individuals, but of organized communities united in allegiance to a
church and its pastor. Carrying provisions and supplies, erecting new
villages, as communities they came from England to Massachusetts, and
in that character the people emigrated to Connecticut.

In the mean time, the silence of the Connecticut woods was broken by
other visitors. The lands occupied by the Massachusetts settlers upon
the Connecticut lay within a grant executed March 19, 1631, by the
earl of Warwick, as president of the Council for New England for "all
that part of New England in America which lies and extends itself from
a river there called Narragansett River, the space of forty leagues
upon a straight line near the seashore towards the southwest, west,
and by south, or west, as the coast lieth towards Virginia, accounting
three English miles to the league; and also all and singular the lands
and hereditaments whatsoever, lying and being within the lands
aforesaid, north and south in latitude and breadth, and in length and
longitude of and within, all the breadth aforesaid, throughout the
main-lands there, from the western ocean to the south sea." The
grantees included Lord Say and Sele, Lord Brooke, and Sir Richard
Saltonstall.[54]

Probably some report of the unauthorized colonies reached them and
hastened Saltonstall to send out a party of twenty men in July, 1635,
to plant a settlement on the Connecticut. But the Dorchester settlers
treated them with even less consideration than they had the Plymouth
men. They set upon them and drove them out of the river.[55] Then, in
October, 1635, John Winthrop, Jr., the eldest son of John Winthrop of
Massachusetts, came from England with a commission to be governor of
the "river Connecticut in New England" for the space of one year.[56]

He was, however, a governor in theory, and made but one substantial
contribution to the permanent possession of Connecticut by the
English. In November, 1635, he erected at the mouth of the river a
fort called after Lord Say and Sele and Lord Brooke--Saybrook--which
in the spring of 1636 he placed under the command of Lyon Gardiner, an
expert military engineer, who had seen much service in the
Netherlands.[57] Hardly had the English mounted two cannon on their
slight fortification when a Dutch vessel sent from New Amsterdam on a
sudden errand arrived in the river. Finding themselves anticipated,
the Dutch returned home, and the scheme of cutting off the Engli