In 1625, there sailed into Boston Bay and New England history, a certain “man of pretie parts,” by name Captain Wollaston, a convivial sport named Thomas Morton, and “a great many servants, with provisions and other implements for to begine a plantation.” Among the implements was obviously a prodigious supply of strong waters. They “pitched themselves in a place” within the present town of Quincy, calling their settlement Mt. Wollaston, after their leader. He, however, like some others before and since, did not find life in New England to “answer his expectations,” and carried off a number of his servants to Virginia, where he sold them at a good figure, and took his exit from the stage of history. Thomas Morton, of Cliffords Inn, Gent., whose literary portrait has come down to us in the somewhat unreliable form of an appreciation by himself, supplemented by sundry exceedingly unflattering sketches by his enemies, now proceeded to take control of the situation in a manner entirely satisfactory to himself, the rest of the stranded Quincy band, and, it was darkly rumored, the less virtuous of the Indian squaws. He suggested to the remaining servants that, instead of allowing themselves to be transported to Virginia, they should stay with him as copartners, he having had a share in the enterprise; and that, together, they should thrust out Wollaston's lieutenant. To this they willingly agreed, and matters proceeded merrily. Morton, who, whatever his failings, was a thorough sportsman and passionately fond of outdoor life, became a great favorite with the Indians, and trade was brisk. It must have been, if Bradford's report that they sometimes drank ten pounds' worth of liquor in a morning is to be credited, as the liquor certainly was not. “They also set up a May-pole,” wrote the scandalized Pilgrim, “drinking and dancing aboute it many days togeather, inviting the Indian women, for their consorts, dancing and frisking together like so many fairies or furies” and revived “the beasley practicses of the madd Bacchanalians.”[252] Footnote 252: Bradford, _Plymouth_, pp. 237 _ff._; Morton, _New English Canaan_ (Force Tracts), vol. II, 89 _ff._ The joy of life had, indeed, made one other feeble effort to acclimatize itself in the frosty New England air on Christmas Day, in Plymouth, four years before. Most of the then recent arrivals, constituting, perhaps, a third of the entire community, had had the hardihood to wish to refrain from work on that day, and to celebrate it “in the streete at play, openly” with such ungodliness as pitching a bar and playing ball.[253] That, however, with a certain show of grim humor, had been successfully repressed, as was the May-pole of Merry Mount, on the arrival of Endicott in Massachusetts. Footnote 253: The colony numbered about 85. The newcomers were 35, and Bradford says (_Plymouth_, p. 112), “the most of this new-company” were guilty of the attempt.