Sir Ferdinando Gorges

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PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD:

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

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THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

CAPE COD: Even as late as 1633 we find Winthrop, the first Governor PEOPLE OF of the Massachusetts Colony, who was not the most likely to be CAPE COD misinformed, who, moreover, has the fame, at least, of having discovered Wachusett Mountain (discerned it forty miles inland), talking about the “Great Lake” and the “hideous swamps about it,” near which the Connecticut and the “Potomack” took their rise; and among the memorable events of the year 1642 he chronicles Darby Field, an Irishman’s expedition to the “White hill,” from whose top he saw eastward what he “judged to be the Gulf of Canada,” and westward what he “judged to be the great lake which Canada River comes out of,” and where he found much “Muscovy glass,” and “could rive out pieces of forty feet long and seven or eight broad.” While the very inhabitants of New England were thus fabling about the country a hundred miles inland, which was a terra incognita to them, —or rather many years before the earliest date referred to,— Champlain, the first Governor of CHAMPLAIN Canada, not to mention the inland discoveries of Cartier, CARTIER Roberval, and others, of the preceding century, and his own ROBERVAL earlier voyage, had already gone to war against the Iroquois in ALPHONSE their forest forts, and penetrated to the Great Lakes and wintered there, before a Pilgrim had heard of New England. In Champlain’s “Voyages,” printed in 1613, there is a plate representing a fight in which he aided the Canada Indians against the Iroquois, near the south end of Lake Champlain, in July, 1609, eleven years before the settlement of Plymouth. Bancroft says he joined the Algonquins in an expedition against the Iroquois, or Five Nations, in the northwest of New York. This is that “Great Lake,” which the English, hearing some rumor of from the French, long after, locate in an “Imaginary Province called Laconia, and spent several years about 1630 in the vain attempt to discover.” (Sir GORGES Ferdinand Gorges, in Maine Hist. Coll., Vol. II. p. 68.) Thomas Morton has a chapter on this “Great Lake.” In the edition of Champlain’s map dated 1632, the Falls of Niagara appear; and in a great lake northwest of Mer Douce (Lake Huron) there is an island represented, over which is written, “Isle ou il y une mine de cuivre,” - “Island where there is a mine of copper.” This will do for an offset to our Governor’s “Muscovy Glass.” Of all these adventures and discoveries we have a minute and faithful account, giving facts and dates as well as charts and soundings, all scientific and Frenchman-like, with scarcely one fable or traveller’s story. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

CAPE COD: It is remarkable that there is not in English any PEOPLE OF adequate or correct account of the French exploration of what is CAPE COD now the coast of New England, between 1604 and 1608, though it is conceded that they then made the first permanent European settlement on the continent of North America north of St. ÆSOP Augustine. If the lions had been the painters it would have been XENOPHANES otherwise. This omission is probably to be accounted for partly by the fact that the early edition of Champlain’s “Voyages” had CHAMPLAIN not been consulted for this purpose. This contains by far the most particular, and, I think, the most interesting chapter of what we may call the Ante-Pilgrim history of New England, extending to one hundred and sixty pages quarto; but appears to be unknown WEBSTER equally to the historian and the orator on Plymouth Rock. Bancroft BANCROFT does not mention Champlain at all among the authorities for De Monts’ expedition, nor does he say that he ever visited the coast of New England. Though he bore the title of pilot to De Monts, he was, in another sense, the leading spirit, as well as the historian of the expedition. Holmes, Hildreth, and Barry, and BARRY apparently all our historians who mention Champlain, refer to the edition of 1632, in which all the separate charts of our harbors, &c., and about one half the narrative, are omitted; for the author explored so many lands afterward that he could afford to forget a part of what he had done. Hildreth, speaking of De Monts’s HILDRETH expedition, says that “he looked into the Penobscot [in 1605], which Pring had discovered two years before,” saying nothing about Champlain’s extensive exploration of it for De Monts in 1604 (Holmes says 1608, and refers to Purchas); also that he followed HOLMES in the track of Pring along the coast “to Cape Cod, which he called Malabarre.” (Haliburton had made the same statement before HALIBURTON him in 1829. He called it Cap Blanc, and Malle Barre (the Bad Bar) was the name given to a harbor on the east side of the Cape.) Pring says nothing about a river there. Belknap says that Weymouth BELKNAP discovered it in 1605. Sir F. Gorges says, in his narration (Maine GORGES Hist. Coll., Vol. II. p. 19), 1658, that Pring in 1606 “made a perfect discovery of all the rivers and harbors.” This is the most I can find. Bancroft makes Champlain to have discovered more western rivers in Maine, not naming the Penobscot; he, however, must have been the discoverer of distances on this river (see Belknap, p. 147). Pring was absent from England only about six months, and sailed by this part of Cape Cod (Malebarre) because it yielded no sassafras, while the French, who probably had not heard of Pring, were patiently for years exploring the coast in search of a place of settlement, sounding and surveying its harbors. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1565

