VII. CHAPTER of governor was rather one of honor than of profit, the compensation voted from time to time never exceeding 1634. three or four hundred dollars annually. Under Winthrop's four years' administration the infant colony had been firmly planted. Already there were seven churches, and eight principal plantations, besides several smaller ones. Ferries had been established between Boston, Charlestown, and Winnissimet; a fort had been built at Boston; water-mills had been set up at Roxbury and Dorchester, and wind-mills at other places. A bark of thirty tons, called the "Blessing of the Bay," had been built and rigged at Winthrop's expense, and another, the "Rebecca," of sixty tons, at Medford, where Cradock had a ship-yard-a branch of business carried on there from that day to this. A trade in corn and cattle had commenced with Virginia, and an exchange of furs for West India goods with the Dutch at Manhattan. This steadiness and perseverance soon made itself felt. The New England churches, unshackled by traditionary institutions, and constructed, it was thought, on the pure Bible model, became the admiration and envy of the English Puritans; and, the first difficulties of the enterprise overcome, the tide of immigration was already pouring into Massachusetts Bay. The eastern coasts, meanwhile, had not been wholly neglected. Mason and Gorges had made a partition of 1629. their province of Laconia, and Mason had obtained, in his own name, a new and separate grant for that portion of it between the Merrimac and the Piscataqua, extending sixty miles into the interior. This new province was called NEW HAMPSHIRE, after the English county in which Mason lived. For the advancement of the settle ments on the Piscataqua, two companies had been formed, to which separate grants from the Council for New Eu VII. gland were presently issued. The company for the upper CHAPTER plantation, or Dover, was composed of west-of-England merchants; that for the lower plantation, or Portsmouth, 1630. of London merchants, with whom Mason and Gorges were partners. The same summer with the great emigration to Massachusetts Bay, Walter Neal was sent out as governor of the lower plantation. In search of the great lakes of Canada, of which some rumor had been heard from the Indians, he penetrated inland almost to Lake Winnipiseogee, but failed to open that lucrative fur trade which his employers had hoped. Mason and Gorges soon bought out the other partners, and became the sole proprietors of Portsmouth. The adventurers for the upper settlement, or most of them, sold out not long after to the Lords Say and Brooke, two Puritan noblemen much engaged in plantation projects. The coast from the Piscataqua to the Kennebec was 1629covered by six other patents, issued in the course of three 1631. years by the Council for New England, with the consent, doubtless, of Gorges, who was anxious to interest as many persons as possible in the projects of colonization, to which he was himself so much devoted. Several of these grants were for small tracts; the most important embraced an extent of forty miles square, bordering on Casco Bay, and named LIGONIA. The establishments hitherto attempted on the eastern coast had been principally for fishing and fur trading; this was to be an agricultural colony, and became familiarly known as the "Plow patent." A company was formed, and some settlers were sent out; 1631. but they did not like the situation, and removed to Massachusetts. Another of these grants was the Pemaquid patent, a narrow tract on both sides of Pemaquid Point, where already were some settlers. PEMAQUID remained an independent community for the next forty years. CHAPTER VIL The region granted to Sir William Alexander, by the name of Nova Scotia, but which the French claimed also 1627. by the name of Acadie, had passed, along with Canada, into the hands of a joint-stock association of French merchants The Hundred Associates, or Company of New France. The foolish vanity of the favorite Buckingham having brought about a war between France and England, Sir William Alexander availed himself of the opportunity to take forcible possession of the province. He joined for that purpose with Sir David Kirk, or Kertz, an adventurous refugee Huguenot, who took command of a fleet of nine vessels, fitted out at their joint expense. Having in1628. tercepted the supplies sent out by the Company of New France, and gained possession of Port Royal, Kirk proceeded toward Quebec, where Champlain was still gov ernor. Informed, however, of the approach of some other French vessels, sent by the company with supplies, he turned about to meet them. The squadrons encountered off the Bay of Gaspé, and all the French vessels were taken. The next year, having first received the submission of some French settlers on the Island of Cape Breton, Kirk ascended the St. Lawrence a second time. Cut 1629. off from all communication with France, and in distress for provisions, Quebec, with its starving inhabitants, about a hundred in number, gladly surrendered peace was already made in Europe; and under the treaty and the negotiations that followed it, not Canada only, 1632. but Cape Breton and Acadie, passed again to the French. But The limits of Acadie toward the west were wholly unsettled. Razzillai, appointed governor for the Company of New France, had a grant of the river and bay of St. Croix; but he preferred to establish himself at La Hâve, on the exterior coast of the Acadien peninsula. The people of Plymouth, encouraged by their successful In VII. dian trade at the Kennebec, had established a trading- CHAPTER house on the Penobscot, and another still further east, at Machias, almost at the entrance of the Bay of Fundy. 1632. The trading-house at the Penobscot was soon visited and rifled by a French pinnace; that at Machias shared, the next year, the same fate; and notice was given by the 1633. French commanders that they would not allow English trade or settlement any where eastward of Pemaquid Point, a promontory about half way from the Penobscot to the Kennebec. The French were not only rivals in trade, but, what was worse, they were papists, and the people of Massachusetts feared they might prove but “ill neighbors." Their commerce thus curtailed toward the eastward, the people of Plymouth, notwithstanding the refusal of Massachusetts to co-operate with them, and disregarding the protests and threats of the Dutch, established a trading post on Connecticut River, as mentioned in a previ- Sept. ous chapter. Since the settlement of Massachusetts Bay, the ancient and enterprising colony of New Plymouth had received considerable accessions, though it still remained, as it always did, far inferior to its younger neighbor. CHAPTER CHAPTER VIII. SETTLEMENT OF MARYLAND. PROGRESS OF VIRGINIA. It was not Puritan nonconformists alone who were exposed to persecution in England. The Catholics, at the other end of the religious scale, in numbers and means a formidable body, including many of the ancient nobility, were watched with even greater jealousy, and subjected to far severer penalties. The Catholics constituted from the beginning what the Puritans came to do only by degrees, not a religious sect merely, but a political party, an inevitable consequence of the supposed necessity, in those times, of maintaining a unity of religious faith. It was not toleration, but supremacy, for which Catholics and Puritans alike sought; while the Church of England, for the maintenance of her own su premacy, struggled equally against both. As against the Catholics, she was sustained, and, indeed, constantly instigated to new severities by the Puritans, who looked upon the ancient faith and its professors with mingled feelings of hatred and terror, of which it is not easy, at this time, to form any very adequate idea. In those feelings the great mass of the English people strongly sympathized. The terrible times of "Bloody Mary,” yet fresh in the public recollection; the famous Spanish Armada, fitted out for the express purpose of carrying into effect the pope's sentence of excommunication and deposition against Elizabeth; the repeated outbreaks of the Catholic nobles during her time, and, still more recently, the foolish and fanatical gunpowder plot; the |