Selected Bibliography on Puritanism
|Works Available Online
About Thomas Morton
Morton was a lawyer, trader, and adventurer whose second trip to New England was as a member of Captain Wollaston's company in 1625. The band settled at Mount
Wollaston (now Quincy, Mass.), and, when Capt. Wollaston went to Virginia in the spring, Morton called the settlement Ma-re-Mount and began a thriving trading business with local Native American
tribes. Morton was captured and sent to England in 1628; when he returned in 1629, his colony had disintegrated. Captured again and returned to England in 1630, he was released, returning to
Massachusetts in 1643 before being sent away by authorities. He was briefly imprisoned when he tried to return, after which he left for Maine, his home for the two years before his death.
For a modern edition with notes, criticism, and biography, see New English Canaan by Thomas Morton of "Merrymount": Text, Notes, Biography ∓ Criticism, ed. Jack Dempsey (2000).
Secondary sources include Donald F. Connors' Thomas Morton (Twayne, 1969).