The New English Canaan of Thomas Morton with Introductory Matter and Notes — A Reader’s Guide

Morton's Classical Frame of Reference

Morton consistently casts his personal struggles in epic terms. When describing his escape from custody at Wessaguscus, he likens his captors to "the Trojans when they had the custody of Hippeus pinetree horse" and himself to the watchful "Geese kept in the Roman Cappitall." This habit of aligning his own actions with classical precedents—while reducing his adversaries to comic figures—runs throughout the narrative. The Puritan captain who pursues him is repeatedly called "Captaine Shrimp," a diminutive that undercuts any claim to authority. Morton's learning is a weapon: he uses it to elevate his own defiance and to mock the pretensions of his opponents.

The Editor's Counterpoint

Charles Francis Adams does not let Morton speak without challenge. In his preface, Adams admits to being an inexperienced editor and notes that the book is "in many respects, a singular book." His annotations supply the historical context that Morton deliberately distorts or omits. For instance, where Morton presents himself as a wronged innocent, Adams's notes draw on court records and other contemporary accounts to reveal a more complicated figure—a trader who antagonized Puritan authorities by selling guns to Native people and erecting a maypole. The editorial apparatus thus becomes a second voice, one that both amplifies and corrects Morton's narrative.

Land, Labor, and the Native Presence

Morton's description of New England's natural abundance in Book II is lush and promotional, but it is also a political argument. By portraying the land as a fertile "Canaan" awaiting English cultivation, he implicitly justifies colonization. Yet his treatment of Native peoples is notably more sympathetic than that of his Puritan contemporaries. In Book I, he describes their customs with ethnographic curiosity, and in the escape episode, a "Salvage" warns him of the approaching posse. This alliance across cultural lines—Morton receiving aid from an Indigenous informant—underscores the complex social landscape of early New England, where allegiances did not always follow the expected colonial divisions.

Readers approaching this edition should attend to the interplay between Morton's seventeenth-century text and Adams's nineteenth-century commentary. The editor's notes are not neutral; they reflect the concerns of the Prince Society, a historical organization dedicated to preserving early American documents. Morton's voice, meanwhile, is anything but objective. Together, they offer a layered portrait of colonial conflict—one in which satire, scholarship, and personal grievance are inextricably tangled.

Thomas Morton’s irreverent voice, tangled up in Adams’s prim footnotes, always felt like a quarrel between two old friends. Strange how that same uneasy companionship finds me again in Narrative of the residence of Fatalla Sayeghir among the wandering Arabs of the great desert — Reading Companion—another record of a stranger’s world, lingering between wonder and the weight of another man’s judgment.