The Problem With Being Merry!

"We may look peaceful, but watch out!"

I feel I can't justify giving the Pilgrims only one post.  We only think of them around Thanksgiving and associate them with pumpkin pies, green bean casseroles and a turkey baking in an oven.  The Pilgrims are more than food.  They were devoted to God and left their homeland for the promise of religious freedom.  However, a man named Thomas Morton, would threaten their utopia.

Thomas Morton arrived in what is now Quincy, Massachusetts in 1625, shortly before he was to accompany Captain Wollaston and several men to Virginia.  Morton, however, decided not to go to Virginia.  Instead he remained in Massachusetts, removed Wollaston's lieutenant and renamed the existing settlement Merry Mount.  Morton wasn't a religious radical like the Pilgrims.  He was a full-blooded Anglican who openly had intimate relations with native women, celebrated all the old English holidays with lots of drinking and continued the pagan practice of the Maypole.

Merry Mount was a neighboring settlement of Plymouth and instead of having a nice block party in May, an unfortunate and hysterical incident occurred.  Morton nor William Bradford, however, would ever find this story funny and are rolling in their graves as I write.  None the less, historians and authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne have found this incident funny enough.

The Pilgrims, motivated by jealousy (the Indians preferred trading with Morton over the Pilgrims) and desiring their land not to be corrupted by sinful, pagan behavior, arrested Morton during the annual May Day festival.  Being to drunk to resist, the Pilgrims arrested him and cut down the Maypole.  The only person hurt was one of Morton's men, who was so inebriated he walked into Captain Miles Standish's sword and got a nose bleed.

The May-Pole at Merry Mount

After the arrest, Morton was exiled to the Island of Shoals with nothing more than the clothes on his back.  Luckily for Morton, the Indians took pity on him and feed and clothed him until an English fishing boat would rescue him.  Morton, however, was never one to give up and returned to New England several years later.  The Puritans, hating him even more than the Pilgrims, arrested him, tried him in a court of law and sentenced him first to the stocks and than exile.  The exact charges against Morton are unknown, because even the Puritans knew he wasn't guilty of anything.

When you sit down for your Thanksgiving dinner next Thursday, remember that the Pilgrims, like any other group in history, were a complicated bunch with conflicting desires.  They sought religious freedom and bravely sailed across the ocean to an unknown land.  Their desire for religious freedom, however, only applied to themselves

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A Forgotten Man in a Haunted City

I don't sell enough t-shirts or knick knacks, which is why you know nothing about me.

It's Halloween week, which reminds me of my trip to Salem, Massachusetts.  About five springs ago, I went to visit my aunt and uncle in Connecticut.  Being a lover of anything history, we saw many of the typical historic sites.  On my last day, we visited Salem and I was sorely disappointed.  Besides some good Thai food, Salem was a typical, over commercialized tourist attraction.

When most people think of Salem, they think of dour, self righteous Puritans and the witch trails of 1692.  I, however, think of one person, Roger Conant.  Conant was a simple fisherman, who set sail from England in 1623 and lived for several years with the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock.  Finding the Pilgrims to strict and their religious sentiments to confining, he founded Salem, Massachusetts in 1626 and served as it's first governor.

Besides a tall, imposing statute of Conant in Salem's square, there is nothing of him that remains.  His house is gone, his name erased and even his burial place is uncertain.  Instead, everything in Salem focuses on witches. There is a Salem Witch Museum, a wax museum and a 17th century grave yard featuring the judges at the Salem witch trails (one of whom was Nathaniel Hawthorn's ancestor).

A judge in the Salem Witch Trails and an ancestor of Nathaniel Hawthorne

 While Salem's official website mentions other historic attractions, which focus on its maritime and literary history, Salem has created the image as the Disney World of Halloween.  Now, I have nothing wrong with a city trying to attract tourists, but it is sad when a city perverts its own history to attract visitors.  The fact that it was and is a thriving metropolitan, maritime city, founded by a man courageous enough to disagree with the Pilgrim's religious beliefs, is all but forgotten.  Americans like history, but only if it sells.

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