had promised to undertake it, thinking to have joyned them all together. Betwixt them there long was much contention. The Londoners, indeed, went bravely forward but in three or four yeares, I and my friends consumed many hundred pounds among the Plimothians, who only fed me but with delayes promises and excuses, but no performance of any kind to any purpose. In the interim many particular ships went thither, and finding my relations true, and that I had not taken that I brought home from the French men, as had beene reported; yet further for my paines to discredit me and my calling it New England, they obscured it and shadowed it with the title of Cannada, till, at my humble suit, king Charles confirmed it, with my map and booke, by the title of New England. The gaine thence returning did make the fame thereof so increase, that thirty forty or fifty saile, went yearely only to trade and fish; but nothing would be done for a plantation till about some hundred of your Brownists of England, Amsterdam and Leyden, went to New Plimouth, whose humourous ignorances caused them for more than a yeare, to endure a wonderful deale of misery with an infinite patience; but those in time do ing well diverse others have in small handfulls undertaken to goe there, to be severall Lords and Kings of themselves. . The Gorges project, certainly, aimed at nothing short of a principality and was begun in all pomp and circumstance. To Greenwich on June 29, 1623, came the Dukes of Buckingham and Richmond, four earls and many lords and gentlemen to draw lots for possessions in the new country. This imposing group was called the Council for New England and had been established under a charter granted in 1620 to the elder Gorges and thirty-nine other patentees. Gorges had had the good luck to acquaint Raleigh with the conspiracy of the Earl of Essex against Queen Elizabeth and James I had valid reason, therefore, to appoint him governor of Plymouth in Devonshire. It was while pursuing his duties in Plymouth that his interest in New England was excited, by the mere accident, as he relates, of some Indians happening to be brought before him. At much pains he learned from them something of the nature of their country and his imagination was soon fired with the vision of golden harvests waiting in the western continent to be reaped by such as he. Naturally sanguine and full of enthusiasm he succeeded in interesting in his project Sir John Popham, Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench, through whose acquaintance with noblemen and connection at Court the coveted patent for making settlements in America was ere long secured. Then the success of the Greenwich assembly - King James himself drew for Buckingham! seems to have decided both Sir Ferdinando and his son to go at once to their glittering new world; and, a few weeks later, the latter sailed forth, armed with a commission as lieutenant of the Council with power to exercise jurisdiction, civil, criminal and ecclesiastical, over the whole of the New England coast. The plan was for him to settle not too far from Plymouth, absorb as soon as might be the little group of men and women who were really laying there the foundations of a nation and begin in masterful fashion the administration of the vast province which was undeniably hison paper. At Weymouth Thomas Weston had left a rude block-house and this Robert Gorges and his comrades immediately appropriated. In their company were several mechanics and tillers of the soil who proceeded to make themselves useful in the new land; but of most interest to us because of their after-history, were |