Before Boston: Early Englishmen on the Bay (episode 360)

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Jake:
[0:04] Welcome to Hub History, where we go far beyond the Freedom Trail to share our favorite stories from the history of Boston, the hub of the universe.

Before Boston Colony

Jake:
[0:13] This is episode 360, Before Boston, Early Englishman on Massachusetts Bay. Hi, I’m Jake. This week, I’m talking about some of the earliest attempts to establish an English colony along the shores of Massachusetts Bay and Boston Harbor.

Jake:
[0:31] Before John Winthrop’s Puritan Arbella fleet made landfall in 1630 and set the standard narrative of Massachusetts Bay, a rowdy and disparate cast of English traders, eccentric recluses, and ill-fated opportunists was already carving out a precarious presence around Boston Harbor. In the decade before the Puritans named the colony that they laid claim to, Massachusetts its bay, the shores of the bay were shaped by European fishing fleets, catastrophic epidemics that devastated indigenous communities, and early, mostly failed attempts at permanent English habitation. From the ill-fated commercial colony at West Agusset to Thomas Morton’s egalitarian consociates at Marymount, these early experiments tested the bounds of survival, trade, and diplomacy on and around the Shawmet Peninsula. In this episode, we step back before the founding date on the city’s seal to explore the forgotten decade of pre-Puritan English settlement. We’re going to trace how early figures like Samuel Maverick at Winnipeg and William Blackston at Shawmet established their lonely outposts. We’ll navigate the tangled land claims created by competing charters, and we’ll examine the grim realities of early European impact on the region’s indigenous nations.

Jake:
[1:52] But before we talk about early English colonies on Massachusetts Bay, I just want to pause and say a big thank you to all the listener supporters who make it possible for me to keep making Hub History.

Jake:
[2:05] Believe it or not, we’re closing in on our 10th anniversary in just a couple of months. I love Boston history, and for almost a decade now, this show’s been a way to keep me from boring everybody around me, you know, the normal people who don’t care about Boston history, by talking directly to you, my fellow Boston history nerds. Before starting this show, I used to give walking tours of the Back Bay, and after that I served as a docent at the Shirley Eustace House for a little while, and that’s where we finally landed on the idea of this podcast. The show gives me an outlet for all the history that I know and an excuse to keep learning new stuff about the city that I love and call home. And your support makes this show possible by covering the expenses that it takes to make it. To everybody who’s already supporting the show, thank you. If you’re not yet supporting the show and you’d like to start, it’s easy. Just go to patreon.com slash hubhistory or visit hubhistory.com and click on the support us link. And thanks again to all our new and returning sponsors.

Jake:
[3:11] It’s easy for me to think of Boston history as starting in 1630. After all, that’s the date on the city seal. It says, Bostonia, Condita, 1630. It’s the date on all the entering Boston signs. It says, Established, 1630. There are other dates that we could trace our history back to. After all, indigenous nations like the Massachusetts, the Nipmuc, the Wampanoag, and the Pinnacook all called the lands surrounding the Shawmet Peninsula and the shores of Massachusetts Bay home. Long before any Europeans arrived to colonize these shores. In fact, they gave us the names Massachusetts and Shawmut to refer to the lands and waters of Boston.

Indigenous Shores

Jake:
[3:52] In this episode, though, I want to take a look at the Europeans and, more specifically, the Englishmen who attempted to colonize the shores of Massachusetts Bay before the Great Puritan Migration arrived with the Arbella fleet in 1630. And one other thing to take note of, I’m not really discussing the Plymouth Pilgrims very much in this episode. I know we’re all part of one state of Massachusetts today, but Plymouth Colony and the Massachusetts Bay Colony were completely independent of one another from their respective foundings in 1620 and 1630 until after the creation of the Dominion of New England in 1689. For more on the forced consolidation of the New English colonies under the hated governor Sir Edmund Andros, refer back to episode 165. In this episode, I’m going to focus on early English attempts to settle along Boston Harbor, from the sheltering arm of Nantasket to the south, who has mirror-imaged Nahant in the north.

Jake:
[4:53] One other thing to dispense with right off the top. If you’ve walked down Mount Auburn Street in Cambridge lately, or along the riverbanks behind Mount Auburn Hospital, you might have noticed stone monuments purporting to mark the spots where Vikings lived, including one that proclaims to be the site of Leif Erikson’s house. Right before the turn of the 20th century, a group of elite Bostonians, led by the wealthy and eccentric chemist Eben Horsford, were firmly convinced that Vikings had colonized the Charles River Valley 900 years before. If you want to learn more about the heady mix of wishful thinking, idealism, and a rabid xenophobia that led them to this conclusion, well, listen to episode 275. While Vikings, or Norsemen, I guess, did establish a colony way up in Newfoundland about a thousand years ago, no evidence has been found of another North American settlement that’s any closer to Boston.

