[30] Morton uniformly speaks of the place as Ma-re-Mount, and John Adams on this point commented in his notes as follows:—“The Fathers of Plymouth, Dorchester, Charlestown, &c., I suppose would not allow the name to be Ma-re-Mount, but insisted upon calling it Merry-Mount, for the same reason that the common people in England will not call gentlemen’s ornamental grounds gardens, but insist upon calling them pleasure-grounds, i. e., to excite envy and make them unpopular.”
Ma-re-Mount, however, was a characteristic bit of Latin punning on Morton’s part, designed to tease his more austere neighbors. He himself says (Infra, [*132]): “The inhabitants of Passonagessit, having translated the name of their habitation from that ancient salvage name to Ma-re-Mount ... the precise seperatists that lived at New Plimmouth stood at defiance with the place threatening to make it a woefull mount and not a merry mount.” (Infra, [*134].) In view of the situation of the place, Ma-re-Mount was a very appropriate name, but it may well be questioned whether it was ever so called by any human being besides Morton, or by him except in print. Bradford calls it Merie-mounte. (p. 237.) The expression used by Morton, that they “translated the name” from Passonagessit to Ma-re-Mount, would naturally suggest that the Indian name might find its equivalent in the Latin one, and mean simply “a hill by the sea.” On this point, however, J. Hammond Trumbull writes: “Morton’s ‘Passonagessit’ has been a puzzle to me every time it has caught my eye since I first marked it twenty years ago or more with double (??). Morton, as he shows in chap. ii. of book I., could not write the most simple Indian word without a blunder. What may have been the name he makes ‘Passonagessit’ we cannot guess, unless it survives in some early record. There is no trace of ‘sea,’ or ‘water,’ or ‘mount’ in it. If it stands for Pasco-naig-és-it, it means ‘at [31] Bradford, p. 253. [32] Whitney’s Hist. of Quincy, p. 18. [34] Josselyn says of the “Indesses,” as he calls them, “All of them are of a modest demeanor, considering their savage breeding; and indeed do shame our English rusticks whose rudeness in many things exceedeth theirs.” (Two Voyages, pp. 12, 45.) When the Massachusets Indian women, in September, 1621, sold the furs from their backs to the first party of explorers from Plymouth, Winslow, who wrote the account of that expedition, says that they “tied boughs about them, but with great shamefacedness, for indeed they are more modest than some of our English women are.” (Mourt, p. 59.) See also, to the same effect, Wood’s Prospect, (p. 82.) It suggests, indeed, a curious inquiry as to what were the customs among the ruder classes of the British females during the Elizabethan period, when all the writers agree in speaking of the Indian women in this way. Roger Williams, for instance, referring to their clothing, says: “Both men and women within doores, leave off their beasts skin, or English cloth, and so (excepting their little apron) are wholly naked; yet but few of the women but will keepe their skin or cloth (though loose) neare to them, ready to gather it up about them. Custome hath used their minds and bodies to it, and in such a freedom from any wantonnesse that I have never seen that wantonnesse amongst them as, (with griefe) I have heard of in Europe.” (Key, pp. 110-11.) And he adds, “More particular: “Many thousand proper Men and Women, I have seen met in one place: Almost all naked, yet not one