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the Massachusett leader Witawamet on display. Operating on a rumor of aggression, and on Bradford’s orders,Myles Standish and his militia had ambushed and slaughtered a band of Witawamet’s men.
    If Bradford’s
Of Plimmoth Plantation,
the A to Z of Pilgrim history, consistently reduces Native Americans to “litle more than … wild beasts,” then Morton’s
New English Canaan,
his own autobiographical take on the early Bay Colony, is all the more stunning for devoting twenty chapters to admiring and praising and honoring a people who welcomed him into their midst. Railing against the Separatists’ ignorant“new creede”—“that the Salvages are a dangerous people, subtill, secreat, and mischievous”—Morton testifies to the Indians’ cordiality, to a decency that puts thieving Separatists to shame, and to a heightened sense of taste and civility that implicitly only a gentleman could see.
    He affords the Massachusetts every last dignity. Their fastidious loincloths are signs of “modesty.” They are too wise to be “cumbered” by eating utensils. Their dainty skill of drinking with their hands is the same human “feate” that made “Diogenes hurle away his dishe.” He marvels at their superhuman eyesight and their ability to distinguish a Spaniard from a Frenchman simply by the smell of his hand. Even his belief that the Indians were “without Religion, Law, and King” doesn’t faze him: they believed in a god, and their society was governed by a deep moral sense—hardly the cannibalism that Bradford imagined. He shows time and again how the “uncivilized” are “more just than the civilized”: their commerce was sophisticated, their judgment discerning, their companionship a joy. They lived in happy and “plentifull” communities and had no need for the jails and gallows that the English built for “poore wretches” and “beggers.” Plus they held elders (like himself) in high esteem.
    The way Morton describes them, the Massachusetts showed a capacity for fun that harked back to his youth. He joined the “great entertainement” of their wedding ceremonies, where he seemed to see an Anglican balance between orderly “solemnities” and liberating “reveling.” They invited him to join their national “Revels,” where “a great company” gathered from all over the country and met “in amity with their neighbors” and where this aging alumnus of the Inns of Chancery was amazed to see their great sachem cavorting among his people. (At the Inns, the royals made only rare appearances at the masquerade parades, where it would have been unseemly for them to break the stage barrier.) Sitting among the feathered tribes, Morton watchedChief Papsiquine prove his honor by performing “feats and jugling tricks”—such as swimming underwater for what Morton suspected was an impossible length of time. Indeed, he wishfully believed the Massachusetts “worshipped
Pan
the great God of Heathens,” or in any case held him “in great reverence and estimation.” He drew this wild conclusion from his classicist fantasy thattheir language was a mix of Ancient Greek and Latin that made frequent use of the homophone “pan.” More precisely, and in line with Morton’s own project for a New English Canaan, he admired the Massachusetts’ epicurean practicality: “According to human reason guided onely by the light of nature, these people leades the more happy and freer life, being voyde of care, which torments the mindes of so many Christians: They are not delighted in baubles, but in usefull things.”
    LATE IN THE WINTER of 1626, less than a year after establishing his colony,Captain Wollaston rounded up most of hisbondservants and sailed to Virginia to sell them off. Morton stayed behind with the remaining seven, who were left in the charge of aLieutenant Fitcher. The weather was bad, the granaries were low, and the rest of the crew started making noise about seeking their fortunes on