Fishermen and Explorers

Jake:
[5:50] Instead, the first Europeans who visited Massachusetts Bay were fishermen. In 1504, a French ship spent the season fishing along the Grand Banks. They were soon followed by the Portuguese, the Dutch, and by Bosque whalers. By 1519, a hundred European ships would spend the summer on the banks, and some of them doubtless used the shelter of Boston Harbor and the safety of its islands as a base to repair and refit their ships, before making the return Atlantic crossing. In 1605 and 1606, Frenchman Samuel de Champlain would visit Cape Cod and Plymouth Harbor, and within a few years, English explorers began making their way to the shores of Massachusetts Bay. The first Englishman to publish a description of Massachusetts Bay and Boston Harbor was John Smith, who visited our bay on a 1614 voyage. By 1614, Captain John Smith was already famous for his role in founding the Jamestown settlement on the coast of Virginia. That summer in 1614, he returned to North America and he sailed the coasts of Maine and Massachusetts in search of whales and gold. He had little luck in finding either of those, but he did trade for a small fortune in beaver skins.

Jake:
[7:13] Among the many places he visited was Boston Harbor, with its archipelago of islands, about which he wrote, We doth enter a great bay where we found some habitations and cornfields. They report a great river and at least 30 habitations do possess this country. But because the French had got their trade, I had no leisure to discover it. The country of the Massachusetts is the paradise of all those parts, for here are many isles all planted with corn, groves, mulberries, savage gardens, and good harbors. The coast is for the most part high clay sandy cliffs. The seacoast as you pass shows you all along large cornfields and great troops of well-proportioned people.

Jake:
[8:01] After that, Thomas Prince’s chronological history of New England records early efforts by Ferdinando Gorges, who was involved in settlement schemes in both Massachusetts and Maine. According to this account, starting in 1608, Sir Ferdinando Gorges sends Richard Vines with a ship to fish, trade, and discover for some years together, and hires men to stay the winter, wherein plague raged among the Indians.

Jake:
[8:30] This overwintering party under Richard Vines made their camp up in Maine at the mouth of the Saco River, but it seems they made frequent visits to Massachusetts Bay to trade. They weren’t the only ones trading on the bay that year. In his 1637 book, A New English Canaan, Thomas Morton describes the fate of a French trading voyage to Boston Harbor that took place in roughly 1616. It fortuned some few years before the English came to inhabit it in New Plymouth in New England, that upon some distaste given in the Massachusetts Bay by the Frenchmen then trading there with the natives for beaver, they set upon the men at such advantage that they killed many of them, burned their ship, then riding at anchor by an island there, now called Pettick’s Island, in memory of Leonard Pettick that landed there, distributing them unto five sachems, which were lords of the several territories adjoining. They did keep them so long as they lived, only to sport themselves at them, and made these five Frenchmen fetch them wood and water, which is the general work that they require of a servant.

Jake:
[9:37] So in the earliest record of Europeans in the Boston Harbor Islands, the French traders at Pettix Island gave the locals enough of an offense that they killed most of the party, burned the ship, and then enslaved the few survivors.

Jake:
[9:53] It’s impossible to know whether the great epidemic that swept the coastal indigenous nations from 1616 to 1619 were brought by the French on Pettix Island, or the English under vines, or some other group of European traders or fishermen.

Jake:
[10:08] Thomas Morton, who we’ll hear more about in just a few moments, includes a description of the unthinkable mortality among local villages in his New English Cayman. The hand of God fell heavily upon them, with such a mortal stroke that they died in heaps as they lay in their houses, and the living that were able to shift for themselves would run away and let them die, and let their carcasses lie above ground without burial. For in a place where many inhabited, there had been but one left to live to tell what became of the rest. The living being not able to bury the dead, they were left for the crows, kites, and vermin to prey upon, and the bones and skulls upon the several places of their habitations made such a spectacle after my coming into those parts that, as I traveled in the forest near the Massachusetts, it seemed to me a newfound Golgotha. You can see why Morton might draw a parallel to the place of the skull, Golgotha, the biblical killing grounds where Jesus is said to have been crucified. As he walked through the now depopulated Massachusetts forests, Morton might have felt like Will Smith’s character in I Am Legend, imagining himself the last living man, surrounded by the remains of a dead world. There were unburied human remains among the trees, and among former village sites he found bodies piled up in heaps.

