The Merman of Maine

Did you know that there used to be a merman who lived off the coast of Maine? Here's the story as it appears in John Josselyn's 1674 book An Account of Two Voyages to New England. 

One Mr. Mittin related of a triton or merman which he saw in Casco Bay. This gentleman was a great fowler, and used to go out with a small boat or canoe, and fetching a compass about a small island (there being many small islands in the bay), for the advantage of a shot, was encountered with a triton, who laying his hands upon the side of the canoe, had one of them chopt off with a hatchet by Mr. Mittin, which was in all respects like the hand of a man. The triton presently sunk, dyeing the water with his purple blood, and was no more seen.

It would be too bad if Mr. Mittin killed the last merman in Maine, but I don't think anyone has seen one since then. Maybe they're just lurking underwater off the coast of Portland, waiting for the oceans to rise from global warming so they can have their revenge.

John Josselyn, an Englishman of noble birth, turned his voyages to New England into a best-selling book called New England's Rarities Discovered in Birds, Beasts, Fishes, Serpents and Plants of That Country. His followup, An Account of Two Voyages to New England, was less popular.

While New England's Rarities is mostly a straightforward guide to New England wildlife (interspersed with praise for the region's lovely Indian women), An Account includes stories about sea serpents, pigs giving birth to monstrous half-lions, and a ghost-haunted island. You'd think this would make it another bestseller, but apparently not. Modern scholars generally think Josselyn was quite gullible, but perhaps he just loved a good story or maybe (just maybe) New England was even stranger in the 1600s than it is now.

A mosaic of Triton. From the fantastic site Theoi.com.

Although very little is known about his life, it's generally assumed that Josselyn was well-educated. His education is even evident in his description of Mr. Mittin's encounter with the merman. Josselyn uses the word triton, which comes from classical Greek mythology. Triton was the son of the sea-god Poseidon, and was usually portrayed as a large merman carrying a conch shell.

Triton was in general a beneficent god. In the plural, though, tritons were a group of minor sea deities who were sometimes aggressive towards mankind.

For example, the ancient writer Pausanias claimed that the Greek city of Tanagra was plagued by a triton that stole cattle from the beach and overturned small boats. Tired of the merman's predations, the Tanagrans set a bowl of wine on the beach. The triton came ashore, got drunk, and passed out. While he was asleep the Tanagrans cut off his head. In another version of the same story, Dionysos the god of wine dispatched the triton himself. However he met his end, the triton's pickled and preserved body was put on display for tourists, including Pausanias himself. I wonder what Mr. Mittin did with that hand?

From Monster to Mer-Bro: Four Centuries of New England Mermen

The more things change the more they stay the same. Yes, it's a cliche, but there's a grain of truth in it. Sometimes things seem like they are new but they are actually not. 

Take Gorton's Seafood, for example. Gorton's was founded in Gloucester, Massachusetts in 1849. The company is still going strong and their longtime mascot, a fisherman wearing yellow rain gear, is widely recognized. But in recent months the company has tried appealing to a younger demographic by airing humorous ads featuring brawny mermen (a.k.a mer-bros) and a laid-back Neptune, god of the sea. Has Gorton's lost touch with its historic New England roots with this new advertising campaign? Not really. Although salty fishermen are an important part of our culture, mermen and their kin have also been reported in this area for hundreds of years.

An old-school merman. 

Mer-bros eating Gorton's fish sticks.

One of the earliest written accounts appears in Englishman John Josselyn's 1674 book An Account of Two Voyages to New England. Josselyn visited New England in 1638 and 1663, and on one of those trips he hear the following story from a colonist in coastal Maine:

One Mr. Mittin related of a triton or merman which he saw in Casco Bay. This gentleman was a great fowler, and used to go out with a small boat or canoe, and fetching a compass about a small island (there being many small islands in the bay), for the advantage of a shot, was encountered with a triton, who laying his hands upon the side of the canoe, had one of them chopt off with a hatchet by Mr. Mittin, which was in all respects like the hand of a man. The triton presently sunk, dyeing the water with his purple blood, and was no more seen.

A triton is a type of merman from classical mythology. They are named after the god Triton, son of Poseidon, and like the sea itself are fickle and sometimes dangerous. Perhaps Mr. Mittin was well-read in Greek myth and unwilling to see if this particular triton was friendly or not. Interestingly, in one of the Gorton's commercials a mer-bro sheds purple tears. Coincidence?

