[125] There is some confusion about these dates. The letter itself is dated the 1st of May, and the commission is here said on that day to have passed the great seal. The commissioners may have designated Gorges as governor-general at this time, and ordered a commission as such to be at once made out to him; but a year later the King’s intention of appointing him was formally announced. (Proc. of Amer. Antiq. Soc., 1867, p. 120.) The probability is that the business relating to the colonies was regarded as of little moment and done in the most careless and irregular way, hardly a record even of it being kept. Some proceedings were thus begun and not carried out, and other things were done twice.
[126] Morton is here quoting from the New Canaan, (p. *188) and its very last page. It would seem, therefore, now to have been written, though it was not published until three years later. (See Infra, pp. 78-9.)
[128] This letter is in Hubbard, pp. 428-30 (II. Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. vi.), and in Winthrop, vol. ii. pp. *190-1. The readings do not materially differ, but the punctuation has been corrected and the spelling is modern.
[129] Mem. Hist. of Boston, vol. i. p. 379, n.
[130] Winthrop, vol. i. p. *137.
[131] Winthrop, vol. i. p. *143.
[132] Ib., vol i. p. *102.
[133] Autobiography of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, vol. ii. p. 118.
[134] Winthrop, vol. i. p. *172.
[136] Bradford, pp. 329-30.
[138] Palfrey, vol. i. p. 401 n. Mem. Hist. of Boston, vol. i. p. 341.
[139] Winthrop, vol. i. p. *161, *187.
[140] Palfrey, vol. i. p. 403. Mem. Hist. of Boston, vol. i. p. 343.
[141] In January, 1640, Richard Vines wrote to Governor Winthrop, of Sir Ferdinando, that he was then “nere 80 yeares ould.” (IV. Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. vii. p. 342.) This can hardly be correct, however, as subsequently he served on the royal side in the civil wars, and was among the prisoners taken by Fairfax when he stormed Bristol in September, 1645. (III. Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. iii. p. 342.) He must, however, have then been a very old man, as fifty-four years before, in 1591, he had distinguished himself at the siege of Rouen, in Essex’s English contingent. (Devereux’s Earls of Essex, vol. i. p. 271).
[143] See further on this subject, Winthrop, vol. i. pp. *161, *187; which is also referred to in the same work, vol. ii. p. *12.
[144] Hazard, vol. i. p. 400.
[145] IV. Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. vi. p. 127.
[146] Winthrop, vol. i. p. *231.
[147] IV. Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. vii. p. 330.
[151] Winthrop, vol. i. p. *137.
[152] Bradford, p. 254.
[153] III. Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. vi. p. 81.
[154] Winthrop, vol. ii. p. *12.
[155] IV. Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. vii. p. 331.
[156] Hazard, vol. i. p. 474.
[157] Hutchinson’s State Papers, p. 106.
[158] Winthrop, vol. i. p. *264.
[159] Winthrop, vol. i. p. *266.
[160] Winthrop, vol. i. p. *269.
[161] Ib., p. *298.
[162] Bradford, p. 375.
[163] IV. Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. vi. p. 175.
[165] See Mr. Deane’s note on the “Plough patent,” in IV. Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. vii. pp. 88-96. Also the note on Cleaves, Ib. p. 363. D’Israeli (Curiosities of Literature, vol. iii. p. 488) gives a singular anecdote of Rigby.
[166] IV. Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. vii. p. 343.
[167] IV. Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. vi. p. 148.
[168] Palfrey, vol. ii. p. 147, n.
[169] Winthrop, vol. ii. p. *189.
[171] Winthrop, vol. i. p. *298.
[172] N. Y. Hist. Soc. Coll., 1869, p. 40.
[173] Records, vol. ii. p. 90.
[174] Hist. of New England, vol. ii. p. 225.
[176] Winthrop, vol. ii. p. *192.
[177] New York Hist. Soc. Coll., 1869, p. 40.
[178] “It is undeniable that Morton became an object of aversion largely for the reason that he used the Prayer Book.” (Mag. of Amer. Hist., vol. viii. p. 83.)
[179] White’s Memoirs of the Protestant Episcopal Church, p. xxii. n. See also Oliver’s Puritan Commonwealth, pp. 37-9.
[181] Mag. of Amer. Hist., vol. viii. p. 89.
[182] Wonder-Working Providence, p. 30.
[183] “Such a rake as Morton, such an addle-headed fellow as he represents himself to be, could not be cordial with the first people from Leyden, or with those who came over with the patent, from London or the West of England. I can hardly conceive that his being a Churchman, or reading his prayers from a Book of Common Prayer, could be any great offence. His fun, his songs and his revels were provoking enough, no doubt. But his commerce with the Indians in arms and ammunition, and his instructions to those savages in the use of them, were serious and dangerous offences, which struck at the lives of the new-comers, and threatened the utter extirpation of all the plantations.” (Notes of John Adams, 1802.)
