The expense of transporting these friends was very heavy, amounting in the aggregate to six hundred pounds, as we learn by opening Allerton’s charge roll.[574] Nor was this all; destitute and homeless, they had to be maintained the better part of fifteen months before they were able to stand on their own feet, and pay their way. They had no harvest of their own to reap. Land was given them and block-houses were run up for their shelter. Then they planted “against the coming of another season.”[575] The Pilgrims, though already overloaded with debt, did not grudge this large addition to the budget of expense, but showed herein “a rare example of brotherly love and Christian care;” for Bradford says that “even thus they were, for the most part, both welcome and useful, as they feared God and were sober livers.”[576] But if the devout colonists of the Plymouth slope were “sober livers,” all their neighbors were not. It seems that some years before this time, perhaps in 1625, perhaps a twelvemonth earlier, an English Captain Wollaston, inoculated with the general rage for planting settlements, had attempted to drop one on that rocky height near Boston bay which still bears his name.[577] Like the foolish architect in the Bible, he built on a sandy foundation, though his colony was bottomed on a rock—so strange are the paradoxes of this mortal life. “Not finding things to answer his expectations,” he did not tarry long in his eyry, but pressed on into Virginia with a portion of his emigrants, intending soon to return for the rest.[578] So much for the intention. But in his absence one of his followers, Thomas Morton, “who had been a kind of pettifogger, of Fernival’s Inn,” London, and was now broken down into an uneasy bloat, ripe for mischief, obtained an ascendency over the waiting colonists, and thereby assumed control. “Then,” says the old recitor, “they fell into great licentiousness of life, in all profaneness, Morton becoming lord of misrule, and maintaining, as it were, a school of atheism. Having gotten some goods into their hands by much trading with the Indians, they spent all vainly in quaffing both wine and stronger liquors in great excess—as some have reported, as much as ten pounds’ worth of a morning. They also set up a May-pole, and danced and drank around it, frisking about like so many fairies, or _furies_ rather: and worse practices they had, as if they sought anew to revive and celebrate the obscene feast of the Roman goddess Flora, or the beastly practices of the mad Bacchanalians. Morton pretended withal to be a poet, and composing sundry rhymes and loose verses, some tending to lasciviousness and others to detraction and scandal, he affixed these to his idle, or _idol_, May-pole. The name of the height was changed; it was called ‘Merry-Mount,’ as if this jollity would have been perpetual.