The Puritans who colonized New England did not look fondly upon ancient Greek gods or aquatic humanoids, apparently thinking both were demonic in nature. This outlook can be seen in their response to the song that Thomas Morton wrote for the raucous May Day celebration in 1628 at Merrymount Colony in Quincy, Massachusetts. It invoked Neptune and Triton, along with more overtly erotic gods like Priapus, Ganymede (Jupiter's young boyfriend), and Hymen, the god of marriage. After learning of Merrymount's pagan-themed celebration the Pilgrims at Plymouth dispatched armed troops to arrest Morton and burn down his colony. Morton was trading furs and arms with the local Indians, which threatened the Plymouth colony's economy, but his pagan and libertine tendencies were a threat to morality.

You can burn down a rival settlement, but the mer-folk are not so easily eradicated. In 1714 a minister named Valentyn sailing past Nantucket's Great Point glimpsed a merman in the water. At first Valentyn and the ship's crew thought he was human:

We all agreed he must be some shipwrecked person. After some time I begged the captain to steer the ship more directly toward it. … We had got within a ship’s length of him, when the people on the forecastle made such a noise that he plunged down, head foremost, and got presently out of sight. 

The man who was on watch at the masthead declared that he had… a monstrous long tail.

That story is quoted in Edward Rowe Snow's book Legends of the New England Coast. Snow also claims that years later, in the early 1900s, a lighthouse keeper at Great Point saw something humanoid emerge from the ocean and crawl into the nearby woods. Other local residents also said they saw signs that something not quite human had been among the trees. Gorton's mer-bros are goofy and fun; the Great Point merman sounds a little bit spooky to me.

Speaking of spooky, Rhode Island horror writer H.P. Lovecraft's 1931story "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" centers on a race of monstrous aquatic humanoids called the Deep Ones who live off the coast of Massachusetts. The citizens of the decaying port city Innsmouth have made a deal with the Deep Ones. The Deep Ones give them plentiful fish harvests and golden treasure from their aquatic realm. In return, the people of Innsmouth give the Deep Ones human sacrifices and have conjugal relations with the scaly monsters. Yikes! In Lovecraft's 1926 story "The Strange High House in the Mist," various sea-gods, including Neptune and a band of tritons, pay a visit to the titular house. At least in this story they aren't demanding sex or human sacrifice. 

Lovecraft wrote fiction; he never thought the Deep Ones were real. But even during his lifetime some of his acquaintances thought he was writing about real occult practices and entities. That movement only grew after his death and some occultists have even claimed the Deep Ones are actual beings. For example, the British occultist Kenneth Grant claimed that he successfully summoned the Deep Ones to appear during a ritual. (Note: they weren't particularly pleasant!) Similarly, the American ceremonial magician Michael Bertiaux claims he has contacted the Deep Ones at an isolated lake somewhere in Wisconsin. Lovecraft based the fictional Innsmouth on Depression-era Newburyport, so perhaps the Deep Ones really are lurking in the waters just off our coast.

Unlike the Deep Ones, Gorton's mer-bros are cheery and goofy. Is this just an advertising gimmick or are there other happy mermen in New England's past? Yes, there are. Elizabeth Reynard's 1934 book The Narrow Land contains several stories given to her by Mashpee Wampanoag Indians. One of these stories tells of Matilda Simons, a widowed Wampanoag woman struggling to feed her three children. When the Christian god doesn't answer her prayers she turns to the old Indian gods. In response, the sea god Paumpagusnit sends several aquatic giants from the ocean to help her. They speak in "the guttural voice of the sea" and save Matilda's family from starvation by bringing gifts of fish. 

So perhaps the mer-bros are not as newfangled as they at first appear. While they are part of the current trend to use folkloric creatures in advertising (like those beef jerky ads starring Sasquatch), these fishmen are also have deep roots here in New England. 

Speaking of deep New England roots, recently I was a guest on Jeff Belanger's fantastic New England Legends podcast. Jeff is a font of weird knowledge and we had a great time chatting about witches, monsters, and why there are so many strange legends from New England. I hope you'll listen if you can!

