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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. WhileAndrew 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 finedifferences 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 severalbondservants under the charge ofCaptain 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 guideSquanto. 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 ofcannibalism, it is striking that from 1623 forward Plymouth Plantation, in a barbarous Mistah Kurtz–like warning to local Indians, kept the severed head of