In this year Ferdinando Gorges was born in Ashton Phillips, Somerset, England. The heraldry books inform us (and I suppose this makes sense, for anyone who gives two hoots and a damn) that this infant was descended from a cadet branch of the Russells of Kingston Russell, Dorset, which had changed its name to the metronymic1 Gorges — which family had died out in its male or patronymic line of descent with the demise of Sir Ralph de Gorges of Tothill, a tragedy that had occurred in about the Year of Our Lord 1324.

Bear in mind, as you peruse what follows, that this Gorges guy was a promoter rather than a voyager. He would not ever place his foot on the soil of a New World. To induce other people to make this adventurous journey across the pond that he himself would never venture, he would deploy a conceit very similar to “Gotam” — it would be “Laconia.”2

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

1. Metronymic is the flip side of patronymic (from the Greek metronumikos, from meter mother + onoma name). 2. That is why there is today a Laconia, New Hampshire. Go there if you’re a biker. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1586

John Mason was born at King’s Lynn, Norfolk, England (he would be active in settlement schemes for the territories of Maine and New Hampshire).

From this year into 1588 John Davis (Davys) was making three voyages to the northwest. He charted the strait between Greenland and Canada and explored the eastern shore of Baffin Island. In 1587 he explored Davis Strait to Sanderson’s Hope and reached the most northerly point reported by any European to that date: 72°45’N. He passed the entrance to a great, swirling, roaring strait, which he dubbed the “Furious Overfall,” now called Hudson Strait. The following fantasy of what he saw as he sailed in the Hudson Strait would be produced by George Back in 1840: HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

Davis reported a “great sea, free, large, very salty, blue and of unsearchable depth” when his ship was anchored off Greenland. He estimated it to be 40 leagues (120 miles) wide and believed the “passage is most probable, the execution easy.” Henry Hudson may have served as mate with Davis on at least one (1587) of his voyages.

LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.

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THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1601

February 25, Wednesday (1600, Old Style): Robert Devereux, 2d Earl of Essex, had been one of Queen Elizabeth’s favorite courtiers. Sir Ferdinando Gorges, who had become involved in his conspiracy to kidnap the queen, would save himself by testifying against the earl.

The “Essex Ring” that can now be seen in Westminster Abbey is said to have been given to the earl by Elizabeth with the understanding if ever he were in trouble he could send it to her and she would intercede. However, when from the Tower of London he attempted to return it, either it did not reach her or she ignored it. On this day he was beheaded on the Tower Green.3 LONDON

3. This would turn out to be the final such beheading on the Tower Green, although during 1743 various Scot- tish deserters would be there executed by firing squad and although, during the world wars, German spies would be being executed in a shed beneath the walls and in the vicinity that had once been the moat. HEADCHOPPING HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1605

Sir Ferdinando Gorges helped sponsor an expedition led by George Weymouth into northern Virginia, which is to say, to the mouth of the Kennebec River along the coast of the present day state of Maine, to find a place where English Catholics, undesirables in Protestant England, could found a settlement. James Rosier, one of his companions, wrote TRUE RELATIONS OF WAYMOUTH’S VOYAGE. The book briefly describes a voyage along the New England coast from Nantucket Island to Maine trading beads and knives for furs and tobacco. The traders noted an abundance of furs, of trees for timber, and of fish. They took five of the Maine Narragansett natives for exhibit in England.

Three of these five exhibits would be for a period in the custody of the governor of the fort at Plymouth, England, Sir Ferdinando Gorges. I observed in them an inclination to follow the example of the better sort, and in all their carriages manifest shows of great civility far from the rudeness of our common people.

(Most likely, these three Maine people would have accompanied the Plymouth Company’s expedition to Sagadahoc in 1606.)

Henry Hudson may have used Waymouth’s logs and charts for his own 1609 voyage.

