ion, and in the
great struggle against monopolies which was then going on, the Plymouth
Company did not fail to serve as a target for attacks. It started,
however, with too little capital to enter upon schemes involving
immediate outlay, and began almost from the first to seek to increase
its income by letting or selling portions of its territory, which
extended from the latitude of Philadelphia to that of Quebec, thus
encroaching upon regions where Holland and France were already gaining
a foothold. It was from this company that the merchant adventurers
associated with the Mayflower Pilgrims obtained their new patent in
the summer of 1621, and for the next fifteen years all settlers in New
England based their claims to the soil upon territorial rights conveyed
to them by the Plymouth Company. The grants, however, were often
ignorantly and sometimes unscrupulously made, and their limits were so
ill-defined that much quarrelling ensued. [Sidenote: Sir Ferdinando
Gorges, and the Council for New England]

During the years immediately following the voyage of the Mayflower,
several attempts at settlement were made about the shores of
Massachusetts bay. One of the merchant adventurers, Thomas Weston, took
it into his head in 1622 to separate from his partners and send out a
colony of seventy men on his own account. These men made a settlement
at Wessagusset, some twenty-five miles north of Plymouth. They were a
disorderly, thriftless rabble, picked up from the London streets, and
soon got into trouble with the Indians; after a year they were glad
to get back to England as best they could, and in this the Plymouth
settlers willingly aided them. In June of that same year 1622 there
arrived on the scene a picturesque but ill understood personage, Thomas
Morton, "of Clifford's Inn, Gent.," as he tells on the title-page of
his quaint and delightful book, the "New English Canaan." Bradford
disparagingly says that he "had been a kind of petie-fogger of
Furnifell's Inn"; but the churchman Samuel Maverick declares that he
was a "gentleman of good qualitie." He was an agent of Sir Ferdinando
Gorges, and came with some thirty followers to make the beginnings of
a royalist and Episcopal settlement in the Massachusetts bay. He was
naturally regarded with ill favour by the Pilgrims as well as by the
later Puritan settlers, and their accounts of him will probably
bear taking with a grain or two of salt. [Sidenote: Wessagusset and
Merrymoun