VI. tlement in New England. Supplies both of provisions CHAPTER and goods for trading with the Indians were afterward. obtained from other fishing vessels, sometimes at ex- 1622. orbitant prices; but without these supplies the infant colony must have perished. The London partners sent out no provisions and very few goods. A scarcity of food, often extreme, continued to a greater or less extent for the first four years. The agricultural arrangements of the colony were as yet very imperfect, and the chief dependence during all that period was on corn purchased of the Indians, for which purpose little trading voyages were undertaken to Cape Cod and the adjoining coasts. The clams with which the harbor of Plymouth abounded were also an essential resource. At certain seasons fish were plenty; but for some time the colonists were so unprovided as to have neither nets nor other tackle with which to take them, nor salt to preserve them. During his visit to Monhiggon, Winslow learned, from a vessel just arrived from Virginia, the rising of the Indians there, and the massacre of many of the colonists. This news occasioned some alarm at Plymouth, and the inhabitants commenced a little fort on the crest of the rising ground inclosed within their palisade. This fort, which it cost them much labor to complete, was used also as a meeting-house-a place of assembly and worship. Weston, who had taken so active a share in fitting. out the Plymouth colony, dissatisfied with the pecuniary result of that experiment, had resolved to try one of his own. Sixty men, chiefly indented servants, whom he sent out to begin a settlement, trespassed for two or three July. months on the hospitality of the people of Plymouth, whose corn-fields they were accused of robbing. establishing themselves at Wissa gusset, now Weymouth, Nov. on the south shore of Massachusetts Bay, they wasted After VI. CHAPTER their provisions, and were soon reduced to great distress. Dispersed in small parties, they lived as they 1623. could, begging or stealing from the Indians, who presently combined for the destruction of these importunate intruders. Just as this plot was maturing, the people at Plymouth, having heard that a Dutch trading shallop was ashore in Narraganset Bay, sent Winslow to open a communication with the Dutchmen, and also to condole with Massasoit, who was reported to lie dangerously sick. Before Winslow arrived the Dutchmen were gone; Massasoit was found at the point of death, insensible, and surrounded by pow-wows-priests or conjurers, that is, making horrible noises and grimaces, after the Indian fashion. Winslow turned the pow-wows out of the wigwam, assumed the part of physician, and soon put his patient in the way of recovery. Out of gratitude, he revealed the project for the destruction of the white men at Wissagusset, in which, it would seem, he had been invited to join. Alarmed at this information, Winslow hastened back Mar. 23. to Plymouth, and, as it happened then to be a "yearly court day," the matter was referred by the governor to the "body of the company;" but they referred it back again, with discretionary authority, to the governor, his assistant, and Captain Standish. The captain was accordingly dispatched, with eight men, under pretense of trade, to judge of the certainty of the plot, to inform the Wissagusset men of their danger, and with orders to bring back the head of Wituwamat, a noted warrior accused of being the principal instigator of the designs against the English. Standish, "a man of very little stature, yet of a very hot and angry temper," found the Indians full of taunts and bravadoes. Taking this as evidence of VI. the reality of the plot, he watched his opportunity, and, CHAPTER having the obnoxious chief, with three of his followers, in a cabin with himself and several others, he closed the 1622. door, made a signal to his men, snatched a knife from the neck of one of the warriors, and stabbed him to the heart. Of the other Indians, two were slain; the fourth, a boy, was taken alive and hanged. Alarmed at this attack, the Indians fled to the swamps and concealed themselves; not, however, till several more had been killed. The plantation at Wissa gusset was abandoned. A few of the people removed to Plymouth; the rest sailed to Monhiggon, and obtained a passage home from the fishing vessels there. Wituwamat's head was carried to Plymouth, stuck upon a pole, and set up, by way of warning, in the fort. These bloody proceedings excited some misgivings in the mind of John Robinson, who, though still in Holland, extended a pastor's oversight to the colony, which he intended presently to join. "Oh, how happy a thing it would have been," he wrote in a letter to the colonists, "that you had converted some before you killed any." The privileges of exclusive traffic and fishery lately granted by the king's patent to the Council for New En gland, was by no means agreeable to the private merchants engaged in the North American fisheries and the peltry trade. Soon after the issue of that patent, James's third Parliament had met-the same that complained of the Virginia Company's lotteries as a raising of money without parliamentary warrant. The pretensions of the Council for New England to an exclusive right of fishing were also denounced in the House of Commons as a griev ance; and a committee reported that the charter was vitiated by the clause in it which forfeited the ships of interlopers, a thing "which could not be," without sanc CHAPTER tion of Parliament. The Commons passed a bill for the VI. protection of the fishermen, but it failed in the Lords. 1623. Liberty in England was not yet fledged; and Coke, the famous lawyer, Pym, and other leaders of the Commons, were imprisoned after the adjournment for their alleged factious behavior. Parliamentary interference having thus failed, the Nov. 26. Council for New England, sustained by a royal proclamation prohibiting disorderly trading within the limits of 1623. their patent, sent out Francis West, the same person, probably, who was temporary governor of Virginia a few years later, with a commission as admiral of New England. Already thirty or forty fishing vessels sailed annually to that coast, upon which West sought to impose a tribute in the shape of license money. The indefatigable Gorges, engaged for so many years in traffic to the coast of New England, had found a partner much to his mind in John Mason, "a man of action," bred a merchant, afterward a naval commander, and more recently an adventurer in the projected settlement of Newfoundland. Having been appointed secretary to the Council for New England, Mason had obtained the 1621. grant of a tract which he named Mariana, extending from Naumkeag, now Salem, to the mouth of the Mer1622. rimac. This was followed the next year by a grant to Gorges and Mason jointly, of the whole tract from the Merrimac to the Kennebec, extending westward to the River of Canada. This grant was named LACONIA. Mason and Gorges induced several merchants to adventure with them as the "Company of Laconia," and sent out a colony of fishermen, a part of whom, under David Thompson, settled at Little Harbor, at the mouth of the Piscataqua, afterward called Strawberry Bank, now Portsmouth. The others settled some eight miles up the river, VI. at Cocheco, now Dover, under William and Edmond CHAPTER Hilton, fishmongers of London, one of whom, however, had qualified himself for the enterprise by a short resi- 1623. dence at New Plymouth. But the But the company of Laconia did not prosper; and these towns, the oldest in New Hampshire, and, with a few exceptions, the oldest in the United States, remained for several years little more than mere fishing stations. Thompson soon left Little Harbor, and established himself on an island in Massachusetts Bay, which still bears his name. Cotemporaneously with the settlement on the Piscataqua, another colony was attempted further to the eastward. With very little regard, it would seem, to the patent of the Council for New England, though perhaps with their consent, James I., in his character as King of Scotland, had issued, under the Scottish seal, a 1621. grant of all the territory between the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the River St. Croix, under the name of NOVA SCOTIA, or New Scotland, to Sir William Alexander, a poet and court favorite, afterward Secretary of State for Scotland, and created Earl of Sterling. This grant included not only the present province so called, but also the territory now known as New Brunswick. A ves sel was fitted out, which explored the shores and entered 1623. some of the harbors in the vicinity of Cape Sable; but the French were found to be already established at several points along this coast. About the time of the appointment of West as Admiral of New England, a territory of ten miles on the northern coast of Massachusetts Bay, adjoining Mason's grant of Mariana, and extending thirty miles inland, was bestowed on Robert Gorges, son of Sir Ferdinando. He was appointed also Lieutenant General of New England, with a council, of which West, the admiral, and |