A pleasant field, for the presence of the sea dwelt there and was not terrible and alien,—a field in which the hot, earthy odours distilled by an August sun mingled pleasantly with the fragrance of salt meadows. The sea birds of the North knew it, and ran along the edge of the ebbing tide, shadows of gulls passed swiftly over its bending grass, the plover rose piping from the reeds, and there were pondlets in it, in tiny round hollows, by whose shores yellow-speckled turtles sunned their backs. The Indians called the field Passonagessit.
Such was the domain of open land which Wollaston, the English trader, saw upon the greenwood shore of the “Bay of Massachusees” on a morning in early summer in the year 1625. The wilderness was his alone. Save for a small and declining trading station established at Wessagusset on what is now the Weymouth shore, the sylvan bay was an uninhabited land. The great Puritan migration of 1630-31, which was to found the town of Boston, was still six years away, and only at Plymouth, some forty miles south along the coast, did the New England forest echo to the day-long sermon soon to thunder through the land.
The imagination rebuilds the scene of the landing, Wollaston’s vessel anchored off the field, the shallop and her little boats plying between her and the shore, the ferrying over of the indentured bondmen, all well sunburnt from their long voyage and longing for a smell of fresh victuals on their wooden plates, the unloading of the stores, “the implaments,” the ancient muzzle loading muskets and fowling pieces, and the bags of powder and ball. One sees Thomas Morton, in great-boots, cape and plume, coax his hunting dog into the boat, one hears the scrape of the keel upon the gravelly beach, and an excited barking—the advocate of Cliffords Inn and his cherished “dogge” have arrived in the new world.
Presently a brave ring of the axe,—a sound that echoes through American history,—floats down the field to the bay; houses and chimneys rise, and the little plantation takes shape in the Massachusetts wilderness.
The vagabond advocate, beholding the vast, unsullied greenwood, loved it with a devotion few have equalled. He wandered everywhere north and south, he visited Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, he went north beyond the beaches of New Hampshire to the surf and the ledges of Maine. It was in truth a noble wilderness, and to Thomas Morton it became a veritable promised land, a “New English Canaan.” His own “Bay of Massachusees” he thought “the paradise of those parts,” and meditating on its virtues, his mellow spirit broke into a fine, old-fashioned Elizabethan panegyric.
“The more I looked, the more I liked it. And when I had more seriously considered of the bewty of the place, with all her faire indowments, I did not thinke that in all the knowne world it could be paralel’d, for so many goodly groves of trees, dainty, fine, round, rising hillucks, delicate, faire, large plaines, sweet cristall fountaines, and cleare running streams that twine in fine meanders through the meads, making so sweete a murmuring noise to hear as lull the senses with delight asleepe, so pleasantly do they glide upon the pebble stones....”
The very words, “the bewty of the place,” reveal the man; the style of the passage his Elizabethan attitudes. In later years, he was to celebrate his love of the American landscape in the rich, full-flowered English of an Elizabethan marriage song.
“If Art and Industry should doe as much
As Nature hath for Canaan not such,
Another place, for benefit and rest,