Gobbling Up Our Inheritance

Where did it all go? - all that plenty.

This is a quote from a piece in American Heritage magazine about Thomas Morton, who landed in New England in 1622 and felt it to be Paradise, Nature’s Masterpiece. It's a great story, well worth reading, about a man liked by the Indians and greatly disliked by the Puritans.

This is some of the abundance he found:

"Cod was a better source of prosperity than all the gold of the Spanish Main. Enough bass filled the stream by his house to load a hundred-ton ship. He could not throw a stone without hitting one and sometimes could cross over on their backs dry-shod. Merely the head provided a good dinner, and the taste excelled the 'marybones of beefe.' Mackerel, trying to escape the bass, 'shot themselves a shore,' and whole hogsheads could be taken up from the sand. Smelt could be scooped up by basketfuls. Halibut were so large, two men could scarcely lift one out of the water. Salmon and hake, 'a dainty white fish,' came in multitudes. The sturgeon were so fat they were yellow. The swarming shad were used only 'to dung the ground.' A thousand per acre would triple the corn yield. He became so sated with lobsters — for five hundred to a thousand came in with each tide — that for five years he used them only for bait. Some oyster beds were a mile long, the mussels were 'fat and large.' He defied anyone to show him 'the like in any known part of the world.'"

Here's another heartfelt piece on the events of that period and the dirty methods of the Puritans in fixing things their way against the free-minded Thomas Morton and the Native Americans.