"It's May, it's May, the lusty month of May," sings one of the characters in the legendary Broadway play "Camelot." And for John Endicott, the first governor of Massachusetts and Salem's most important citizen, that was just the problem he was facing in the spring of 1629.

Shortly after his arrival at Salem the previous summer, the new governor had become aware of Merry Mount, a renegade settlement at Wollaston (now Quincy) led by Thomas Morton. The inhabitants were providing the Native Americans in the area with guns and liquor and even selling some of them as slaves in Virginia. They also routinely participated in drunken bacchanals in the shadow of an 80-foot-high May-pole.

In rural communities in ancient England there had been a long-standing practice on the first of May to spend the morning haying and the afternoon erecting a tall, brightly-decorated pole around which locals would then eat, drink and dance. The celebration often led to perceived excesses and other illicit, "lusty" activities.

The May-pole ritual was rooted in pagan traditions, and partly for that reason it was eventually outlawed in Protestant England and by the sober, hard-line Puritans who settled Massachusetts in the late 1620s. Because the ongoing Merry Mount celebrations and the culture they represented threatened the mores of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and because Wollaston lay within the boundaries of the colony, Gov. Endicott decided to take corrective action against Morton and his fellow "heathens."

In May of 1629 Endicott led an armed force southward to Wollaston. Traveling most likely by water, the Puritans made quick work of the illicit goings-on shortly after their arrival. Endicott's men stopped the celebration and then gleefully toppled the offensive May-pole.

The governor sent Morton, the "lord of misrule," out of the colony, and his followers were given a choice to sign an oath of allegiance to the colonial government or follow their leader elsewhere.

Endicott's raid brought to an end to Morton's "Merry Mount" and the "beastly practices of the mad Bacchanalians" who had gathered there. Order had been restored in Puritan Massachusetts.

To the ultra-conservative historian James Duncan Phillips, writing in his "Salem in the Seventeenth Century," the dismantling of Merry Mount was merely the "suppressing of one of those dissolute, lawless settlements which have been always an accompaniment of frontier life." But the noted Salem author Nathaniel Hawthorne had a slightly different, and infinitely more human, take on the event.

Hawthorne used the Wollaston episode as the theme of a short story entitled "The May-pole of Merry Mount," which was as concerned with human behavior and growing up as it was with political suppression.

In Hawthorne's tale, a young couple chosen to be the King and Queen of the May, are also to get married in real life during the May-pole celebration. The priest, dressed in the canonical robes of an English priest but also festooned with flowers and vines in the pagan tradition, is just starting the sunset ceremony when Endicott and his armed men appear from the shadows.

"Stand off, priest of Baal" the Puritan commander warned, and then then proceeded to attack the pagan "altar" with his own sharp sword. Within seconds the offending May-pole lay on the ground.

But the Endicott of Hawthorne's tale immediately regretted what he had done: "I could find it in my heart to plant it again, and give each of these beastial pagans one other dance round their idol" the governor shouted. "It would have served rarely for a whipping-post!"

Endicott then turned his attention to the young bride and groom. In a cruel voice he informed the pair they would soon have a "token" by which to remember their nuptial day. The groom, however, gallantly asked the governor to spare his lover and volunteered to take all the punishment himself. The bride-to-be did likewise.

Not even John Endicott could be unmoved by this show of true love and willingness to sacrifice, Hawthorne wrote. Seeing the pair had the potential to become upstanding Puritan citizens, he chose to begin the process of assimilation by personally crowning them with a wreath of roses on the very spot where the May-pole had stood.

The couple was not uncooperative. In the minutes before the wedding ceremony was to have begun, both had voiced their belief that after the ceremony the mirth and gaiety of their existence would be replaced by more difficult times. They were willing, says Hawthorne biographer Edwin Haviland Miller of the fictional duo, to trade "the pagan delights for the sobrieties of Puritan maturity."

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Jim McAllister of Salem writes a weekly column on the region's history. Contact him at jim@nii.net.