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.
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