American Fun Page 3

  The compact was written under serious duress. Winter was closing in. The Pilgrims had been bobbing in the harbor for weeks, and their scouts had already drawn deadly fire from indigenous people hiding in the woods. They needed to erect a “governmente” fast. William Bradford, the compact’s principal author, reports that the document had two main motives. Some of the unfaithful among their number had been giving “discontented & mutinous speeches” about using “their own libertie” once they hit shore; containing these rogues was the first order of business. Indeed, without the contract, “none had the power to command them.” Second, the compact, if it could get enough buy-in, would prove “to be as firme as any patent” in setting up a system that the English courts would recognize. Once a small majority had signed it, all they needed was to elect a leader. They chose the “godly” John Carver on the spot.

  Carver may have been the benevolent leader that Bradford made him out to be (managing to “[quell] & overcome” uprisings with his “just & equall carrage of things”), but the following spring, after a hot day in the fields, he died of sunstroke. Bradford himself was promptly elected governor, as he would be annually for the next thirty years. Bradford’s regime—much more accurately than his Mayflower Compact—tells the true story of America’s character, or at least one fierce side of it. William Bradford was nobody’s democrat. He crossed the Atlantic to build a fortress in the wilderness where he could wall out natural and social evils and wall in his tidy hive of “Saints.” He was the first in a long line of American fortress builders—from slave owners and Klansmen to corporations and country clubs—elitists, oligarchs, and authoritarians for whom the wilderness was either weeds to be incinerated or woods to be hewn into exclusionary towns. He was also the first great American curmudgeon.

  And he had his work cut out for him. Fortress builders always do. Not only did his Pilgrims face the constant peril that they had known to expect when they left Amsterdam—sickness, starvation, Native American hostility. But, more surprisingly, they also encountered an ideological threat to their fastidious utopia: Thomas Morton, who founded a camp of free-loving bondservants within striking distance. A lover of the wilderness who consorted with Indians, a radical democrat and reckless hedonist, Morton represented an opposing side of the incipient American character, the gleefully unruly side. Cheerful, curious, horny, and lawless, he anticipated the teeming masses, the mixing millions who would exploit the New World as an open playground for freedom, equality, and saucy frolic. His experiment in insanely energized democracy at his anything-goes Merry Mount colony, thirty miles north of Plymouth’s spiky fortress, made confetti of their Mayflower Compact. Bradford’s coup to bring it down, in the spring of 1627, counts as the first volley on the battlefield of American fun.

  BRADFORD’S CHILDHOOD WAS FILLED with misery. He was born in 1590 to a Yorkshire yeoman, and by age five he had lost both his parents and his grandparents. He suffered a prolonged and debilitating illness, and from the age of seven, his feeble health aside, he toiled in the fields, herded sheep, and probably attended some grammar school. He was twelve when he declared his independence, enraging his father’s surviving brothers by abandoning the family’s Anglican Church and joining a congregation of Separatist rebels in the nearby town of Babworth. Richard Clyfton, the Separatists’ “grave & revered” preacher, soon became Bradford’s father figure. In all likelihood, he inspired the young fellow with the Puritanical beliefs that all people are depraved, that only God elects those who will be saved, that His grace flows freely to the chosen few, and other such maxims of Calvinist philosophy that would have been meaningful, even comforting, to a boy who had been thrown into a world of unrelenting hardship.

  While other children his age played quarterstaff and barleybreak, typical village sports of the period, young Bradford took Clyfton’s preaching to heart and pursued intense Bible study. A boy with stern will and a spiritual zeal, he was jailed at seventeen with the rest of the Saints for trying to escape England for more religiously tolerant Holland. They emigrated successfully the following year. The Dutch tolerated Separatism, as they did other forms of aberrant behavior—drunkenness, promiscuity, festivals, free speech, and various notions of liberal government that rankled the authoritarian Saints. To be sure, as Bradford insisted, it was “not out of any newfangledness, or other such like giddie humor” that the congregation struck out for North America; it was “for sundrie weightie & solid reasons,” particularly the “great licentiousness of the [Dutch] youth” and “manifold temptations of the place.” Just as Eurailers flocked to Amsterdam for coffeehouses and sex tourism, so too were young Separatists hooked by Holland’s “evill examples into extravagante & dangerous courses”—chief among which, in Bradford’s words, was their desire to pull their “neks” from their parents’ “raines.” Never mind that Bradford himself had been a willful child.

