Note 30 — MORTON OF MERRY-MOUNT.

Morton uniformly speaks of the place as Ma-re-Mount, and John Adams on this point commented in his notes as follows:—“The Fathers of Plymouth, Dorchester, Charlestown, &c., I suppose would not allow the name to be Ma-re-Mount, but insisted upon calling it Merry-Mount, for the same reason that the common people in England will not call gentlemen’s ornamental grounds gardens, but insist upon calling them pleasure-grounds, i. e., to excite envy and make them unpopular.”

Ma-re-Mount, however, was a characteristic bit of Latin punning on Morton’s part, designed to tease his more austere neighbors. He himself says (Infra, *132): “The inhabitants of Passonagessit, having translated the name of their habitation from that ancient salvage name to Ma-re-Mount ... the precise seperatists that lived at New Plimmouth stood at defiance with the place threatening to make it a woefull mount and not a merry mount.” (Infra, *134.) In view of the situation of the place, Ma-re-Mount was a very appropriate name, but it may well be questioned whether it was ever so called by any human being besides Morton, or by him except in print. Bradford calls it Merie-mounte. (p. 237.) The expression used by Morton, that they “translated the name” from Passonagessit to Ma-re-Mount, would naturally suggest that the Indian name might find its equivalent in the Latin one, and mean simply “a hill by the sea.” On this point, however, J. Hammond Trumbull writes: “Morton’s ‘Passonagessit’ has been a puzzle to me every time it has caught my eye since I first marked it twenty years ago or more with double (??). Morton, as he shows in chap. ii. of book I., could not write the most simple Indian word without a blunder. What may have been the name he makes ‘Passonagessit’ we cannot guess, unless it survives in some early record. There is no trace of ‘sea,’ or ‘water,’ or ‘mount’ in it. If it stands for Pasco-naig-és-it, it means ‘at [a place] near the little point,’ but I know so little of the local topography that I hesitate to suggest this interpretation.” The rendering here suggested by Dr. Trumbull does apply sufficiently well to the locality. Mount Wollaston is a part of the neck which connects the peninsulas locally known in Quincy as Germantown and Hough’s Neck with the mainland.