Jake:
[11:32] Elsewhere in the book, he notes that it is the custom of those Indian people to bury their dead ceremoniously and carefully, and to make some monuments over the place where the corpse is interred. So the very existence of these untended, unburied remains indicates the speed and severity of the apocalypse that had overtaken the Massachusetts people soon before his arrival. However it started, historians agreed that the winter of 1616 to 1617 was ground zero for the terrible epidemic. Historian Charles Francis Adams, in his three episodes of Massachusetts history, wrote, Throughout the years 1616 and 1617, the hand of death lay heavily on those then dwelling in the eastern portions of what’s now the state of Massachusetts. The savages died, as a writer of that time phrased it, like rotten sheep. Continuing, he said that the plague center would seem to have been Boston Bay, Writing in 2014, Mark Lasky described the extent of the epidemic. Reports from the period indicate that the epidemic covered an area that spanned from the Kennebec and Penobscot rivers of southern Maine to the Narragansett Bay of Rhode Island, with the highest rate of fatalities concentrated around Boston Harbor and Plymouth Bay.

Jake:
[12:53] Thomas Dermer sailed the Massachusetts coast in 1619 and reported, I passed along the coast where I found some ancient plantations not long since populous now utterly void. In other places a remnant remains but not free of sickness.

Jake:
[13:11] The next year, John Smith revisited Massachusetts Bay, as he recounts in the general history of Virginia. God had laid this country open for us and slain the most part of the inhabitants by cruel wars and a mortal disease. For where I had seen 100 or 200 people in 1614, there is scarce 10 to be found. You can listen to our episode 119 for more on the epidemics that swept indigenous New England and the gleeful language that people like King James I and Cotton Mather used to describe the, prodigious pestilence or wonderful plague that they believed God had sent to open up these shores for English colonization.

Weston’s Failed Colony

Jake:
[13:55] The first group who tried to create a permanent settlement on Massachusetts Bay arrived in North America aboard an English fishing vessel named the Sparrow. They were sponsored by wealthy London merchant Thomas Weston, who also helped arrange and bankroll the Mayflower voyage. The Maine Fishing Party made their summer home base around Booth Bay, Maine, while Weston’s colonists who’d hitched a ride with them sailed an additional 150 miles down the coast in a small open boat known as a shallop. I’ll include photos that I took of the restored Mayflower shallop in Plymouth Harbor a few years ago, but suffice it to say that I would not want to cross 150 miles of ocean in a shallop. And speaking of Plymouth Harbor, citing Winslow’s relation and Governor Bradford’s history of the Plymouth Colony, our New England chronology records that in the spring of 1622, Come into our harbor two ships of Mr. Weston’s with his letter of April 10th, and 50 or 60 men send it his own charge to settle a plantation for him in the Massachusetts Bay, for which he has procured a patent. They sailed from London about the last of April. The bigger ship leaves them, having many passengers to carry to Virginia. We allow this people housing, and many being sick, to have the best means our place affords.

Jake:
[15:20] Charles Francis Adams describes how the Weston colonists, who were not too sick to travel, searched for a new place to call their home. They set sail in their shallop, skirting along the coast. They touched the Isle of Shoals and the Cape Ann, and thence they ran for Boston Harbor, where they passed some four or five days exploring. They selected the southerly side of the bay as the best place for the proposed settlement, as in these parts there seemed to be the fewest natives and made a bargain with the sachem Aberdesist for what land they needed. It was August before the party reached its permanent quarters. There’s no record of the exact spot on which they placed their settlement, but a very general tradition assigns it to the north side of Phillips Creek. Not improbably, there was a better draft of water in that inlet than now, but it’s well established that the locality was to the south of the Four River, and the very sheltered character of the creek would naturally have suggested it to the explorers for the object they had in view. Today, Phillips Creek flows from east to west, just a few blocks north of the Abigail Adams Birthplace Home and Weymouth’s Old North Cemetery. If you travel north on North Street from the Birthplace Home, you’ll notice a high-tension power line crossing over by the corner of Pearl Street. Phillips Creek flows under North Street here, so the settlement that these colonists dubbed Wesagusset must have been somewhere in this vicinity.

Jake:
[16:49] Prince’s New England chronology continues, Mr. Weston’s people stay here, meaning in Plymouth, the most part of the summer, while some seek out a place for them. They exceedingly waste and steal our corn, and yet secretly revile us. At length, their coasters return, having found in the Massachusetts Bay a place they judged fit for settlement, named Wessagusset, since called Weymouth. Whither upon their ship, returning from Virginia, the body of them go, leaving their sick and lame with us till they had built some housing.