Cotton Mather and the Connecticut Triton

Many of you are probably familiar with Cotton Mather, the 17th century Puritan minister. Mather was born in Boston in 1663, and was the son of Increase Mather, the city’s leading minister. Cotton attended Harvard, entering at age eleven and a half, making him the youngest person to attend the university. (Thanks for that tidbit, Wikipedia!) Clearly, he was a smart person. After graduating, he followed in his father’s footsteps and became a minister, serving with him as co-pastor of Boston’s most prominent church. 

During the 1692 Salem witch trials, the colony’s political leaders asked Cotton Mather for his opinion on witchcraft. They wanted some guidance on what types of evidence were acceptable, and to know if witchcraft was even real. Mather replied that witchcraft was indeed real, and that execution was an appropriate punishment for the most dangerous witches. He did tell the judges to proceed with caution and be careful with the types of evidence they accepted, but he otherwise said the Salem trials were valid. He maintained this position even after most other people in Massachusetts realized no witches were being executed, just innocent people. 

Ultimately, nineteen people were executed during the Salem trials, one man was crushed to death during questioning, and several people died in jail. Some, or maybe many, of those deaths might have been avoided if Cotton Mather had given the magistrates a different opinion.

Cotton Mather was twenty-nine in 1692. I had a lot to learn about life when I was twenty-nine, and it's pretty obvious that Cotton Mather did too. Luckily, no one was asking me to make life-or-death decisions, or maybe I would have screwed up like he did. Mather's misjudgment about the Salem trials tainted his reputation for the rest of his life. He expected to become president of Harvard, like his father was, but that didn't happen. A shadow hung over him until he died, and still hangs over our memory of him today. 

Despite Mather’s superstitious and ignorant beliefs about witches, he was also one of the best-educated people in Massachusetts and was very interested in science. In 1721, he even helped to start an inoculation campaign in Boston against smallpox, one of the first in the Western world. Most of Boston's physicians violently opposed the campaign, but it turned out to be a resounding success. It's odd to think of Mather as the voice of scientific reason, but in that situation he was.

Mather also wrote dozens of letters to the Royal Society, England’s national academy of sciences, describing interesting phenomena in New England. Some of his letters discussed topics that today we might think of as appropriately scientific, like local New England wildlife (snakes, muskrats, moose), people suffering from unusual medical conditions, and earthquakes. Other letters covered somewhat stranger topics, such as prophetic dreams, ghosts, and a calf born with a human face. The boundaries between science, religion, and magic were poorly delineated at the time, and Cotton Mather was not alone in mixing these topics together. 

One letter, which he wrote in July of 1716, describes a triton, or what we might call a merman. In the letter, Mather writes that he doubted the existence of merfolks until learning about three men who had seen a triton off the coast of Connecticut. On February 22, 1716, the men had been sailing from Milford to Branford when they saw a “creature that seemed a man, lying on the top of a rock” close to the Branford shore. 

“… his head, and face, and neck, and shoulders, and arms, and elbows, and breast and back, all of a human shape, only his arms were little more than half the length of a man’s. He wanted not for hair, which was of a grayish color. However – desinit in piscem (Latin – “it ends in a fish”); his lower parts were those of a fish, and colored like a mackerel. His tail was forked, and he had two fins about a half foot above the tail. The whole animal was about five or six feet in length.” 

That's a very vivid and specific description. Was this a hoax played on Cotton Mather, or did the men actually see something strange on that rock? Or maybe they misidentified a large seal or some other creature? My mind tries to find a rational explanation, but here in the 21st century we're more skeptical about the existence of mermen and mermaids. People were still learning how the physical world worked back in the 17th century and were more willing to believe strange, half-human creatures lurked in the ocean.

It’s interesting that Cotton Mather considered the triton an animal, rather than a mythical being, a monster, or some kind of sea-demon. I suppose he was trying to be scientific, and not superstitious. I’m sure he would have liked to study the triton, but he did not get the opportunity. The men who saw the triton attempted to capture it, but it jumped off the rock and quickly swam away. 

The truth about the Connecticut triton will never be known. Was there a scientific explanation, or a supernatural one? It's fun to speculate there might supernatural creatures like tritons. That type of speculation is less fun when those "supernatural" creatures are innocent people being accused of witchcraft. 

Folklore and Pagan Gods in The Lighthouse

My work schedule has been very busy the last few weeks, but I did manage to see The Lighthouse, the new film by Robert Eggers, the New Hampshire-born director who gave us The Witch a few years ago. My review is a little delayed but I wanted to post it anyway because The Lighthouse has some interesting New England folklore in it. Be warned: my review has a few (but not many) SPOILERS.