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

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THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1606

April 10, Thursday (Old Style): Charters for two joint stock companies, the “Virginia company of London” (“London Company”) and the “Virginia Company of Plymouth” (“Plymouth Company”) were issued by King James I,

permitting Sir Ferdinando Gorges and John Popham to settle the American coast between Cape Fear and mid- Maine (this was the area that two years earlier Henry of Navarre, the French king, had claimed). The Reverend Richard Hakluyt and his young friend Captain Bartholomew Gosnold were involved in these negotiations. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

Between their respective spheres of operation there would be a coastal section of overlap from the 38th parallel to the 41st parallel in which either company was free to establish a settlement so long as it was at least a hundred miles distant from the other company’s settlements.

READ THE FULL TEXT READ ABOUT VIRGINIA

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

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THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1607

Between this year and 1615 the Plymouth Company would be attempting briefly to establish a “Popham Colony” on the Kennebec River near present-day Phippsburg, Maine. As a shareholder in the Company, Sir Ferdinando Gorges helped in the funding of this endeavor.

Dutch and English merchants were selling inexpensive iron tools to the Woodland natives of New York and Virginia. Among these inexpensive iron tools were small hand-axes, which would come to be referred to by the Algonquins of Virginia as “tomahawks.”

The Arcadia patent enjoyed by Pierre Dugua, Sieur de Mons was revoked, and then renewed on condition of forming settlements. The patentees found it, however, more advantageous to carry on trade with the Indians, and in consequence the Acadian colony would be neglected and a contemplated Canadian one delayed.

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

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THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1611

Edward Harlow captured five natives in the Cape Cod region. Epenow, a sachem of Capawak (Martha’s Vineyard), was among those enslaved, and would later be donated to Sir Ferdinando Gorges of Plymouth, England — he would eventually through a ruse escape and be able to return home. INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE “...The conflicts of Europeans with American-Indians, Maoris and other aborigines in temperate regions ... if we judge by the results we cannot regret that such wars have taken place ... the process by which the American continent has been acquired for European civilization [was entirely justified because] there is a very great and undeniable difference between the civilization of the colonizers and that of the dispossessed natives....” — Bertrand Russell, THE ETHICS OF WAR, January 1915

WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

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THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1614

June: Argall and Ralph Hamor departed from the Virginia coast for England.

The sachem Epenow of Capawak (Martha’s Vineyard) who had been captured in 1611 by Edward Harlow, and donated to Sir Ferdinando Gorges of Plymouth, England, at this point escaped from the ship commanded by Nicholas Hobson. He had tricked them into bringing him back across the ocean by persuading them that he knew where gold ore was to be found. John Smith was exploring the coast from Monhegan Island (Maine) as far as the tip of Cape Cod. Thomas Hunt captured 20 men from Patuxet (including Tisquantum or Squanto) and 7 men from Nauset to sell as slaves in Spain. Tisquantum was taken to England “on a Bristol ship.” [What is meant here is a ship out of the port of Bristol, England — not a ship pertaining to what would become the slave-trading port of Bristol, Rhode Island.] The Wampanoag became hostile towards Europeans.

The Dutch mariner Adriaen Block mapped the southern New England coast, from the Hudson River to eastern Massachusetts. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1615

Captain John Mason was appointed to succeed John Guy at the Cuper’s Cove colony on the island of Newfoundland, as Proprietary Governor.

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

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THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1616

In the area that would become the Boston Harbor, or off Cape Cod, a French trading ship in difficulties was taken by the native Americans. The ship was burned and all but five of its crewmembers were slaughtered. These five were made slaves of the local sagamores, of various native towns (including Namasket and Massachuset), who would use them for sport as well as for menial labor.4 In return for allowing Anglican SLAVERY IN MASSACHUSETTS

missionaries to spread the Word of God among them, the Woodland Indians of the Powhatan Confederation begin acquiring snaphaunce muskets from the Virginians (the natives preferred snaphaunces to matchlocks because snaphaunces did not require either glowing coals or stinky matches, both of which might disclose a shooter’s position during ambushes, raids, and hunting trips; the Virginians preferred these snaphaunces, too, although usually they couldn’t afford them).