Jake:
[17:27] The Wessagusset colonists were ill-prepared to spend the summer in North America, much less to survive a New England winter. After being accused of stealing food from Plymouth, they were soon also accused of stealing food from their indigenous neighbors. Some of these complained to the Plymouth colony, but Plymouth had no authority over Weston’s group. Because 1622 was also a lean year for the separatists at Plymouth, the two colonies arranged a joint trading expedition among the native peoples of the coast to purchase food with trade goods brought by the Wessagusset colonists. The two colonies split the proceeds, giving them provisions to start off the long winter. By January, however, the Wessagusset colonists were hungry again. They kept trading with their Massachusetts neighbors, but with their trade goods long since spent, and their hollow cheeks giving evidence of their desperation, the colonists were at a severe disadvantage.

Jake:
[18:28] Soon they were forced to trade their clothes, blankets, tools, and other vital supplies. Some of the West Augustate colonists even entered into a form of servitude sort of like being an indentured servant, where they would build canoes and perform other labor for the Massachusetts in exchange for food. And even with that, ten of the colonists died before spring.

Wessagusset Massacre

Jake:
[18:52] The pattern of food theft by these colonists remained unbroken, and one Wessagusset man was caught stealing corn from a Massachusetts village. To curry favor with their neighbors, the other Wessagusset colonists hanged him in view of their neighbors.

Jake:
[19:08] By spring, though, the Massachusetts seemed to have had enough. An account published by the Massachusetts tribe at Ponkapog says, In 1622, the Poconocet chieftain Massasoit, who befriended the English colonists at Plymouth the year before and formed an alliance with them, warned Edward Winslow of a conspiracy being undertaken by several tribes to attack a second colony at West Agusset and the Plymouth Colony. The attack was to be led by the Massachusett and joined by the Nauset, Palmet, Succonet, Matacheist, Agawatwam, and Capuac tribes, and tribes from as far away as Martha’s Vineyard. As a result, the Plymouth Colony sent Miles Standish with a small army to West Agusset. Arriving on March 26th the following spring, 1623, Standish invited Massachusetts war chiefs Pexwit and Witawamut and several of principal Massachusetts leader Chickataubit’s most peaceful warriors to a peaceful summit, ambushed or poisoned them, and murdered them.

Jake:
[20:14] Several of the native villagers at West Augustet were killed as well. One warrior’s head was cut off and displayed on a pole as warning. Due to the savage attack at Wessagusset, Plymouth’s trade with the Indians was devastated for years. Local tribes which had previously been favorable to Plymouth began to forge bonds with other tribes in defense against the English, finally evolving into what was later called King Philip’s War.

Jake:
[20:43] Following the massacre, the Wessagusset colonists scattered. Some returned to England, some resettled at Casco Bay in Maine, and a handful joined the Plymouth Colony. You have to imagine that after all those reports of food theft, Miles Standish and his friends kept a close eye on the former Weston colonists in their midst. One of these refugees, Phineas Pratt, married in Plymouth and later moved to Puritan Charlestown, where he lived until his death at the age of 90 in 1677.

Gorges Returns

Jake:
[21:17] The abandoned English settlement at Weymouth would not remain abandoned for long. A walled village overlooking a sheltered harbor would prove to be a tempting destination for the next colonization project that came to the Massachusetts Bay.

Jake:
[21:32] This next settlement was both more official than the Wessagusset colony and seemed better prepared for the reality of life in distant New England. This one was led by the son and heir of the man who’d sponsored the earliest English overwintering settlements in North America, and it actually held a royal charter. Charles Francis Adams wrote, Wessagusset was not destined long to remain a solitude. Deserted in March, it was again occupied just six months later, for in the middle of September 1623, Captain Robert Gorgias, a son of that Sir Fernando whose name is so prominent in the early annals of New England, sailed up the Fore River and landed at Weston’s deserted plantation. His enterprise was of a quite different character from that which had preceded it. He held a grant from the Council of New England, covering a tract of land vaguely described as lying on the northeast side of Massachusetts Bay, as what is now known as Boston Bay was then called, and covering 10 miles of seafront while stretching 30 miles into the interior.