THE PLOT

The plot is relatively simple. In the late 1800s, two lighthouse keepers (or wickies as they're called) arrive for duty at a lighthouse located on a small rocky island off the coast of Maine. The older wickie, Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) has served on the island many times before. His new assistant, Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson) is a former lumberjack reporting for his first stint in a lighthouse. When asked what happened to his previous assistant, Wake replies that he went insane and became convinced the lighthouse was enchanted and that merfolk haunted the island. Oh, and by the way Wake adds, never kill a seabird because they contain the souls of dead sailors.

 

After this ominous set-up the two men settle into a monotonous routine. As the senior lighthouse keeper Wake tends to the actual light itself, a role he guards jealously. He forbids Winslow from even entering the chamber at the top of the lighthouse and instead assigns to him all the manual labor: hauling coal, cleaning their tiny living quarters, and emptying bedpans. Winslow grows to resent his poor treatment, and his unhappiness is only compounded by a one-eyed seagull that regularly torments him. Winslow's sole pleasure is a scrimshaw mermaid he finds hidden in his mattress which fuels his sexual fantasies.

Over the course of their four-week stint the two men gradually come to an understanding, but things become complicated when the ship that is supposed to bring their replacements is delayed by a powerful storm. The men are stuck on the island. The storm lasts for weeks, and when their liquor runs out Wake and Winslow start to drink kerosene sweetened with honey. And that's when things start to get really weird...

DIALECT AND KILLING A SEABIRD

As he did with The Witch, Robert Eggers incorporates local folklore into his film to make it feel authentic. Much of the dialogue was influenced by 19th-century writers including Sarah Orne Jewett, whose novels and stories were drawn from her experience living in Maine. I've read that Eggers used Jewett's work to craft the two distinct dialects the lighthouse keepers speak: Wake's nautical one and Winslow's inland Maine dialect. I think Willem Dafoe has the easier job, since he basically gets to talk like a pirate or Mr. Crabs from Spongebob Squarepants. Robert Pattinson, on the other hand, has to speak with an accent somewhere between a classic Boston accent and the "Yah cahn't theyah from heyah" Mainer accent. He does a good job though, and I enjoyed hearing him deliver his dialogue.

  

One of the key plot points is Wake's admonition to never kill a seabird. This is an actual piece of nautical folklore although I think it is particularly local. Many people are familiar with it from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, where a ship becomes cursed after a sailor kills an albatross. According to this article the belief was still extant as late as 1959, when sailors transporting an albatross in a cage blamed various malfunctions on the bird's accidental death.

However, there is one possible link to Maine's folklore. Maine lumberjacks believed that is was bad luck to kill gray jays (also known as gorbeys), which were small birds that frequented lumber camps. They were said to be the souls of dead lumberjacks, and hurting a gray jay would bring grave misfortune. In one tale a brutish lumberjack plucks the feathers from a gray jay on a cold winter night, thinking it is the soul of a deceased colleague that he despised. When he awakes in the morning he finds he finds himself bald, weak, and constantly pursued by stormy weather. He had plucked the feathers from his own soul.

MERFOLK

The island in The Lighthouse may be haunted by a mermaid. I won't give away too much, but if it is she's definitely not the happy Little Mermaid variety. There are quite a few mermaid and merman stories from New England, and none of them are happy. They're much closer to horror stories than fairy tales.

 

One of the earliest comes from John Josselyn's 1674 book An Account of Two Voyages to New England. Josselyn, an Englishman, visited New England in 1633 and 1638. While visiting Maine some of the settlers told him about strange things that had happened to them.

One Mr. Mittin related of a triton or merman which he saw in Casco Bay. This gentleman was a great fowler, and used to go out with a small boat or canoe, and fetching a compass about a small island (there being many small islands in the bay), for the advantage of a shot, was encountered with a triton, who laying his hands upon the side of the canoe, had one of them chopt off with a hatchet by Mr. Mittin, which was in all respects like the hand of a man. The triton presently sunk, dyeing the water with his purple blood, and was no more seen.

Gruesome. Merfolk were generally believed to be aggressive, and an almost identical encounter with a violent merman supposedly happened in Gloucester Harbor in Massachusetts, according to author Edward Rowe Snow. 

