Anglican Christianity. And Gorges wasn’t just paying lip service: He wrote about this a lot. Pilgrims and Puritans did not have a monopoly on Christianity, and, as we'll see, they had an increasingly hostile and contemptuous attitude to Indians. Gorges also thought that colonization was a risky business (imagine that) with no guarantee of success. But he had the resources to keep trying, thanks to the combined wealth of the Council for New England.

Of course, to create a colony, Gorges had to make sure that control of New England went to him and his associates, not to the French, or some crazy unofficial Englishmen who might do more harm than good. That’s why he needed someone to be his eyes and ears on the ground. That someone would be Thomas Morton.

A Little Ship Heads for Virginia

In 1621, the Council for New England, trying to prevent colonial competition, fired off letters to the administrators of southern English ports, urging them to stop any unofficial ships headed for New England.

A year earlier, a little ship with a tiny passenger load had left England for America, right under Ferdinando Gorges’s nose in Plymouth. He might have even watched it sail out of the harbor. But, if so, no worries: This ship was not headed for New England, but for Virginia, for the area around the Jamestown colony. This ship was funded by the Merchant Adventurers of London (Inc.) whose members hoped the settlers would turn a profit, and repay them the cost of the voyage with interest. If this was today, their logo would have been on the side of the ship, and the colonists would have been wearing corporate T-shirts.

On board were about a hundred English people. Among them were about thirty annoying religious fanatics (in the eyes of everyone else), who were failed emigrants to the Netherlands who had recently returned to England. This handful of people were planning to set up a little colony in Virginia, and they had a proper document, a charter, from the King giving them permission to set up home somewhere in the general area of Jamestown. Everyone else on board was pretty much just headed to economic opportunity in Virginia.

But the ship got lost. The captain ended up taking his motley crew of passengers much further north, to New England, where Ferdinando Gorges and his colleagues had exclusive colonizing rights. The passengers, super-religious or not, stayed on the ship until they hammered out how they would all somehow live together in this unexpected place.

The ship, of course, was called the Mayflower. They named the place they settled “Plymouth”. The year was 1620.

That was the same year a certain English lawyer named Thomas Morton married his client, Alice Miller.

Soon, Morton’s destiny would become entwined with the New England dreams of Sir Ferdinando Gorges.

Read Part 2 of The Man Who Told the Puritans "Up Yours" or, better yet, order a copy of Peter C. Mancall, The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England from your public library or favorite bookstore!

Eager to get started on the full story? Order a copy of Peter C. Mancall, The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England from your public library or favorite bookstore.

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