Jake:
[22:37] Unlike the Weston group, the West-Augusset colony under Robert Gorges included not only laborers and tradesmen, but also entire families. According to this plan, bringing families to New England would encourage a permanent settlement, so Gorges would enjoy the same success as the separatist families down in Plymouth. But the experiment didn’t last long. After a single winter in Weymouth, Gorges and almost everyone in his colony packed up and headed back to England, with Charles Francis Adams noting that he seemed thoroughly disgusted with the work of founding empires in the New World. Almost every colonist returned to England, though a handful went to Plymouth and joined the colony there. One man from the second West Augusta colony, William Blaxton, decided to take his chances on an easily defended peninsula that lay just a few miles to the north, a peninsula that the Massachusetts called Shawmet.

Maverick and Blackston

Jake:
[23:36] The next, more or less permanent English settlement on the Massachusetts Bay was a bit smaller, founded by a colonist from another gorgeous project. The documentary history of Samuel Maverick before he showed up on the Winnesemite Peninsula, what we now know as Chelsea, is pretty spotty. In his 1908 documentary history of Chelsea, Mellon Chamberlain speculates, He may have come by way of Piscataqua. He knew David Thompson of Piscataqua before the latter settled his island in Boston Bay, for in 1625, Thompson assisted him in building his house at Winnesemite. Piscataqua was a colony founded by Ferdinando Gorges along the river that divides Maine from New Hampshire today. It included several small settlements, most famously Strawberry Bank, which you can visit a restored and recreated version of in Portsmouth today. Thompson is the namesake of Thompson Island, one of the Boston Harbor Islands, but it’s not clear whether he ever lived on that island.

Jake:
[24:41] Samuel Maverick would eventually marry David Thompson’s widow, Amias, and she joined him in the Chelsea home that her late husband had helped build. They raised their three children and Amias’ son from her previous marriage there. Chamberlain continues, Amias Maverick once lived at Kittery, near Piscataqua, as did Mary Hook, Maverick’s daughter. Possibly Captain Gorgias, who came over in September 1623, on his return to England in 1624, left directions with David Thompson as his agent to confirm the possession of the land by effecting a settlement within his grant, and that when a simmet was chosen for the purpose as good farming land with a southern aspect, it was also easily defensible being surrounded by river, sea, and marshes, and possessing a valuable spring of fresh water not far from the shore on the southern slope of the hill. When he first moved the area in 1624, Samuel Maverick lived on what’s now Admirals Hill in Chelsea, completely alone.

Jake:
[25:45] Maverick describes his one-man colony in a 1660 account of New England, in which he lists and describes every English town east of the Hudson River Valley that existed by then. Two miles south from Rumney Marsh on the north side of the Mystic River is Winnisemite, which, though but a few houses beyond it, yet deserves to be mentioned. One house yet standing there, which is the ancientest house in the Massachusetts government, A house which, in the year 1625, I fortified with a palisade and flankers, meaning it had a wall with corner towers. And guns both below and above in them, meaning that he had mounted cannons in his walls. Which awed the Indians, who at that time had a mind to cut off the English. They once faced it, but receiving a repulse, never attempted it more, although, as they now confess, They repented it when about two years after they saw so many English come over.

Wollaston’s Colony

Jake:
[26:45] Around the same time that Samuel Maverick was setting up his lonely habitation in today’s Chelsea, another group of Englishmen were setting up a new habitation in what’s now Quincy, on the opposite side of the bay. The New England chronology records, This year, meaning 1624 or 1625, comes over Captain Wollaston, with three or four more of some eminence and a great many servants, provisions, etc., to begin a plantation. They pitch on a place in the Massachusetts Bay, since named Braintree, on the northerly mountainous part thereof, which they call Mount Wollaston, among whom is one Thomas Morton. A footnote explains that a 1631 letter from Deputy Mass Bay Governor Thomas Dudley to the Countess of Lincoln counts 30 members of Wollaston’s party, who other sources say were primarily indentured servants. And if you’ve been listening for a while, you know that Quincy was part of Braintree well into the 18th century, because the Adams papers record Braintree as the family’s home, until Quincy split off while John Adams was vice president of the new United States.

Jake:
[27:57] Mount Wollaston actually stood very close to the Adams family home in Quincy. If you visit Adams National Historic Park, the crown jewel is Peacefield, the mansion that Abigail purchased for the family while John was serving as ambassador to Britain. A stream called Furnace Brook flows through the grounds, just behind the house. If you follow Furnace Brook Parkway, which parallels the creek, and take it toward the ocean, the brook itself soon flows onto the parkway and then flows into Black’s Creek, which is basically a tidal estuary that flows into the Massachusetts Bay under a bridge near the southern end of Quincy Shore Drive. The strong tidal current at the outflow is popular for fishing, but you really wouldn’t want to swim in it. Across Furnacebrook Parkway from the estuary, you’ll find that Marymount Road leads to a side gate of Mount Wollaston Cemetery, which marks the approximate location of Mount Wollaston’s settlement.