Snow also claims that in 1900 a lighthouse keeper at Nantucket's Great Point saw something humanoid emerge from the ocean and crawl into the woods near the beach. Other people who lived nearby saw signs that something large had crawled through the underbrush and made a nest. It's kind of creepy. The plot of The Lighthouse might not be that far from reality (or at least folklore). 

PAGAN GODS

There are several references to classical Greek and Roman gods in The Lighthouse. The myth of Prometheus, the Titan who was punished for stealing fire from Mount Olympus, is alluded to throughout the movie, as is the myth of Proteus, the shapeshifting Old Man of the Sea. I was also struck by this curse that Wake hurls at Winslow when the younger man complains about Wake's cooking:

WAKE: Hark, Triton, Hark! Bellow, and bid our father, the sea king, rise up from the depths, full-foul in his fury, black waves teeming with salt-foam, to smother this young mouth with pungent slime... 

(addressed directly to Winslow)... to choke ye, engorging yer organs till ye turn blue and bloated with bilge and brine and can scream no more... only when, he, crowned in cockle shells with slithering tentacled tail and steaming beard, takes up his fell, be-finnèd arm -– his coral-tined trident screeches banshee-like in the tempest and runs you through the gullet, bursting ye, a bulging bladder no more, but a blasted bloody film now -- a nothing for the Harpies and the souls of dead sailors to peck and claw and feed upon, only to be lapped up and swallowed by the infinite waters of the dread emperor himself, forgotten to any man, to any time, forgotten to any god or devil, forgotten even to the sea... for any stuff or part of Winslow, even any scantling of your soul, is Winslow no more, but is now itself the sea.

Triton was the son and herald of the sea-god Poseidon and mermen were sometimes called 'tritons' after him (as in Josselyn's account). Wake seems to be invoking Poseidon but the 'slithering tentacled tail' also makes me think of H.P. Lovecraft's squid-like deity Cthulhu, and Eggers has said that Lovecraft's weird fiction was one of the film's inspirations.

 

The references to classical mythology are more prominent than the nods to Lovecraft, though, and I don't think they are out of place in a film set in New England. Many of the original English colonists were well-versed in classical mythology. For example, Thomas Morton invoked a variety of pagan gods (including Neptune, Triton, Priapus and Ganymede) at his 1628 May Day celebration in what is now Quincy, Massachusetts. Of course, the Pilgrims at Plymouth weren't too happy about this and burned down his settlement, but even the die-hard Puritans of Boston and Connecticut knew their ancient gods. For example John Winthrop Jr., the son of Massachusetts's first governor, was so skilled in alchemy and medicine that his peers dubbed him the Christian Hermes. 

In 1776, four captive British sailors carved a statue of Bacchus, the god of wine, for an innkeeper in Windham, Connecticut, while in 1820 Ephraim Lyon of Eastford, Connecticut started a church of Bacchus and declared himself its priest. Perhaps Lyon was just really the town drunk, but in the 1800s many large New England towns also built athenaeums, libraries named after the Greek goddess of wisdom. Many athenaeums were decorated with statues of her. In downtown Boston there are also several large mercantile buildings from the late 19th century decorated with statues of Poseidon and Hermes as well. New England was founded by Puritan Christians but they brought the gods of their ancestors with them as well. We can try to escape the past but it usually catches up with us, which is one of the film's themes.

MY THOUGHTS 

I'm the perfect audience member for The Lighthouse. I like horror movies, I like art films, and I love weird old New England stuff. I enjoyed The Lighthouse and will probably see it again. It had good actors, beautiful cinematography, sea shanties, writhing tentacles, a sinister seagull, and something gruesome in a lobster trap. 

I'm curious how audiences will react to the movie. When I saw The Witch some audience members were puzzled and angry after it ended because it was not the straightforward horror film they expected. The Lighthouse is much weirder than The Witch and even harder to categorize. Is is a dark slapstick comedy? A mythopoetic meditation on the price we pay to tell the truth? A 19th century nautical version of The Odd Couple with repressed erotic undertones? If you see it let me know what you think.

The Maypole of Merrymount: Religion, Sex and Money

When I was in elementary school, way back in the 1970s, we had to make May Day baskets as an art project. I don't remember what grade it was, but I do remember thinking "May Day? That's not really something we celebrate here." I knew it was a holiday in other countries, but was it something celebrated in Haverhill, Massachusetts? Still, I made my basket from construction paper and dutifully left it on a neighbor's doorstep like the teacher suggested.