  All along the Saints had wanted to “separate”—from the Anglican Church, from England’s monarchy, from any pollutants and social deterrents that threatened to maculate their pious cloth, hence the nickname “Separatists.” Their decision to shun urban Renaissance comforts for “those vast & unpeopled” (Bradford’s word) wilds of North America must have called for a deeper appreciation of the anguish that had brought them closer to God.

  But separate they did. They endured their share of hardship on the crossing—from scurvy to seasickness to a narrowly avoided mutiny, but Bradford gets most exercised in his account of a “lustie” and “very profane younge” seaman whom it “plased God … to smite … with a grievous disease, of which he dyed in a desperate manner.” (He was unceremoniously buried at sea.) This death is the first of many cautionary tales that brighten the pages of Bradford’s Historie—and warn against the evils of having fun.

  The Separatists themselves, with few “sadd” exceptions, liked to follow the rules. They relocated from the Mayflower to a Wampanoag village (whose previous tenants had died of the plague), and there they founded a highly regulated community devoted to work and constant worship. That first punishing winter on savage Cape Cod, when half of their number died, Bradford’s inner circle of John Carver, William Brewster, and Myles Standish “spared no pains, night nor day” to care for each other in their hours of need—building fires, dressing meat, fetching wood, even scrubbing one another’s “lothsome clothes.” Meanwhile, a band of non-Separatist so-called Strangers who “had been boone companions in drinking & joylity” turned on each other when hardship set in, isolating themselves and refusing to help. One of them denied Bradford “but a small cann of beere” and in this way secured his low place in the annals of American history.

  Such fun-loving, beere-cann-hoarding, fair-weather friends became a running joke for Bradford. They pitched their tents on sandy ground and looked like jerks beside the Separatists. His message was clear: a life built on frivolous pleasure, not work, spreads its infection to the surrounding community. It had best be yanked like a rotten tooth.

  One year after the Mayflower arrived, a smaller ship, the Fortune, plagued Plymouth Plantation with thirty-five non-Separatist emigrants—most of them “lusty yonge men, many of them wild enough.” One month later, on Christmas, a holiday that the Separatists didn’t recognize, most of them refused when Bradford called them out to work. He respected their appeal to their own religious law, but when he returned from the frozen fields to find them “pitching the barr” and playing “stoole-ball, and shuch like sports”—frolicking while others toiled away—he confiscated their “implements” and officially forbade “gameing and reveling in the streets.” He recounts this Christmas story as a bit of “mirth” but concludes it with a haunting boast: play was gone from Plymouth Plantation, “at least openly.”

  Plymouth’s most severe crackdown on pleasure came in the year 1642, a year “of sundrie notorious sins,” when a young servant, Thomas Granger, no older than seventeen, was spied having sexual congress with a mare. After submitting to days of interrogation, which required him t
o identify a parade of animals with whom he may or may not have lain, Granger confessed to committing “buggery” with: “a mare, a cowe, tow [sic] goats, five sheep, 2 calves, and”—a winking joke among Early American scholars—“a turkey.” According to Levitican law (20:13, per Bradford), this bizarrely detailed crime of perversion (Bradford called it a “sadd accidente”) required an equally ridiculous punishment. Poor Granger, whose likeness was also recognized in a certain piglet’s face, had to stand by as the mare, the cow, and the “lesser catle” were slaughtered before his eyes. “Then he him selfe,” Bradford writes, “was executed.” The cattle were buried in a massive pit, “and no use made of any part of them.” Apparently the turkey lived to sin another day.

  This story warned “how one wicked person may infecte many” and showed what happens when “so many wicked persons and profane people” come pouring in from Europe to “mixe them selves amongst” the Separatists. Granger had learned to practice “such wickedness” in England (not, Bradford contended, on Plymouth Plantation), and the only way to prevent the foreign sickness from spreading throughout the God-fearing colonies was to cure it with the harshest medicine.

  Granger’s may have been the most perverse example in Bradford’s cautionary history, but it wasn’t the most menacing. That had come some fifteen years earlier, when they crushed Thomas Morton’s “New English Canaan.”

  BRADFORD CAME TO PLYMOUTH to build a spiky fortress to fence out all things mixed and messy. His eventual enemy, Thomas Morton, crossed the same ocean two years later with an eye for natural beauty and a powerful libido. From the moment Bradford arrived in America, he put up his dukes against the “hidious & desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts & wild men,” but Morton wanted to dive right in. An Anglican lawyer from England’s West Country, he described the lush landscape as a light-toned virgin who “long[s] to be sped” and to “meete her lover in a Nuptiall bed.” Morton belonged to a leisurely class, and an older generation. If Bradford was at the forefront of a Puritan revolution that was rattling its sabers across Northern Europe, Morton was a son of the Elizabethan Age, with its free-spirited politics and quick-witted hedonism. On his first trip over, he was taking a summer vacation.