Jake:
[28:56] In an article about this new colony in What’s Today Quincy, Leslie Landrigan writes, Morton, Wollaston, and the indentured servants established their own colony, Mount Wollaston. It grew quickly and grew prosperous. Morton then parted ways with Wollaston in 1626 when he learned that Wollaston sold indentured servants into slavery on Virginia tobacco plantations. Morton encouraged the remaining servants to rebel against Wollaston and set up their own colony. They didn’t need much persuading. The servants organized themselves into a free community with Morton in command. He called himself the Host. Wollaston fled to Virginia. This was a colonial utopia in which the settlers were considered consociates. They lived in harmony with the Algonquin Indians, and in this article Algonquin is interpreted broadly meaning members of the Algonquian language groups. Plymouth was horrified that the liberal-minded Morton and his men consorted with native women. They considered Morton an impious, drunken libertine, and they didn’t like that his easygoing colony attracted escapees from Plymouth’s strictness.

Merrymount Maypole

Jake:
[30:10] In 1627, Thomas Morton and six other colonists still remained at Mount Wollaston. To make it clear that they were now a new, egalitarian, and, frankly, a fun colony, a small group decided to rename their community Marymount. They would later claim that it was a combination of the Latin word for sea, mare, or mare, and a native word that meant hill by the sea. To celebrate the new moniker, the Consociates at Merrimont decided to throw a party that would welcome their indigenous neighbors and stick a thumb in the eye of the joyless separatist pilgrims at Plymouth, just a few miles down the coast.

Jake:
[30:50] Writing in his New English Canaan, Morton says, Being resolved to have the new name confirmed for a memorial to after ages, they did devise amongst themselves to have it performed in a solemn manner, with revels and merriment after the old English custom. They prepared to set up a maypole on the festival day of Philip and Jacob, and therefore brewed a barrel of excellent beer and provided a case of bottles to be spent with other good cheer for all comers of that day. And upon mayday they brought the maypole to the place appointed with drums, guns, pistols, and other fitting instruments for that purpose, and there erected it with the help of savages that came thither for the purpose to see the manner of our revels. A goodly pine tree of 80 foot long was reared up with a pair of buckhorns nailed on somewhat near the top of it, where it stood as a fair sea mark for directions on how to find the way to my host of Merrymount.

Jake:
[31:48] The setting up of this maypole was a lamentable spectacle to the precise Separatists that lived at New Plymouth. They termed it an idol, yea, they called it the Calf of Horeb, and stood at defiance with the place, naming it Mount Dagon. Threatening to make it a woeful mount and not a merry mount.

Jake:
[32:08] Since it’s mostly pulled from primary sources written in Plymouth, the New England chronology reports on the same events from the perspective of the separatists there in May 1627. Morton and the company at Mount Wollaston, having got some goods and acquired much by trading with the natives, they spend the same in rioting and drunkenness, drinking ten pound worth of wine and spirits in the morning, and set up a maypole, get the Indian women to drink and dance about it with worse or practices, as in the Feasts of Flora, or like the Mad Bacchanalians, and changed the name to Marymount, as if this jollity were to last forever.

Jake:
[32:49] The Plymouth colonists recognized Marymount as a threat to the strictly hierarchical society dominated by church leaders that they’d set up just a few miles away, as they could not let the easygoing colony and its Mayday Party stand. Leslie Landrigan’s article about the Maypole continues, Governor William Bradford was horrified by the beastly practices of the Mad Bacchanalians. After a second Maypole party the next year, Miles Standish led a party of armed men to Marymount, seized Morton, and put him in chains. Standish also took down the offending Maypole. Not a shot was fired. According to Morton, the Marymount inhabitants didn’t want bloodshed. According to Bradford, they’d had so much to drink that they couldn’t resist.

Jake:
[33:41] Bradford feared executing Morton, who had many friends in high places back in London. He did maroon him on the Isle of Shoals until September, when an English ship took him back to England. During the next winter, an especially harsh one, John Endicott led a raid on Marymount’s corn supply. The Puritans then chopped down what was left of the maypole.

Puritan Crackdown

Jake:
[34:04] Morton returned to New England in 1629, only to find his friends the Indians decimated by plague, and most of the Marymount residents scattered. Marymount would never recover, and the other early colonies in today’s Weymouth and Chelsea would soon face a new threat. King Charles I granted a group of investors calling themselves the Massachusetts Bay Company, a charter granting them all the land between the mouth of the Charles River in the south and the Merrimack River in the north, and extending westward to the Pacific Ocean. Now, when you buy real estate these days, one of the steps is a title search, which basically confirms that nobody else has an ownership claim to the land you’re buying. King Charles didn’t bother with that, so this new charter included lands that other colonists, like Robert Gorges, the son of Fernando, Samuel Maverick, and William Blackston all believed they had legal title to.