About this time another French ship was intercepted by the Americans near Peddock’s Island in Massachusetts Bay, and the entire crew was killed and the ship burned. MASSACHUSETTS BAY

Captain John Mason, who had been appointed in the previous year as Proprietary Governor of the Cuper’s Cove colony on the coast of Newfoundland, at this point arrived in the New World. He would prepare the 1st

4. Rhode Island College’s anthropologist, Professor Richard Lobban, has interestingly asserted that slavery began in New England as an export business — exporting native American prisoners of war at the suggestion of the Reverend Roger Williams after the Pequot campaign later in the 17th Century. In the light of the above information, that is a strangely ethnocentric stance in which to be discovering, of all persons, an anthropologist! HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

known English map of the locale, and a “Discourse” describing his findings. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1620

The London and Plymouth companies, which in 1606 had been granted the territory between latitudes 34° and 45° North under the name “Virginia,” were in this year reorganized and the northern part of their grant, extended to 48º, was granted to a newly formed “Council of New England.” Sir Ferdinando Gorges became treasurer of this newly formed Council. Governor John Mason of Newfoundland and Sir William Alexander were able to persuade King James I that the best way to persuade Scots to emigrate would be to provide them with a “New Scotland” destination comparable to the “New France” and “New England” destinations. King James conveyed this as a royal wish to the newly formed Council of New England and obtained from it the surrender of all its claims to territory north of the Sainte-Croix River. He then instructed his Scottish Privy Council to grant this northern territory to Sir William.

Captain John Mason’s tract A BRIEFE DISCOURSE OF THE NEW-FOUND-LAND WITH THE SITUATION, TEMPERATURE, AND COMMODITIES THEREOF, INCITING OUR NATION TO GO FORWARD IN THE HOPEFULL PLANTATION BEGUNNE. The Privy Council issued a commission and provided a ship with which he might suppress piracy in Newfoundland waters.

Use the sword to poke at the pigeon on your head! HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1621

Captain John Mason, who had been acting as Proprietary Governor of Cuper’s Cove on the coast of Newfoundland since 1616, returned at this point to England. He would not be replaced and nevertheless the colony would endure for the remainder of the century. Back in England, he would consult with Sir William Alexander about the possibility of establishing a new colony, this time on Nova Scotia.

In Canada, the Iroquois began their system of extermination, and carried on the most sanguinary and destructive warfare in the history of the world. A mission was sent to France to represent the defenceless state of the colony. The patent for the colony was transferred to William and Emeric de Caen.

In France, the normally very robust Jean de Brébeuf experienced some sort of collapse of his bodily health. It would not be possible for him to continue theological studies. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1622

Captain John Mason and Sir Ferdinando Gorges, a couple of guys who knew how to work the system, received a patent from the Plymouth Council for New England for all the territory lying between the Merrimack River and the Kennebec River, which territory was to be known as the Province of Maine.

Sir Ferdinando’s A BRIEFE RELATION OF THE DISCOVERY AND PLANTATION OF NEW ENGLAND.

A settlement of Plymouth people at Wessaguscus or Wessagusset (Weymouth MA) was attempted by Sir Ferdinando, but this would not take hold.

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THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

(When the settlers would move on in 1625, the Reverend William Blaxton, their Anglican divine, would decide to relocate about a dozen miles to the northwest, there to attempt in his clerical garments a hermit existence, on the south bank of the Charles River upon the isolated peninsula known as Shawmut “Place Where You Find Boats.” “Of orthodox education at the University of Cambridge and an ordained priest in the Church of England, the young William Blaxton was not so much a latter-day St. Francis of Assisi as an earlier day Henry Thoreau, with somewhat more demanding tastes. It was no hut or lowly cabin that Blackstone fashioned there on his hill overlooking the Charles River. It was a comfortable, rambling cottage, multi-gabled and with small-paned windows, woodbine creeping over the walls and up into the eaves.” — Tourtellot, Arthur Bernon, THE CHARLES, NY: Farrar & Rinehart, 1941, pages 25-26 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

He would take seeds and his three Bibles, and multiple other volumes of use to hermits, and for five years would be living the life of a religious solitary. His grant was at that time presumed to amount to some almost 800 acres, comprising the highest hill and best spring in the area.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

If you want to see where this first grant was, you can search for the marker:

Here, for what it is worth, is a subsequent deposition by John Odlin and other elders concerning their earlier purchase of the Reverend Blackstone’s land, which had since come to be known as Boston Common: In or about the year of our Lord One thousand six hundred thirty and four the then present inhabiants of sd Town of Boston of Whom the Honble John Winthrop Esqr Govnr of the Colony was chiefe did treate and agree With Mr William Blackstone for the purchase of his Estate and rights in any Lands lving within said HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

neck of Land called Boston after Which purchase the Town laid out a plan for a trayning field which ever since and now is used for the feeding of cattell

August 10, Saturday (Old Style): Grant of the Province of Maine to Sir Ferdinando Gorges and John Mason, Esq.