[186] Winthrop, vol. ii. p. *14.
[187] Winthrop, vol. ii. p. *166.
[188] See Deane’s note to Bradford, p. 254.
[189] Harvard Univ. Library Bulletin, No. 10, p. 244.
[191] Mag. of Amer. Hist., vol. viii. p. 94, n.
[192] Mr. DeCosta says that the titlepage of the copy in the Library of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel reads in this way. Mag. of Amer. Hist., vol. viii. p. 94, n. 4.
[193] This copy was in the Adams Library for many years, and until within a quite recent period. It cannot, however, now (1882) be found. It would appear to have been stolen, together with many other volumes and almost innumerable autographs, which formerly lent a peculiar value to the John Adams Collection, given by him in 1822 to the town of Quincy.
[194] “Mint and cumin” uniformly appears as “muit and cummin;” “humming-bird” as “hunning-bird.”
[195] Ante, pp. 61-3.
[196] In regard to the Board of Lords Commissioners of 1634, see supra, 57-60. The royal letter patent in the original Latin is in Hazard, vol. i. pp. 344-7. There are translations of it in Hubbard (pp. 264-8) and in Bradford (pp. 456-8), together with notes by Harris in his edition of the former, and by Deane in the latter.
[197] [seth.] Wherever in this edition an apparently obvious misprint in the text of 1637 has been, as in the present case, corrected, the misprinted word, as it appears in the original, is printed between brackets as a foot-note.
[200] [stife.]
[201] [muit.]
[202] The Isle of Sall appears on the map in the Geography of Peter Heylyn, London, 1674, as one of the Cape Verde Islands. It is called in the text Insula Salis, and on other old maps Isle of Sal, or Ilha do Sal. There are some ten islands in the group. Professor J. D. Whitney writes that several islands are known by the name of Sall, and that the one referred to by Morton is probably that off the north shore of Cuba. “A good deal has been written about the poisonous fishes of the waters about the island of Cuba. The disease produced by eating poisonous fish is called ciguatera, and the fish itself is said to be ciguato. All that is definitely known about the matter seems to be that quite a large number of species of fish in that region are believed to be liable to some disease, the nature and course of which is unknown; and that those who eat the fish thus diseased are themselves liable to be attacked by the malady called ciguatera.”
[203] Morton here apparently refers at second hand to Aristotle’s resumé of the ancient belief of five zones, two only of which were habitable. Meteorologica, B. II. ch. v. § 11.
[204] From this passage it would appear that the Isle of Sall and the tropical waters, which Morton in this chapter refers to as having been visited by him, were in the neighborhood of the Western and Cape Verde Islands. In his time the word tornado had probably not been adopted into the English language, and in writing it Morton gives to the letter d the peculiar Western Island or Portuguese pronunciation.
[205] Morton here confounds Davis with Hudson. Davis’s three voyages were made in 1585-6-7, and it was in the first of them that he discovered the straits which bear his name. He afterwards made five voyages to the East Indies, in the last of which he was killed in a fight with some Japanese on the coast of Malacca. Hudson made four voyages between 1607 and 1610, during the last of which he passed a winter, frozen in, near the entrance to Hudson Bay. His crew mutinied, and turned him adrift in an open boat, on the 22d of July, 1610. He was never heard of again; and it is his “fate,” probably, which Morton had in mind. No other noted discoverer of the Northwest Passage was lost prior to 1634. The discovery of that passage, however, then excited as active an interest as it has since, or does now. In 1632 Edward Howes sent out to Governor Winthrop a printed “Treatise of the North-West Passage” (IV. Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. vi. p. 480) which is still in the library of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
[206] The phrase in the Meteorologica (ubi supra, 117, note 1.) is, “the parts under the Bear (i.e., north) by cold are uninhabitable.”
[208] “18. Yea, I hated all my labor which I had taken under the sun: because I should leave it unto the man that shall be after me.
“19. And who knoweth whether he shall be a wise man or a fool?”
Ecclesiastes, ch. ii. vers. 18, 19.