  Little is known of Morton’s Devonshire youth. He was born to landed gentry around 1579. From an early age he practiced falconry and other noble sports. Yet the fact that he studied law at Clifford’s Inn, on Fleet Street, all but guarantees he had a healthy education in the “science” in the “Art of Revels.” The Inns of Court and Chancery, in Morton’s time, fostered a fast-paced college culture (not unlike today) that asked little more of their young gentlemen scholars than to show their faces at regular moot courts. There was just so much else to learn—especially in what King James’s “Master of Revels” cheekily called the Third University of England: “To wit, London.” Fencing, dancing, drinking, courting, pulling pranks, staging plays, spinning lewd verse—such rakish pursuits weren’t merely diversions; they were sanctioned curriculum for a rising lawyer making his way in the halls of power. In general the revelry was licensed and orderly (“Master of Revels” and “Lord of Misrule” were ironically official titles), but even as the parades of decadent mummers fêted England’s national spirit—sometimes enlisting delighted participation from the merry Stuarts themselves—there were always loose bands of free-lance rapscallions who devised sexier fun in the shadows. Morton must have belonged to this faster set, and he showed a taste for the randiest pursuits, but only decades later, among the friendly Massachusetts, would he get his honorary doctorate in the science of revelry.

  He practiced law for many years in Devon, representing clients up and down the social ladder and maintaining a country lad’s love of the outdoors. He was in his early fifties when he made his first crossing, arriving on the Charity in June 1622. Glad to take a breather from an acrimonious lawsuit raging back home with his churlish stepson, the gentleman roamed the sloping shores of Wessagusset and “did endeavour to take a survey of the Country.” This hillocky region thirty miles north of Plymouth offered reedy marshes and hardwood forests and pastures cleared by previous tenants. While Andrew Weston’s crew, with whom he was traveling, used the summer months to build village houses, Morton took leisurely tours of the land, fishing in streams, climbing low mountains, and exploring the tricky coast in his boat. He fell into reverie over soft breezy plains and “sweete cristall fountaines.” He was lulled almost to sleep by “cleare running streames, that twine in fine meanders through the meads, making so sweete a murmuring noise to heare … so pleasantly doe, they glide upon the pebble stones.” Something of an armchair Aristotelian, he totted great lists of flora and fauna and spotted fine differences between sycamores and oaks and among his beloved birds of prey. Indeed, when he departed in the crisp early days of September, he had already fallen in love with the country where he would die an outlaw and nobody’s hero.

  Returning two years later with several bondservants under the charge of Captain Wollaston, he helped to found a fur-trading colony on a treeless hill in Passonagessit, at the site of present-day Quincy. The smooth, arable mound afforded 360-degree views of wooded mountains—and open fields—and a chain of islands in Boston Bay, but this time he hadn’t come to sightsee. His new motivation, both personal and commercial, was to get to know the “Infidels,” whom he quickly found to be “most full of humanity, and more friendly” than the local “Christians.”

  Morton’s open love of the Massachusetts marks his sharpest difference from the Separatists, whose professed mission, in Bradford’s words, was to convert the “poore blinde Infidels.” The Separatists had fought the Wampanoags since arriving on Cape Cod, and they maintained chilly communication through their loyal guide Squanto. Their excitable imaginations almost seemed to relish “the continuall danger of the salvage people,” whom they perceived to be not only “cruell, barbarous, & most treacherous” but downright cannibalistic—prone to flaying men alive with scallop shells, roasting their “joyntes” and “members” over coals, and savoring these “collops of their flesh in their sight whilst they live.” While it remains to be proven that any northeastern tribes engaged in such acts of cannibalism, it is striking that from 1623 forward Plymouth Plantation, in a barbarous Mistah Kurtz–like warning to local Indians, kept the severed head of 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 watched Chief 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 that their 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 his bondservants and sailed to Virginia to sell them off. Morton stayed behind with the remaining seven, who were left in the charge of a Lieutenant Fitcher. The weather was bad, the granaries were low, and the rest of the crew started making noise about seeking their fortunes on 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 legal right to rebel—before Wollaston returned and sold them too. If they took his free advice, Morton promised to join them in open society.