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1623

A signal event in the history of Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Strawberry Banke was founded.

Under the authority of an English land-grant, Captain John Mason and others sent two groups of colonizers to establish fishing colonies at the mouth of the Piscataqua River. One of these expeditions, under the Scotchman David Thomson, erected salt-drying fish racks and a stone “factory” near the river’s mouth at a place they called Little Harbor or “Pannaway,” which has since become the town of Rye. The other expedition, under the fish-merchant brothers of London Edward Hilton and Thomas Hilton, set up on a neck of land eight miles to the north which they named Northam, afterwards to become Dover.

Sir Ferdinando Gorges’s son Robert Gorges was made Governor-General of New England (until he would give up and return to England in 1624). HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1625

Captain John Mason’s map of Newfoundland and “Discourse” about his findings was published in William Vaughan’s CAMBRENSIUM CAROLEIA.

The folks who had settled at Wessaguscusset (Weymouth MA) under Sir Ferdinando Gorges were ready to move elsewhere. The Reverend William Blaxton, their Anglican divine, however, was reluctant. He decided to stick it out, about 20 miles to the north, attempting a hermit existence upon the isolated peninsula known as Shawmut “Place Where You Find Boats” with its three connected drumlins, the peninsula which initially HERMITS would be known to the white people as “Blaxton’s Peninsula” and eventually would become known as “Trimontaine” or Boston town. He took with him seeds and his three Bibles, and multiple other volumes of use to hermits, and for five years would be living the life of a religious solitary.

WALDEN: Sometimes, having had a surfeit of human society and PEOPLE OF gossip, and worn out all my village friends, I rambled still WALDEN farther westward than I habitually dwell, into yet more unfrequented parts of the town, “to fresh woods and pastures new,” or, while the sun was setting, made my supper of huckleberries and blueberries on Fair Haven Hill, and laid up a store for several days. The fruits do not yield their true flavor to the purchaser of them, nor to him who raises them for the market. There is but one way to obtain it, yet few take that way. If you would know the flavor of huckleberries, ask the cow-boy or the partridge. It is a vulgar error to suppose that you have tasted huckleberries who never plucked them. A huckleberry never reaches Boston; they have not been known there since they grew on her three hills. The ambrosial and essential part of the fruit is lost with the bloom which is rubbed off in the market cart, and they become mere provender. As long as Eternal Justice reigns, not one innocent huckleberry can be transported thither from the country’s hills.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

Solitary? –Rather, of white people, only the Reverend would be present: as to whether there were Native Americans living anywhere on the Trimontaine peninsula at this time, or perhaps colonies of the harbor seals, the records simply make no mention. Thoreau, in CAPE COD, would toy with these historical silences, in recounting his study of a volume of the “Historical Collections” which offered that:

CAPE COD: When the committee from Plymouth had purchased the PEOPLE OF territory of Eastham of the Indians, “it was demanded who laid CAPE COD claim to Billingsgate?” which was understood to be all that part of the Cape north of what they had purchased. “The answer was, there was not any who owned it. ‘Then,’ said the committee, ‘that land is ours.’ The Indians answered, that it was.” This was a remarkable assertion and admission. The Pilgrims appear to have regarded themselves as Not Any’s representatives. Perhaps this was the first instance of that quiet way of “speaking for” a place not yet occupied, or at least not improved as much as it may be, which their descendants have practiced, and are still practicing so extensively. Not Any seems to have been the sole proprietor of all America before the Yankees. But history says, that when the Pilgrims had held the lands of Billingsgate many years, at length “appeared an Indian, who styled himself Lieutenant Anthony,” who laid claim to them, and of him they bought them. Who knows but a Lieutenant Anthony may be knocking at the door of the White House some day? At any rate, I know that if you hold a thing unjustly, there will surely be the devil to pay at last.

LIEUTENANT ANTHONY “NOT ANY”

The Reverend settled near a spring on the west slope of what is now termed Beacon Hill but then would have been becoming known as Sentry Hill, to begin his orchard and home and live in peace with his books.