[209] Sir Ferdinando Gorges, of Ashton Phillips in Somerset, has already been frequently referred to in the introductory portions of this volume. Of an old West Country family and pure English descent, he was born about the year 1560 (IV. Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. vii. p. 329). He early devoted himself to a military and naval life, and in 1591 served under Essex at the siege of Rouen. Subsequently he is said to have been wounded, either at Amiens, or during the siege of Paris by Henry IV. In consequence of his services he was appointed by Queen Elizabeth royal governor of Plymouth, and in 1597 was designated as one of the staff of Essex in the Ferrol expedition, with the title of Sergeant-Major. In 1601 he was concerned in Essex’s insurrection, and was one of the principal witnesses against the Earl at his trial. After a considerable period of imprisonment he was released, and, on the accession of James I., was reappointed governor of Plymouth. In 1605 he became interested in American discovery and colonization, and in 1607 he was one of the projectors of the Popham colony in Maine. During the next thirteen years he was engaged in fishing and trading ventures to New England, and indefatigable in collecting information as to America. (Palfrey, vol. i. p. 79.) In 1620 he procured from James I. the great patent of the Council for New England. In 1623 he sent out the Robert Gorges expedition which settled itself at Wessagusset. (Supra, 2-4.) His subsequent connection with Morton, and his intrigues against the Massachusetts colony and charter, have been sufficiently referred to in this volume. During the Civil War Gorges espoused the royal side, and was made a prisoner when Fairfax captured Bristol in August 1645. He died probably about the 10th of May 1647, as he was buried on the 14th of that month.
In regard to Gorges, see Belknap’s American Biography; Folsom’s Catalogue of Original Documents in the English Archives relating to the Early History of the State of Maine; Williamson’s Maine; Palfrey’s New England (vol. i.); Poole’s Introduction to Johnson’s Wonder Working Providence; Devereux’s Earls of Essex (vol. i.); and the Briefe Narration (III. Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. vi. p. 44), and Gorges’s own letters, to Winthrop and others, in the Winthrop Papers. (IV. Mass. Hist. Coll., vol. vii.)
[211] These are the Inner Harbor (Boston), so called, and Dorchester, Quincy, and Weymouth bays. The latter includes all the inlets south and west of Nut and Pettuck’s islands and Hull, among which is Hingham Bay.
[212] “Sleetch, n. The thick mud or slush lying at the bottom of rivers.” Webster.
[215] In the letter already quoted from (Supra, 14), Mr. J. H. Trumbull remarked that “Morton, as he shows in chap. ii. of book I., could not write the most simple Indian word without a blunder.” As respects the words which Morton believed to be Indian-Greek, Mr. Trumbull has further kindly furnished the following notes: “En animia—Wunanumau, as Eliot wrote it, signifies ‘he is well disposed, or well minded toward another,’ or ‘is pleased with’ him. There is another word, nearly related, which Morton may have had in mind, meaning ‘to help,’ ‘do a favor to,’—aninumeh, ‘help me’ (Eliot), anúnime (R. Williams).”
[216] “Paskanontam (Eliot), ‘he suffers from hunger,’ ‘is starving.’ In Eliot’s orthography, paskuppoo would signify ‘he eats hungrily,’ or ‘as if starving,’ and from this comes the verbal Paskup-wen or Paskuppoo-en ‘a starving eater’—Morton’s ‘greedy gut.’”
[217] “Eliot’s paskanontam, as above, which is well enough translated by ‘halfe starved.’”
[218] “I can make nothing of these words. They certainly do not mean ‘set it upright.’”
[219] “An island is munnoh (Eliot).”
[220] “Here Morton mistook the word. Cos is, probably, Koüs (Eliot), ‘sharp-pointed,’ or, from the same root, mukqs, (Eliot), mucks (R. Williams), ‘an awl,’ used for boring wampum, beads, &c.; cau-ompsk (R. Williams) was ‘a whetstone,’ i. e., a sharpening stone.”
[221] “Om (aum, Eliot), is fish-hook; aumau-i, ‘he is fishing’ (with hook and line,) R. Williams; whence omaën, (Eliot) ‘a fisherman.’”
[222] “Probably misprinted for Pantucket—the equivalent of Pautucket, meaning ‘at the fall’ of the river. (The n was not distinctly sounded, but represents the nasalization of the preceding vowel.)”
[223] “Mattapan means ‘sitting down’—or ‘a setting down’—and usually designates the end of a ‘carry’ or portage, where the canoes were put in water again.”
[224] Winslow, in his Relations, says of the Indians: “The people are very ingenious and observative; they keep account of time by the moon, and winters or summers; they know divers of the stars by name; in particular they know the north star, and call it maske, which is to say, the bear.” (Young’s Chron. of Pilg., pp. 365-6.) See also to the same effect, Roger Williams’s Key (Publications of the Narragansett Club, vol. i.) and Mr. Trumbull’s note (p. 105). Mr. Trumbull now further adds: “The name (maske) was given to Ursa Major or Charles’s Wain, not to the North Star; and by nearly all Algonkin tribes. An interesting note on this point can be found in Hopkins’s Hist. Memorials of the Housatonic Indians (p. 11), and another in Dawson’s Acadian Geology (2d ed. p. 675), showing that the Micmacs still know that constellation as Mooin, ‘the bear.’”
