[85] Morton says, in his New English Canaan, ch. vii. “There are great store of oysters in the entrance of all rivers. They are not round, as those of England, but excellent fat and all good. I have seen an oyster bank a mile in length. Muscles there are infinite store. I have often gone to Wessaguseus, where were excellent muscles to eat, (for variety,) the fish is so fat and large.”
[86] The word inclined or disposed seems to have been accidentally omitted.
[87] Morton says, “this man’s name was Phinehas Prat, who has penned the particulars of his perilous journey, and some other things relating to this tragedy.” Hubbard states that he was living in 1677, at the time he was writing his History of New England. In 1662 the General Court of Massachusetts, in answer to a petition of Phinehas Prat, then of Charlestown, which was accompanied “with a narrative of the straits and hardships that the first planters of this Colony underwent in their endeavours to plant themselves at Plymouth, and since, whereof he was one, the Court judgeth it meet to grant him 300 acres of land, where it is to be had, not hindering a plantation.” At the Court held May 3, 1665, it was ordered that land be laid out for Prat, “in the wilderness on the east of the Merrimack river, near the upper end of Nacook [Pennacook?] brook, on the southeast of it.” Prat married in 1630, at Plymouth, a daughter of Cuthbert Cuthbertson. His heirs had grants of land in Abington subsequent to 1672. Drake says that after long search he has not been able to discover Prat’s narrative. It was probably never printed. See Morton’s Memorial, p. 90; Drake’s Book of the Indians, b. ii. 35; Mass. Hist. Coll. xv. 78, xvii. 122.
[88] The notorious Thomas Morton, of Merry Mount, in his New English Canaan, b. iii. ch. 4, which was published in 1637, is the first writer who mentions a ludicrous fable connected with this execution, which has been made the occasion of some reproach on the first planters of New England. After relating the settlement of Weston’s colony at Weymouth, he mentions that one of them stole the corn of an Indian, and upon his complaint was brought before “a parliament of all the people” to consult what punishment should be inflicted on him. It was decided that this offence, which might have been settled by the gift of a knife or a string of beads, “was felony, and by the laws of England, punished with death; and this must be put in execution, for an example, and likewise to appease the salvage. When straightways one arose, moved as it were with some compassion, and said he could not well gainsay the former sentence, yet he had conceived within the compass of his brain an embryon, that was of special consequence to be delivered and cherished. He said that it would most aptly serve to pacify the salvage’s complaint, and save the life of one that might, if need should be, stand them in good stead, being young and strong, fit for resistance against an enemy, which might come unexpected, for any thing they knew. The oration made was like of every one, and he entreated to proceed to show the means how this may be performed. Says he, ‘You all agree that one must die; and one shall die. This young man’s clothes we will take off, and put upon one that is old and impotent, a sickly person that cannot escape death; such is the disease on him confirmed, that die he must. Put the young man’s clothes on this man, and let the sick person be hanged in the other’s stead.’ ‘Amen,’ says one, and so say many more. And this had liked to have proved their final sentence; but that one, with a ravenous voice, begun to croak and bellow for revenge, and put by that conclusive motion, alleging such deceits might be a means hereafter to exasperate the minds of the complaining salvages, and that by his death the salvages should see their zeal to justice; and therefore he should die. This was concluded;” and they “hanged him up hard by.”
This story of the unscrupulous Morton furnished Butler with the materials out of which he constructed the following fable in his Hudibras, part. ii. canto ii. line 409.
“Our brethren of New England use
Choice malefactors to excuse,
And hang the guiltless in their stead,
Of whom the churches have less need;
As lately happened. In a town,