Jake:
[35:03] This would prove to be a problem when the Arbella fleet brought almost 1,000 Puritan colonists to the shores of Massachusetts Bay in 1630, with something like 20,000 more following over the next decade.

Jake:
[35:17] This group interpreted their charter very broadly, laying claim to everything from Hull and the Nantescat Peninsula on north, since they were treating that peninsula as the mouth of the Charles, since it tended to benefit them.

Jake:
[35:31] These new neighbors were a headache for the Englishmen who already lived here. Sometime between the arrival of the Winthrop fleet in 1630 and the April 1633 Court of Assistance, Maverick moved his home and family from Winnisemite to a new farm on Noddles Island, moving from Admirals Hill in Chelsea to Jefferies Point in East Boston. According to Prince’s New England chronology, On Noddles Island lives Mr. Samuel Maverick, a man of very loving and courteous behavior, very ready to entertain strangers. On this island, with the help of Mr. David Thompson, he had built a small fort with four great guns to protect him from the Indians. On the south side of the Charles River mouth, on a point of land called Blackston’s Point, lives Mr. Blackston, where he has only a cottage. The neck of land from which the point runs being an Indian named Shawmut, afterwards Boston. To the southeast thereof, near Thompson’s Island, lives some few planters more. These were the first planters of those parts, having some small trade with the natives for beaverskins, which moved in to make their abode in those places, and are found of some help to the new colony.

Jake:
[36:48] The Mr. Blaxton in that note was William Blaxton. He’d been part of the second settlement at Wessagusset under Robert Gorges. He arrived in 1623, and he stayed after most of the colony fled to Plymouth or to Old England after that first winter along the shores of Massachusetts Bay. In 1625, he left Wessagusset and built a small cottage on a peninsula known to the Massachusetts it as Shawmut, overlooking the tidal estuary that we know as the Back Bay. In that same note in the chronology, the planters to the southeast near Thompson Island were the last residents of Mount Wollaston or Marymount, who would soon be forced to assimilate to the Puritan colony. On September 7, 1630, at the same meeting of the Court of Assistance where Boston, Dorchester, Mattapan, and Watertown were all formally named, the Puritan leaders of Massachusetts Bay Colony made it clear that they were sick and tired of Thomas Morton and his band at Marymount. The New England Chronology records…

Jake:
[37:54] The second court of assistance held at Charlestown ordered that Thomas Morton of Mount Wollaston shall presently be sat in the Bilbo’s, meaning that he was to be held in shackles, and after sent prisoner to England by the ship called the Gift, now returning thither. That all his goods shall be seized to defray the charge of his transportation, payment of his debts, and to give satisfaction to the Indians for a canoe he took unjustly from them, and that his house be burnt down to the ground in sight of the Indians for their satisfaction for many wrongs he has done them. Then, perhaps betraying Morton’s real crime, the record continues, ordered that no person shall plant in any place within the limits of this patent without leave from the governor. Samuel Maverick gives his opinion on Morton’s arrest in his 1660 account of New England, concluding that Morton’s true crime was writing the truth about the Puritans in the Massachusetts, and the book he titled A New English Canaan After the Biblical Promised Land. The Puritans took issue with this description, which resulted in America’s first banned book.

Jake:
[39:06] Morton was banished, his house fired before his face, and he sent prisoner to England. But for what offense I know not? Some years after, he returned for New England, where he was soon after apprehended and kept in the common jail a whole winter, nothing laid to his charge but the writing of a book entitled New Canaan, which indeed was the truest description of New England as it was then that I ever saw. The offense was, he had touched them too near, they not proving the charge, he was set loose, but soon after died, having, as he said, and most believed, received his bane by hard lodging and fair in prison.

Jake:
[39:47] Now, we can’t give this much attention to Samuel Maverick without noting one, shocking incident that was recorded by John Jocelyn, an early tourist on New England shores. Jocelyn visited New England in 1638 to see if he cared to make his fortune here. He arrived in July and ended up staying for about 15 months. In his account of the journey, he recalls Maverick’s hospitality. The 30th day of September I went ashore upon Noddles Island, where, when I was come to Mr. Maverick’s, he would not let me go aboard no more until the ship was ready to set sail. Jocelyn stayed in the home of Samuel Maverick until October 10th. While he was there, he witnessed a shocking act of violence. In February of 1638, the first shipload of African captains had been sent to Boston and enslaved. Maverick purchased two of them, a man and a woman, and he forced the man he had enslaved to rape the woman, because, according to Jocelyn’s account, Mr. Maverick was desirous to have a breed of Negroes. By some measures, this is the beginning of chattel slavery in Massachusetts, so we should probably think about renaming Maverick Square in Eastie at some point.

