A little below Phillips Creek, the Monatoquit River empties into the bay, and across the river lies a fair height, now included in the town of Quincy, but then known as Passonagessit, whence one might then, and still may, look east and north upon the lovely archipelago of Boston Harbor, or westward to the blue hills of Milton. On its eastern face this height of Passonagessit sloped gently to the sea, with good harborage for boats at its foot, promising facilities for fishing and for traffic with the northern Indians.
Upon this headland in the early summer of 1625 a wild and motley crowd of adventurers pitched their tents, and soon replaced the canvas with comfortable log-houses and a stockaded inclosure. The leader of this company was one Captain Wollaston, perhaps the same adventurer whom Captain John Smith of Pocahontas memory encountered, some fifteen years before, on the high seas, acting as lieutenant to one Captain Barry, an English pirate. With Wollaston were three or four partners, and a great crew of bound servants, men who had either pledged their own time, or been delivered into temporary slavery as punishment by English magistrates, and the purpose of the leaders was to found a settlement like that of Plymouth. The place was named Mount Wollaston by the white men, while the Indians continued to call it Passonagessit, just as they still speak of Weymouth as Wessagusset. One New England winter, however, cooled the courage of Captain Wollaston, as it had that of Robert Gorges, and in the spring of 1626 he took about half his bound men to Virginia, where he sold their services to the tobacco planters at such a profit, that he wrote back to Mr. Rasdall, his second in command, to bring down another gang as soon as possible, and to leave Mount Wollaston in charge of Lieutenant Fitcher, until he himself should return thither.
Rasdall obeyed, and in making his parting charges to Fitcher remarked,—
“All should go well, so that you keep Thomas Morton in check. Give him his head and he will run away with you and Wollaston.”
Fitcher assented with a rueful countenance, for he knew himself to be but a timid rider, and the Morton a most unruly steed, and the event proved his fears well grounded, for Rasdall had not reached Virginia before Morton in the lieutenant’s temporary absence called the eight remaining servants together, produced some bottles of rum, a net of lemons, and a bucket of sugar, to which he bade his guests heartily welcome, greeting each man jovially by name, and telling them that the time had come to throw off their chains, to assert their rights, and to reap for themselves the benefit of their hard work. He assured them that he, although a gentleman, a learned lawyer, and a man of means, felt himself no whit above them, and asked nothing better than to live with them in liberty, fraternity, and equality, finally proposing that they should seize upon “the plant” of Mount Wollaston, turn Lieutenant Fitcher out of doors, and establish a commonwealth of their own. No sooner said than done! The men whom Morton addressed were, in fact, the dregs of the company left behind by Wollaston as not worth trading off. Perhaps he never intended to come back to claim them; perhaps if indeed he had been a pirate he took Morton’s action as nothing more than a reasonable proceeding; at any rate this disappearance of Captain Wollaston and Lieutenant Rasdall was final, and except that the neighborhood of Passonagessit is still called Wollaston Heights, the very name of this adventurer would probably have been forgotten.
It was at any rate disused, for so soon as Lieutenant Fitcher had been, as he reported to Bradford, “thrust out a dores,” the name of the place was changed to Merry Mount, and the life of debauch and profligacy promised by Morton inaugurated; as a natural consequence, Merry Mount soon acquired so wide a fame for license and disorder that it became the resort of the lawless adventurers who haunted the coast in those days, sometimes calling themselves fishermen, sometimes privateers, and sometimes buccaneers, and the whole affair grew to be a scandal, not only to Godfearing Plymouth, but to those other settlements, of sober, law-abiding folk, scattered up and down the coast, especially when in the spring of 1627 Morton set up a Maypole at Merry Mount, and proclaimed a Saturnalia of a week.
Now a Maypole, and dancing around it crowned with flowers, is in our day a very pretty and pastoral affair, only open to the objections of cold, wet, and absurdity. But in old English times it was a very different matter, being in effect a remnant of heathenesse, and the profligate worship of the goddess Flora. William Bradford, writing an account of the attack upon Merry Mount, expresses himself thus:—
“They allso set up a Maypole, drinking and dancing aboute it many days togeather, inviting the Indean women for their consorts, dancing and frisking togeather like so many fairies (or furies, rather) and worse practices. As if they had anew revived and celebrated the feastes of the Roman goddes Flora, or the beastly practices of the madd Bacchinalians.”
Although Plymouth and its neighbors were shocked at these practices, they would not probably have interfered, beyond a remonstrance, with the amusements of the Merry Mountaineers had the matter stopped there, but, as the delegates to Plymouth represented, the selling of fire-arms to the Indians, teaching them to shoot, and inflaming their murderous passions with alcohol, was a very different matter, a matter of public import, and one to be arrested by any means before it went farther.