(This would have been near where Beacon and Spruce streets now intersect in downtown Boston.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

“Of orthodox education at the University of Cambridge and an ordained priest in the Church of England, the young William Blaxton was not so much a latter-day St. Francis of Assisi as an earlier day Henry Thoreau, with somewhat more demanding tastes. It was no hut or lowly cabin that Blackstone fashioned there on his hill overlooking the Charles River. It was a comfortable, rambling cottage, multi-gabled and with small-paned windows, woodbine creeping over the walls and up into the eaves.” — Tourtellot, Arthur Bernon, THE CHARLES, NY: Farrar & Rinehart, 1941, pages 25-26 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1629

Captain John Mason and Sir Ferdinando Gorges, who had in 1622 received a patent from the Council for New England for all the territory lying between the Merrimack and Kennebec rivers, at this point divided their grant along the Piscataqua River, with Captain Mason being assigned the southern portion.

This territory would be recharted as the Province of New Hampshire — it would include most of the southeastern part of the current state of New Hampshire and the portions of present-day Massachusetts that lie HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

to the north of the Merrimack River.

They divided the Isles of Shoals between themselves. Captain Mason taking Londoner Island (Lunging Island), Star Island, and White Island, Sir Ferdinando taking Appledore Island, Cedar Island,5 Duck Island,6

5. Cedar Island, a small circular island in the Isles of Shoals about one-seventh of a mile in diameter, derived its name, apparently, from the few and scrappy cedar trees that had been noticed there by Captain John Smith in the early 17th Century. It is populated today by lobstermen’s families descended from early Shoaler fisherman. It is now connected by a government breakwater to Smuttynose Island and Star Island. Near it is Cedar Island Ledge. 6. Gorges and Mason most likely named Duck Island in the Isles of Shoals for its migrant waterbirds. It is about one-seventh of a mile long and one-seventh of a mile wide. It is surrounded by Jimmie’s Ledge, Shag Rock, Eastern Rocks, and Mingo Rock, and is closest to Old Henry Ledge. After being used by our government as a bombing target within a zone off-limits to the general public, what is left of the island and its ledges has become the private property of the Star Island Corporation and is maintained as a wildlife refuge. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

Malaga (Malagoe) Island, and what Thoreau would refer to as “Hog Island” (Smuttynose Island).

In this year Sir Ferdinando and his nephew established Maine’s first court system.

November 17, day (Old Style): Grant of Laconia to Sir Ferdinando Gorges and Captain John Mason by the Council for New England. READ THE FULL TEXT HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1630

According to Ned Bunker’s MAKING HASTE FROM BABYLON / THE MAYFLOWER PILGRIMS AND THEIR WORLD: A NEW HISTORY (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), during the 1620s a single beaver pelt from the New World continent had been selling for a phenomenal amount, roughly the same as what it cost to rent nine acres of English farmland for a year. The New Comers to Plymouth (or, more precisely, their financial backers in the Old World) were counting on being able to capitalize on this furry gold — and in fact, during the decade of the 1630s the new colony on Plymouth bay would be able to send something like 2,000 beaver pelts back to England.

Captain Christopher Levett, early English explorer of the New England Coast, an agent for Sir Ferdinando Gorges as well as a member for the crown’s Plymouth Council for New England, was making a desultory attempt to establish a colony in Maine but died aboard ship after having met with Governor John Winthrop in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

At about this point the population of this new colony reached 300 while the population of the Virginia colony was at 30, but the population of the New England coast would quickly undergo a radical alteration because conflict in England between the Puritan and the Crown factions would drive many of the Puritans overseas in an attempt to establish a “Bible Commonwealth.” Within this decade, some 20,000 of the Puritan persuasion would make the crossing, while the Pilgrims already in the New England colonies moved out into remote farms, their “Great Lots,” and began to raise livestock to herd toward the coast and sell as food to these more recent immigrants. According to William Bradford’s OF PLYMOUTH PLANTATION, published later, New England weather was being discovered to be just about as bitchy and contrary as a passel of Cavaliers: “And for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent, and subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to … search an unknown coast.”

In Europe, this would be another poor harvest year. Everybody talks about the weather and nobody ever does anything about it!7 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

