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surrounding plantations. According to Bradford, whose hearsay is our only source for this event, Morton, who had taken a liking to Passonagessit, prepared a feast for the hungry men, opened his personal stock of liquor, and counseled them on their legalright to rebel—before Wollaston returned and sold them too. If they took his free advice, Morton promised to join them in open society.
    Bradford ventriloquizes the radical democrat: “I, having a parte in the plantation, will receive you as partners and consociats … and we will converse, trade, plante, & live together as equalls, & supporte & protecte one another, or to like effecte.” Even as a mocking squib, his speech rings true for today’s readers, who see in it the tenets of basic civility. But to its intended audience, the Separatists, it would have hissed liked the serpent in the Garden. It promised knowledge beyond man’s control.
    The servants took Morton’s bait, ran feckless Fitcher into the forest, and quickly “fell to great licentiousness” as willing pupils in Morton’s “schoole of Athisme.” They also became incredibly prosperous. Even Bradford, whose own beaver trade was operating at a loss (due in no small part to his bad rapport with the Wampanoags), had to admit that this new rebel colony “gott much by trading with Indeans”—though naturally, as the antagonists in his ongoing parable, they squanderedtheir fortunes, “10 pounds worth in a morning,” on “wine & strong waters.” It was thanks to this financial hardship that Plymouth Plantation itself, in the same year of 1627, was forced to take in a host ofStrangers that further diluted their social purity. To be sure, in ridiculing Morton’s open society, Bradford may have been, asDouglas Anderson suggests,protesting too much.
    History hides the names of Morton’s “worthy wights,” who would have been listed among Wollaston’s cargo as so much merchandise. They were the lowest of the English low. They could have been petty criminals working off sentences, or they could have been folks from the London slums who had signed away their rights in a drunken blur and ended up locked in a dockside tank. Aboard ship, confined in the airless hull, they would have suffered conditions like those of Africans making theMiddle Passage: sickness, starvation, abuse, and death. Hence, to have thrown off their chains and been incorporated as traders on a thriving plantation must have given them the communal thrill that has long since been associated with coming to the New World—the land of plenty, opportunity, and freedom. Morton himself names few names in his book, but the honor he affords these new fellow colonists supports Bradford’s charge that he was radically democratic:
    And pitty ’t is I cannot call them Knights,
    Since they had brawne and braine and were right able,
    To be installed of prince Arthures table,
    Yet all of them were Squires of low degree,
    As did appeare by rules of heraldry.
    Rules of heraldry need not apply in America, not so far as Morton was concerned. The New English Canaan need not be stratified, exclusive. For Europeans to prosper in this abundant new land, an ethic of friendship had to prevail. Traders had to mingle and deal as equals, among themselves and with the Indians. To this extent, Morton’s vision of social upheaval wasn’t the old European “misrule,” the festive suspension of social roles that actually kept them more firmly intact. It was an explosion of Old World order, and he urged his wights to enjoy the fireworks.Though he lacked the authority to “call them Knights,” on Merry Mount such titles didn’t carry weight. Morton claimed the right to treat them as partners and dignify them as intellectual peers.
    In his efforts to get closer to the Massachusetts, moreover, he exchanged sporting secrets and also (allegedly—he never copped to it) broke the king’s ban on teaching indigenous people to shoot. Before long, his trading company