The New English Canaan of Thomas Morton with Introductory Matter and Notes

A settler's descriptions of New England share space here with colonial disputes and an editor's detailed historical commentary. Thomas Morton writes about the region's people, customs and natural surroundings, including trees, birds, fish and geology. Charles Francis Adams Jr. prepared this 1883 edition with introductory material and notes explaining historical incidents, classical references and unfamiliar expressions in the seventeenth-century text.

Morton's sharp comic voice emerges in the account of a prisoner called "mine Host," who escapes at night from Wessaguscus and crosses the woods during a storm to reach Ma-re Mount. His opponents, led by the figure nicknamed "Captaine Shrimp," prepare to pursue him. Alongside these quarrels, the volume offers material on early settlement and the landscape of Massachusetts. It gives readers interested in colonial history both an early account and a later editor's efforts to explain its references.