“The Great Bay of the Massachusees,” for so was Boston Harbor anciently
known, is a pleasant place with its long, whaleback islands, its
countrified, hillocky shores, drumlin mounds, and inland glimpse of the
little mountains known as the Blue Hills; it still retains something
of a sylvan air; in 1625 it was a sylvan wilderness. Until very recent
years, the most conspicuous feature of the bay was a vast field, almost
a domain, sloping from a thicket of inland trees to the curving beach
of the pleasant Quincy shore. In July, when the grass of the field had
ripened to yellow hay, this pleasant open land poured down to the sea
like a river mouth of gold. Cleared and cultivated, by the Indians long
before the arrival of the whites, the old domain had that mellow quality
which Nature sometimes assumes when long allied with man.
A pleasant field, for the presence of the sea dwelt there and was not
terrible and alien,—a field in which the hot, earthy odours distilled by
an August sun mingled pleasantly with the fragrance of salt meadows.
The sea birds of the North knew it, and ran along the edge of the ebbing
tide, shadows of gulls passed swiftly over its bending grass, the plover
rose piping from the reeds, and there were pondlets in it, in tiny round
hollows, by whose shores yellow-speckled turtles sunned their backs. The
Indians called the field Passonagessit.
Such was the domain of open land which Wollaston, the English trader, saw
upon the greenwood shore of the “Bay of Massachusees” on a morning in
early summer in the year 1625. The wilderness was his alone. Save for a
small and declining trading station established at Wessagusset on what is
now the Weymouth shore, the sylvan bay was an uninhabited land. The great
Puritan migration of 1630-31, which was to found the town of Boston, was
still six years away, and only at Plymouth, some forty miles south along
the coast, did the New England forest echo to the day-long sermon soon to
thunder through the land.
The imagination rebuilds the scene of the landing, Wollaston’s vessel
anchored off the field, the shallop and her little boats plying between
her and the shore, the ferrying over of the indentured bondmen, all well
sunburnt from their long voyage and longing for a smell of fresh victuals
on their wooden plates, the unloading of the stores, “the implaments,”
the ancient muzzle loading muskets and fowling pieces, and the bags of
powder and ball. One sees Thomas Morton, in great-boots, cape and plume,
coax his hunting dog into the boat, one hears the scrape of the keel upon
the gravelly beach, and an excited barking—the advocate of Cliffords Inn
and his cherished “dogge” have arrived in the new world.
Presently a brave ring of the axe,—a sound that echoes through American
history,—floats down the field to the bay; houses and chimneys rise, and
the little plantation takes shape in the Massachusetts wilderness.
The vagabond advocate, beholding the vast, unsullied greenwood, loved
it with a devotion few have equalled. He wandered everywhere north and
south, he visited Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, he went
north beyond the beaches of New Hampshire to the surf and the ledges of
Maine. It was in truth a noble wilderness, and to Thomas Morton it became
a veritable promised land, a “New English Canaan.” His own “Bay of
Massachusees” he thought “the paradise of those parts,” and meditating
on its virtues, his mellow spirit broke into a fine, old-fashioned
Elizabethan panegyric.
“The more I looked, the more I liked it. And when I had more seriously
considered of the bewty of the place, with all her faire indowments, I
did not thinke that in all the knowne world it could be paralel’d, for
so many goodly groves of trees, dainty, fine, round, rising hillucks,
delicate, faire, large plaines, sweet cristall fountaines, and cleare
running streams that twine in fine meanders through the meads, making so
sweete a murmuring noise to hear as lull the senses with delight asleepe,
so pleasantly do they glide upon the pebble stones....”
The very words, “the bewty of the place,” reveal the man; the style
of the passage his Elizabethan attitudes. In later years, he was to
celebrate his love of the American landscape in the rich, full-flowered
English of an Elizabethan marriage song.
“If Art and Industry should doe as much
As Nature hath for Canaan not such,
Another place, for benefit and rest,
In all the universe can be possest.
The more we proove it by discovery,
The more delight each object to the eye
Procures as if the elements had here,
Bin reconciled, and pleased it should appeare
Like a faire virgin longing to be sped
And meete her lover....”
There were others at the plantation, however, who did not share these
poetic raptures. As the summer wore away, furs proved scarce, and the
severe New England winter enclosed the silent land, Wollaston began to
lose faith in his venture. At the return of spring, he had made his
decision; he would hold on to the trading post, leave a few men there to
care for it, and sell to planters in Virginia the time still due him from
his bondsmen. A spring morning sees the two groups of “servants” bid each
other farewell, and Wollaston’s ship pass from view of the trading post
behind the wooded isles. And with his ship, Wollaston himself disappears,
for there is no evidence that he ever returned to the shores of Boston
Bay.
Thomas Morton, left behind in his beloved Canaan with five or six young
English exiles, now assumed command of the trading post by the old Indian
field; there was joy in Olympus, and the golden reign began.