[225] Roger Williams, in the preface to his Key (p. 23), says: “Wise and judicious men, with whom I have discoursed, maintain their [the Indians] original to be northward from Tartaria.” The Asiatic origin of the North American Indians was a necessary part of the scriptural dogma of the origin and descent of man. It is safe, however, to assert that, first and last, every possible theory on this subject has been carefully elaborated. It is not necessary, in connection with the New Canaan, to enter into the discussion, as the views of those, from St. Gregory to Voltaire, who have taken part in it, have been laboriously collected by Drake in his Book of Indians (ch. ii.).
[228] David Thomson occupied the island in Boston Harbor, which still bears his name, from some time in 1625, apparently, until his death in 1628 (supra, 24). He left a widow and an only son, who inherited the island. Originally, Thomson seems to have been a messenger, or possibly an agent, of the Council for New England. In November, 1622, a patent, covering a considerable tract of land, was issued to him, and the next year, he then being apparently a young man and newly married, he came out and established himself at Piscataqua, whence he afterwards moved to Boston Harbor. All that is known of Thomson can be found in Mr. Deane’s Notes to an Indenture, &c., in the Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc., 1876 (pp. 358-81). See also, Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc., 1878 (p. 204), and Memorial History of Boston (vol. i. p. 83).
[229] Morton’s attempt to trace the origin of the North American Indians from Brutus, and the support he finds for his theory in the resemblance of some Indian to Greek words, there being no reason to suppose that Brutus or the Latins had any acquaintance with Greek, reads like a humorous satire on the historical methods in vogue with the writers of his time. Until within the last century there were two historical events, or events assumed to be historical, to one or the other of which it was deemed safe to refer the origin of any modern nation. These events were the Siege of Troy and the Flood,—the profane and the sacred beginnings of modern history. Morton wrote in 1635, and his mind naturally had recourse to the profane theory. Fifteen years later, Milton began his history of England, and at the outset came in contact with Brutus. “That which we have,” he then remarks, “of oldest seeming, hath by the greater part of judicious antiquaries been long rejected for a modern fable.” He nevertheless “determined to bestow the telling over even of these reputed tales, ... seeing that ofttimes relations heretofore accounted fabulous have been after found to contain in them many footsteps and reliques of something true; as what we read in poets of the flood, and giants little believed, till undoubted witnesses taught us that all was not feigned.” Then passing on, he says: “After the flood, and the dispersing of nations, as they journeyed leisurely from the East, Gomer, the eldest son of Japhet, and his offspring, as by authorities, arguments and affinity of divers names is generally believed, were the first that peopled all these west and northern climes.” Coming down to Brutus and the whole progeny of kings, and following Geoffrey of Monmouth, Milton then recounts in detail the marriages, voyages, adventures and mishaps of the descendants of Æneas until Brutus reached an “island, not yet Britain but Albion, in a manner desert and inhospitable; kept only by a remnant of giants, whose excessive force and tyranny had destroyed the rest. These Brutus destroys,” and, after this, “in a chosen place, builds Troja Nova, changed in time to Trinovantum, now London.”
The superiority of Morton’s historical method to Milton’s, or to that in use in Milton’s time, is obvious. Accepting the common origin, he premises that he does not find that “when Brutus did depart from Latium his whole number went with him at once.” Accordingly, some of them being put to sea, “might encounter with a storm,” and then being carried out of sight of land, “they might sail God knoweth whether, and so might be put on this coast, as well as any other.” And hence the author is “bold to conclude that the original of the natives of New England may be well conjectured to be from the scattered Trojans, after such time as Brutus departed from Latium.”
It would be easy to quote from many serious productions, contemporaneous with the New Canaan and a century after it, examples of the same method of daring historical hypothesis; a single instance will, however, suffice. In his history of Lynn, written in 1829, the Rev. Alonzo Lewis says (p. 21): “The Indians are supposed by some to be the remnants of the long lost ten tribes of Israel; and their existence in tribes, the similarity of some of their customs, and the likeness of many words in their language, seem to favor this opinion.”
More sensible than either Thomas Morton or Mr. Lewis, William Wood, in writing his New England’s Prospect, in 1633, remarks (p. 78), that “Some have thought they [the Indians] might be of the dispersed Jews, because some of their words be near unto the Hebrew; but by the same rule they may conclude them to be some of the gleanings of all nations, because they have words which sound after the Greek, Latin, French, and other tongues.”
There is in the Magnalia (book III. part iii.) a lengthy but highly characteristic passage, in which Mather recounts the points of resemblance which the evangelist Eliot saw between the Indians and “the posterity of the dispersed and rejected Israelites.”