Apparently I was on the dying end of a tradition, because May Day baskets were quite popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Maybe I would have been more enthusiastic about May Day if I had been allowed to dance around a Maypole, but that was not part of my school's curriculum.

*****

The first and most famous Maypole erected in Massachusetts was the one put up by Thomas Morton at his colony of Merrymount in 1624. Morton was a well-educated English lawyer who had come to Massachusetts as part of a colonial expedition. Their colony, in what is now the city of Quincy, was initially called Mount Wollaston after Captain Wollaston, the commander of the expedition's ship. When Morton learned the captain was selling indentured servants to another colony in Virginia he encouraged the other servants to rebel. Wollaston fled, and Morton became the new leader of the calling. Preferring to call himself the colony's "host," he renamed it Merrymount.

Since Thomas Morton was an educated, literary type of guy, the name Merrymount had a variety of meanings to it. First, it indicated that the colony was to be a place of happiness now that Captain Wollaston was gone. Second, it was a play on the Latin word for the sea, mare, since the colony was on the coast. Ma-re-mount, get it? Finally, there was a sexual connotation to the colony's name, indicating it was someplace where the mounting (aka sex) was merry.

Puritans disapprovingly watching Maypole festivities at Merrymount.

As May 1st approached the colonists Merrymount erected an 80' Maypole topped with a pair of deer antlers. They fired rifles and pistols in celebration, and Morton composed a poem that was nailed to the pole. Morton's poem mentions various Roman sea deities like Neptune, Amphitrite and Triton, and ends with these lines:

With proclamation that the first of May
At Ma-re-Mount shall be kept holiday

Morton and the other colonists invited the local Indians to join them at their celebration, particularly the Indian women. Beer flowed, people got drunk, and a good time was had by all. The Merrymount men sang a song that was composed in honor of the celebration. Here are some of the lyrics:

Drink and be merry, merry, merry boys;
Let all your delight be in Hymen's joys
Iô to Hymen, now the day is come,
About the merry Maypole take a roam. 

Make green garlands, bring bottles out
And fill sweet Nectar freely about.
Uncover thy head and fear no harm,
For here's good liquor to keepe it warm. 

Give to the Nymph that's free from scorn
No Irish stuff nor Scotch overworn.
Lasses in beaver coats come away,
Ye shall be welcome to us night and day

The "Hymen" mentioned in this poem is the Greco-Roman god of marriage, but again I am sure there is a double entrendre intended. 

Hymen, god of marriage

I suppose if Merrymount had survived as a colony the history of New England would have been quite different, but it didn't survive. Shortly after the May Day celebration the Pilgrims from Plymouth Colony marched on Merrymount. They chopped down the May Pole, arrested Thomas Morton, and exiled him from New England. Morton made his way back to Merrymount in 1630, but most of the inhabitants had scattered by then. This time, the Puritans of Boston arrested Morton and burned Merrymount to the ground. Morton was sent back to England.

Back in England, Morton and his wealthy patron Fernando Gorges successfully sued to revoke the Plymouth Colony charter, but Morton's victory was short-lived because the English Civil War started. Morton fled from the chaos back to New England, where he died penniless in York, Maine in 1647. I believe he is buried somewhere in York, but I couldn't find a location for his grave. Perhaps it has been lost?

The New England Puritans and Thomas Morton came into conflict for three big reasons:

RELIGION

The Puritans followed a very strict version of Christianity that had rigid rules about how people should behave. They also didn't celebrate holidays like May Day or even Christmas, which they associated with the Catholic and Anglican Churches. Holidays were one of the things they were trying to purge from the English church.

Thomas Morton, on the other hand, was an Anglican who clearly enjoyed a good holiday. He was also well-educated and appreciated the ancient paganism of Greece and Rome. I don't think he was a practicing pagan, but he did enjoy the literature and mythology of the Classical World, as evidenced by his poem's references to Roman gods. This was quite common for educated people of his time. For example, Shakespeare's late romances Cymbeline, Pericles and The Tempest all include pagan gods.

The Puritans specifically cast Morton as a sinful pagan, calling Merrymount Mount Dagon (after the ancient Canaanite sea god) and saying the maypole was a modern version of the Golden Calf. Morton took up this mantle proudly. He titled his book about New England The New English Canaan, and urged readers to help protect the new Canaan from the invading Puritans.