Jake:
[41:09] We always think about Puritan Massachusetts as an early example of American self-government, arranged as almost a proto-democracy. But Maverick’s 1660 account also includes a description of what that so-called self-government looked like to the English residents of Massachusetts Bay who were barred from participating in the civil government that now ruled them. He wrote, They forthwith sent over one Mr. Endicott governor, as deputy to rule over us the inhabitants, which had lived there long before their patent was granted, and some had patents preceding theirs. But within two years after, they sent over one Mr. John Winthrop governor, and with him a company of assistants, all chosen here in England, without the knowledge or consent of them that then lived there, or of those which came with them.

Jake:
[41:57] This governor and his council, not long after their arrival, made a law that no man should be admitted as a freeman, and so consequently have any voice in election of officers, civil or military, but such as were first entered into church covenant and brought certificate of it. Let their estates and, accordingly, their portion of land be never so great, and their taxes toward public charges. Nor could any competency of knowledge or inoffensiveness of living or conversation usher a man into their church fellowship unless he would also acknowledge the discipline of the Church of England to be erroneous and to renounce it, which very many never condescended unto, so that on this account the far great number of his majesty’s loyal subjects there never enjoyed those privileges intended by his royal father and his grand.

Jake:
[42:49] Samuel Maverick would eventually take his complaints about the Massachusetts Puritans all the way to the top. During a visit to England, he was granted an audience with King Charles II in 1664. He told the king that the Puritan government in Massachusetts was persecuting him because he wanted to accept the discipline of the Church of England and because he supported the king. In return, Charles appointed him as one of the four commissioners to arbitrate disputes in New England. But it doesn’t seem like he exercised that power very much, or maybe not at all, before he died in about 1670.

Blackston and Boston

Jake:
[43:26] The first group of Puritans from the Arbella fleet settled in what’s today Charlestown, but they very quickly suffered from a lack of fresh water. Across the mouth of the Charles River, William Blackston took pity on them. In August of 1630, he wrote a letter to Isaac Johnson, whom he’d gone to school with at Emanuel College back in the original Cambridge. In it, he described the plentiful water he drew from a natural spring on the Shawmut Peninsula and invited the Puritans to come over and join him. This would prove to be a costly mistake for Blackston. He sold the peninsula to the Massachusetts Bay Company, retaining about 50 acres for himself. Soon, however, he had thousands of Puritan neighbors we butted heads with on religious grounds and under whose governance he chafed after spending years completely free and alone on the peninsula.

Jake:
[44:20] In 1634, he sold his remaining land to Boston to be used as common grazing land, which is now the park that we know as Boston Common. Laxton, the last of the Wessegusset colonists and the first English resident of Boston, gave up, and he headed south to Rhode Island, far from the Puritan sphere of domination.

Jake:
[44:44] To learn more about English settlements on Boston Harbor before Boston was founded, check out this week’s show notes at hubhistory.com slash 360. I’ll have links to some of the primary sources I referenced this week, including Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan, Captain John Smith’s description of the New England coast, John Jocelyn’s account of his two voyages to New England, and Samuel Maverick’s 1660 account of New England. I’ll also link to Thomas Prince’s Chronological History of New England, which is compiled from primary sources, as well as later accounts by Charles Francis Adams, Mellon Chamberlain, and Leslie Landrigan.

Jake:
[45:26] If you’d like to get in touch with us, you can email podcast at hubhistory.com. I still maintain profiles for Hub History on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and over on Mastodon, where you can find me as at hubhistoryatbetter.boston. Lately, though, the only social platform where I’m actively posting things from time to time and making a point of interacting with people is Blue Sky. Search for Hub History to find me there, where my handle is hubhistory.com. If none of that strikes your fancy, or if you’ve unplugged from the surveillance capitalism of social platforms, just go to hubhistory.com and click on the Contact Us link. While you’re on the site, hit the subscribe link and be sure that you never miss an episode. If you subscribe on Apple Podcasts, please consider writing us a brief review. If you do, drop me a line and I’ll send you a Hub History sticker as a token of appreciation. That’s all for now. Stay safe out there, listeners.