IX. CHAP. on the part of those for whose benefit they were issued. The consequences were obvious. As the neighborhood of the indefinite possessions of France foreboded the border feuds of a controverted jurisdiction, so the domestic disputes about land-titles and boundaries threatened perpetual lawsuits. At the same time, enterprise was wasted by its diffusion over too wide a surface. Every harbor along the sea was accessible; groups of cabins were scattered at wide intervals, without any common point of attraction; and the agents of such proprietaries as aimed at securing a revenue from colonial rents, were often, perhaps, faithless, were always unsuccessful. How feeble were the attempts at planting towns, is evident from the nature of the tenure by which the lands near the Saco were held; the condition of the grant was the introduction of fifty settlers within seven years! Agriculture was hardly attempted. A district of forty miles square, named Lygonia, and stretching from 1630. Harpswell to the Kennebunk, was set apart for the first colony of farmers; but when a vessel of sixty tons brought over the emigrants who were to introduce the plough into the regions on Casco Bay, the earlier resident adventurers treated their scheme with derision. The musket and the hook and line were more productive than the implements of husbandry ; the few members of the unsuccessful company remained but a single year in a neighborhood where the culture of the soil was so little esteemed, and, embarking once more, sought a home among the rising settlements of Massachusetts. Except for the wealth to be derived from the forest coast of Maine would not at that time have been tenanted by Englishmen ; and this again was fatal to the and the sea, the COLONIZATION OF MAINE. 337 IX. expectations of the proprietaries; since furs might be CHAP. gathered and fish taken without the payment of quitrents or the purchase of lands.1 Feb. Yet a pride of character sustained in Gorges an 1635. unbending hope; and he clung to the project of ter- 3. ritorial aggrandizement. When Mason limited himself to the country west of the Piscataqua, and while Sir William Alexander obtained of the Plymouth company a patent for the eastern extremity of the United States, Gorges, alike undismayed by previous losses, and by the encroaching claims of the French, who had already advanced their actual boundary to the Penobscot, succeeded in soliciting the whole district that lies between the Kennebec and the boundary of New Hampshire. The earnestness of his designs is apparent from his appointment as governor-general of New England. If an unforeseen accident prevented his embarkation for America, and relieved Massachusetts of its apprehensions, he at least sent his nephew, William Gorges, to govern his territory. That officer repaired to the province without delay. Saco may have contained one hundred and fifty inhabitants, when the first court ever duly organized on the soil of 1636. Maine was held within its limits. Before that time, there may have been some voluntary combinations among the settlers themselves; but there had existed on the Kennebec no jurisdiction of sufficient power to prevent or to punish bloodshed among the traders.3 William Gorges remained in the country less than two years; the six Puritans of Massachusetts and Con- 1637. necticut, who received a commission to act as his 1 Hubbard's Narrative, 204. Willis, 13. 17, &c. Folsom, 318, &c. Williamson, i. 237, and ff. Gorges, 48, 49. 43 VOL. I. 2 Documents in Folsom, 49-52. Josselyn, 200. 3 Hubbard, 167, 168. Winthrop. CHAP. successors, declined the trust,' and the infant settleIX. ments then called New Somersetshire were aban1638 doned to anarchy, or to so imperfect a government, 1640. that of the events of two years no records can be found. to 1639 April 3. 1624. Meantime a royal charter now constituted Gorges, in his old age, the lord proprietary of the country; and his ambition immediately soared to the honor of establishing boroughs, framing schemes of colonial government, and enacting a code of laws. The veteran royalist, clearly convinced of the necessity of a vigorous executive, had but dim conceptions of popular liberty and rights; and he busied himself in making such arrangements as might have been expected from an old soldier, who was never remarkable for sagacity, had never seen America, and who, now in his dotage, began to act as a lawgiver for a rising state in another hemisphere.2 Such was the condition of the settlements at the north at a time when the region which lies but a little nearer the sun, was already converted, by the energy of religious zeal, into a busy, well-organized, and even opulent state. The early history of Massachusetts is the history of a class of men as remarkable for their qualities and their influence on public happiness, as any by which the human race has ever been diversified. The settlement near Weymouth was revived; a 1625. new plantation was begun near Mount Wollaston, within the present limits of Quincy; and the merchants of the West continued their voyages to the islands of New England. But these things were of 1 Winthrop. Hubbard, 261, 252. Williamson, i. 268. COLONIZATION OF MASSACHUSETTS. 339 IX. feeble influence compared with the consequences of CHAP. the attempt at a permanent establishment near Cape Ann; for White, a minister of Dorchester, a Puritan, 1624. but not a separatist, breathed into the enterprise a higher principle than that of the desire of gain. Roger Conant, having already left New Plymouth for Nantasket, through a brother in England, who was a friend of White, obtained the agency of the adventure. 1625. A year's experience proved to the company, that their speculation must change its form, or it would produce no results; the merchants, therefore, paid with honest liberality all the persons whom they had employed, and abandoned the unprofitable scheme. But Conant, a man of extraordinary vigor, "inspired as it were by some superior instinct," and confiding in the active friendship of White, succeeded in breathing a portion 1626 of his sublime courage into his three companions; and, making choice of Salem, as opening a convenient place of refuge for the exiles for religion, they resolved to remain as the sentinels of Puritanism or the Bay of Massachusetts.1 The design of a plantation was now ripening in the mind of White and his associates in the south-west of England. About the same time, some friends in Lincolnshire fell into discourse about New England; im- 1627 agination swelled with the thought of planting the pure gospel among the quiet shades of America; it seemed better to depend on the benevolence of uncultivated nature and the care of Providence, than to endure the constraints of the English laws and the severities of the English hierarchy; and who could doubt, that, at the voice of undefiled religion, the wil 1 Hubbard, 102. 106-108. Prince, 224. 229. 231. 235, 236. Cotton Mather, b. i. c. iv. s. 3. CHAP. derness would change to a paradise for a people who IX. lived under a bond with the Omnipresent God? 328. Mar. 19. After some deliberation, persons in London and the West Country were made acquainted with the design.1 The council for New England, itself incapable of the generous purpose of planting colonies, was ever ready to make sale of patents, which had now become their only source of revenue. Little concerned even 4 at making grants of territory which had already been purchased, they sold to Sir Henry Roswell, Sir John Young, Thomas Southcoat, John Humphrey, John Endicot, and Simon Whetcomb, gentlemen of Dorchester,3 a belt of land, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, extending three miles south of the River Charles and the Massachusetts Bay, and three miles north of every part of the River Merrimac. The zeal of White sought and soon found other and powerful associates in and about London,5 kindred spirits, men of religious fervor, uniting the emotions of enthusiasm with unbending perseverance in action,-Winthrop, Dudley, Johnson, Pynchon, Eaton, Saltonstall, Bellingham, so famous in colonial annals, besides many others, men of fortune, and friends to colonial enterprise, who desired to establish a plantation of "the best" of their countrymen on the shores of New England, in a safe seclusion, which the corruptions of human superstition might never invade. Three of the 1 Dudley to the countess of Lincoln, in i. Mass. Hist. Coll. viii. 37. The countess of Lincoln, to whom Dudley wrote, was "the approved Lady Briget," daughter of Lord Say, the sister-in-law, and not the mother, of the Lady Arbella. Savage on Winthrop, i. 2. Walpole's Royal and Noble Authors, ii. 272-275. The mother of Arbella was an authoress. 2 Chalmers, 135. 3 Hubbard, 108. 4 Prince, 247. The charter repeats the boundaries. 5 Hubbard, 109. iv. s. 3. Mather, i. c |
