The site of Merrymount had originally been selected by Captain Wollaston for a trading post. Imbued with the same mercenary motive which had proved fatal in the case of Weston and Gorges, Captain Wollaston, whose name is perpetuated in Mount Wollaston, brought with him in 1625 a gang of indented white servants. Finding his system of industry ill suited to the climate, he carried his men to Virginia, where he sold them. When he left, Morton took possession of the place and dubbed it "Ma-re-mount." And then began the pranks which shook the Colony to its foundations. Picture to yourself a band of sworn triflers, dedicated to the wildest philosophy of pleasure, teaching bears to dance, playing blind-man's buff, holding juggling and boxing matches, and dancing. According to Hawthorne, on the eve of Saint John they felled whole acres of forests to make bonfires, and crowned themselves with flowers and threw the blossoms into the flames. At harvest-time they hilariously wasted their scanty store of Indian corn by making an image with the sheaves, and wreathing it with the painted garlands of autumn foliage. They crowned the King of Christmas and bent the knee to the Lord of Misrule! Such fantastic foolery is inconceivable in a Puritan community, and the Maypole which was its emblem was the most inconceivable of all. This "flower-decked abomination," ornamented with white birch bark, banners, and blossoms, was the center of the tipsy jollity of Merrymount. As Morton explains: "A goodly pine tree of eighty foote was reared up, with a peare of bucks horns nayled on somewhere near to the top of it: where it stood as a faire sea mark for directions how to find out the way to mine host of Ma-re-mount." Around this famous, or infamous, pole Morton and his band frolicked with the Indians on May Day in 1627. As the indignant historian writes: "Unleashed pagans from the purlieus of the gross court of King James, danced about the Idoll of Merry Mount, joining hands with the lasses in beaver coats, and singing their ribald songs." It doesn't look quite so heinous to us, this Maypole dancing, as it did to the outraged Puritans. In fact, the story of Morton and Merrymount is one of the few glistening threads in the somber weaving of those early days. But the New England soil was not prepared at that time to support any such exotic, and Myles Standish was sent to disperse the frivolous band, and to order Morton back to England, which he did, after a scrimmage which Morton relates with great vivacity and doubtful veracity in his "New English Canaan."