CAPE COD: Very different is the general and off-hand account given PEOPLE OF by Captain John Smith, who was on this coast six years earlier, CAPE COD and speaks like an old traveller, voyager, and soldier, who had seen too much of the world to exaggerate, or even to dwell long, on a part of it. In his “Description of New England,” printed in JOHN SMITH 1616, after speaking of Accomack, since called Plymouth, he says: “Cape Cod is the next presents itself, which is only a headland of high hills of sand, overgrown with shrubby pines, hurts, and such trash, but an excellent harbor for all weathers. This Cape is made by the main sea on the one side, and a great bay on the other, in form of a sickle.” Champlain had already written, “Which CHAMPLAIN we named Cap Blanc (Cape White), because they were sands and downs (sables et dunes) which appeared thus.” When the Pilgrims get to Plymouth their reporter says again, “The land for the crust of the earth is a spit’s depth,” — that would seem to be their recipe for an earth’s crust, — “excellent black mould and fat in some places.” However, according to Bradford himself, whom some BRADFORD consider the author of part of “Mourt’s Relation,” they who came over in the Fortune the next year were somewhat daunted when “they came into the harbor of Cape Cod, and there saw nothing but a naked and barren place.” They soon found out their mistake with respect to the goodness of Plymouth soil. Yet when at length, some years later, when they were fully satisfied of the poorness of the place which they had chosen, “the greater part,” says Bradford, “consented to a removal to a place called Nausett,” they agreed to remove all together to Nauset, now Eastham, which was jumping out of the frying-pan into the fire; and some of the most respectable of the inhabitants of Plymouth did actually remove thither accordingly.

7. This weather report would be picked up and replayed by Nathaniel Hawthorne upon an appropriate occasion, his adventure to the Brook Farm community of West Roxbury MA in April of 1841:

Here is thy poor husband in a polar Paradise! I know not how to interpret this aspect of Nature — whether it be of good or evil omen to our enterprise. But I reflect that the Plymouth pilgrims arrived in the midst of storm and stept ashore upon mountain snow-drifts; and nevertheless they prospered, and became a great people — and doubtless it will be the same with us. … Belovedest, I have not yet taken my first lesson in agriculture, as thou mayest well suppose — except that I went to see our cows foddered, yesterday afternoon. We have eight of our own; and the number is now increased by a transcendental heifer, belonging to Miss Margaret Fuller. She is very fractious, I believe, and apt to kick over the milk pail. Thou knowest best, whether, in these traits of character, she resembles her mistress. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

CAPE COD: It must be confessed that the Pilgrims possessed but few of the qualities of the modern pioneer. They were not the ancestors of the American backwoodsmen. They did not go at once into the woods with their axes. They were a family and church, and were more anxious to keep together, though it were on the sand, than to explore and colonize a New World. When the above- mentioned company removed to Eastham, the church at Plymouth was left, to use Bradford’s expression, “like an ancient mother grown BRADFORD old, and forsaken of her children.” Though they landed on Clark’s Island in Plymouth harbor, the 9th of December (O.S.), and the 16th all hands came to Plymouth, and the 18th they rambled about the mainland, and the 19th decided to settle there, it was the 8th of January before Francis Billington went with one of the master’s mates to look at the magnificent pond or lake now called “Billington Sea,” about two miles distant, which he had discovered from the top of a tree, and mistook for a great sea. And the 7th of March “Master Carver with five others went to the great ponds which seem to be excellent fishing,” both which points are within the compass of an ordinary afternoon’s ramble, — however wild the country. It is true they were busy at first about their building, and were hindered in that by much foul weather; but a party of emigrants to California or Oregon, with no less work on their hands, — and more hostile Indians — would do as much exploring the first afternoon, and the Sieur de Champlain would CHAMPLAIN have sought an interview with the savages, and examined the country as far as the Connecticut, and made a map of it, before Billington had climbed his tree. Or contrast them only with the French searching for copper about the Bay of Fundy in 1603, tracing up small streams with Indian guides. Nevertheless, the Pilgrims were pioneers, and the ancestors of pioneers, in a far grander enterprise. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1631

The cultivation of tobacco destined for European markets began in the Maryland colony.

The group of settlers that had been organized in Holland by David Pietersz. de Vries disembarked from the Walvis (“Whale”) to form the whale hunting station and agricultural settlement that they would name Zwaanendael “Valley of the Swans” in the lower Delaware valley. They found, of course, human beings already on the scene — members of an Algonquian grouping, the Cinconicins, Sickoneyns, Sikonessink, Siconesius, Siconese, or Great Siconese — a peaceable folk but not to be trifled with.