SEX

As mentioned above, the Puritans expected people to follow very strict codes of behavior. Sex was intended for married couples. Morton and the settlers at Merrymount had a more relaxed view on these matters.

I think it is useful to note that many of the Puritan settlers were already married and brought their families to New England with them, while most of the Merrymounters were unmarried men with no problem enjoying the company of the local Indian women or possibly even marrying them. Intermarriage between European colonists and indigenous people was common in parts of the New World where the colonists were single men, but the Puritans took a dim view of this practice.

Some historians have also suggested that homosexuality may have been tolerated at Merrymount. For example, the authors of the Boston History Project's book Improper Bostonians point out that Morton mentions Jupiter, the king of the gods, and Ganymede, his male mortal lover, when writing about Merrymount. Of course, Ganymede was also Jupiter's cupbearer so he may have been mentioned because of his connection with getting drunk. Still, male homosexuality was somewhat tolerated among educated Englishmen like Morton. For example, the character of Antonio in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night is clearly in love with Sebastian, something the other characters do not question.

Morton himself never married, for whatever reason, so he would have personally benefited from "hosting" a sexually liberal colony.

MONEY

The Merrymounters were trading with the local Indians for beaver pelts, which brought them into direct conflict with the Puritans, who wanted to corner the trade in pelts. Morton and his men were also giving the Indians guns in return for the pelts, which the Puritans definitely didn't want. This just gave the Pilgrims one more good reason to shut down Morton's colony.

*****

What would I have learned about Maypoles in elementary school if Thomas Morton had succeeded? Probably more than I did (which was nothing). Maybe in some alternate universe he did succeed, and happy New England school children descended from both English and Algonquin Indian ancestors frolic around Maypoles and learn their history. That's not the universe we live in, but Merrymount is still fondly remembered as a brief glimpse of what might have been. 

The Nantucket Merman

I've always liked monsters. Well, at least I like reading about them. I've never met one face-to-face but plenty of New Englanders have. People see all sorts of things around here: Bigfoot, extraterrestrial creatures, pukwudgies, and even the occasional lake monster.

What people don't see much of these days is mer-people. Mermaids and mermen don't seem to be very common around here now, but in the past they were apparently more plentiful. For example, an aggressive triton was seen off the coast of Maine in the early 1600s, while a sailor named Captain Dodge exhibited a mermaid's corpse in a Boston museum in the 1820s.

A merman was even seen off the coast of Nantucket. The year was 1714, and a minister named Valentyn was sailing past Nantucket's Great Point when it happened. Here is a quote from the good reverend's journal:

“It appeared like a sailor, or a man sitting on something; and more like a sailor, as on its head there appeared to be something like an English cap of the same color.

We all agreed he must be some shipwrecked person. After some time I begged the captain to steer the ship more directly toward it. … We had got within a ship’s length of him, when the people on the forecastle mad such a noise that he plunged down, head foremost, and got presently out of sight.

The man who was on watch at the masthead delared that he had… a monstrous long tail.” 

There's something a little creepy about that account. I can imagine the ship's crew going from "Oh, look there's a sailor in the water" to "Oh crap, that guy's got a giant fish tail!" in just a few panicky moments. I know I would.

That may not have been the only sighting of a mer-person near Nantucket. According to folklorist Edward Rowe Snow, the keeper of Great Point's lighthouse claimed to have seen something humanoid crawl out of the ocean and head into nearby Coskata Woods in the early 1900s. Some other locals claimed to have seen signs of something living in the same forest.

Great Point Light from Wikipedia.

The Coskata Woods are very old and have not been logged since 1711. It makes sense that an ancient primal sea being would want to visit an ancient forest.

Perhaps memaids and mermen are still swimming in the waters off our coast. I hope so, because I do like monsters. And make no mistake, mer-people do have a monstrous side. Folklore tells of mermaids who sink ships by raising storms or abduct handsome sailors to be their lovers, while mermen and tritons sometimes attack young women walking alone on the beach. So though I hope there are still some mer-people out there, I don't want to meet one face-to-face, and hope you don't meet one either.

 *****

Most of the information about the Natucket merman can be found in Edward Rowe Snow's book Legends of the New England Coast.