Captain John Mason built himself a house at the mouth of the Piscataqua River, naming the spot Portsmouth (to explain these names: Mason had been governor of Portsmouth in County Hampshire, England). HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1635

Henry Alexander, son of the Earl of Stirling, was granted a patent by the Council for New England for “Matowack or Paumanok Long Island.” The Council for New England surrendered its charter, thus confirming the sole proprietorship of Captain John Mason over New Hampshire. He had just been appointed as “1st vice- admiral of New England” and at his home in Portsmouth preparing for an initial visit to this district on the mainland of the continent — when he died. His widow would struggle to manage this large New Hampshire estate but would find herself ignored. Over the years the Mason family would make legal attempts to make good their hereditary title, and this would lead to long litigation with the actual settlers. Finally the settlers would be compelled to recognize the entitlement of these heirs, and in 1746 one of Mason’s descendants would be able to get some money from a group of a dozen investors at Portsmouth, who would come to be known as “the Masonian Proprietors.” This group would go into the business of issuing, for whatever prices they could command, the sort of “settlement permits” that would quiet land titles in the undeveloped parts of the Mason land grant (the grant would be redefined by the state of New Hampshire in 1788).

September 17: Grant of His Interest in New Hampshire by Sir Ferdinando Gorges to Captain John Mason.

READ THE FULL TEXT HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1636

Governor John Endecott led troops against the Pequot in the start of a race war.

The war began, actually, when the white soldiers went on a rampage. According to John Underhill, they had been waiting and waiting and waiting for some “negotiations” to begin, and, tiring of this, “Marching into a champaign field [open grassland suitable for formal frontal military engagement], we displayed our colors, but none would come near us, but standing remotely off did laugh at us for our patience.” From the looks on their faces at a distance, some Pequot were mocking them. Finally the patience of these whites was utterly exhausted, and they “suddenly set upon our march, and gave fire to as many as we could come near, firing their wigwams, spoiling their corn, and many other necessaries that they had buried in the ground we raked up, which the soldiers had for booty. Thus we spent the day burning and spoiling the country. And the next day too.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

Henry Jocelyn, brother of John Josselyn, was serving on the council of Sir Ferdinando Gorges’s Province in what is now Maine. He would become Deputy-Governor of the Province. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

The Pequot of Connecticut refused to be provoked into any encounter and thus the only fatality, initially, apparently, was one Pequot warrior who was intercepted and killed by a Massachusett warrior allied with the English. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

AN ACCOUNT OF TWO VOYAGES TO NEW-ENGLAND.

The people that inhabited this Countrey are judged to be of the Tartars called Samonids that border upon Moscovia, and are divided into Tribes; those to the East and North-east are called to the year of Christ 1673. Churchers and Tarentines, and Monhegans. To the South are the Pequets and Narragansets. Westward Connecticuts and Mowhacks. To the Northward Aberginians which consist of Mattachusets, Wippanaps and Tarrentines. The Pocanakets live to the Westward of Plimouth. Not long before the English came into the Countrey, happened a great mortality amongst them, expecially where the English afterwards planted, the East and Northern parts were sore smitten with the Contagion; first by the plague, afterwards when the English came by the small pox, the three Kingdoms or Sagamorships of the Mattachusets were very populous, having under them seven Dukedoms or petti- Sagamorships, but by the plague were brought from 30000 to From the year of World 300. There are not many now to the Eastward, the Pequots were destroyed by the English: the Mowhacks are about five hundred: Their speech a dialect of the Tartars, (as also is the Turkish tongue).

BY John Josselyn Gent.

CONTAGION HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

March 25 or 28: Sir Ferdinando Gorges, 60 years of age and robust in mind and body, had been appointed Governor- General over New England and a ship-of-war was prepared to bring him to America, but its hull broke in its launching and the baronet would never make it across the pond. He had sent a nephew, William Gorges, with full authority to keep an eye on things for him. This nephew had arrived at Saco, Maine, finding about 150 inhabitants disciplining themselves only by a voluntary social compact, and on this day imposed a government of Somersetshire, i.e., all the coast between the Kennebec River and the Piscataqua River, the 1st such within the State of Maine. Soon afterward a royal edict made the elder Gorges the lord proprietor of a large territory in that region, called the “Province or County of Maine.” The nephew would at some point give up and come home, but, gratified by this mark of royal favor, the elder Gorges would survive for another eight years in distant enjoyment of his vice-regal honors, energetically devising laws for his palatinate –such edicts as a soldier and royalist would be likely to fantasize– while being politely disregarded. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1637

July 23, Sunday (Old Style): Commission to Sir Ferdinando Gorges as Governor of New England by King Charles I of England. READ THE FULL TEXT HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1638

October: John Josselyn, Gent. arrived at his brother Henry’s home in Scarborough,8 where he would abide for some 15 months. While walking in the woods he spied what he presumed to be a kind of fruit:

chanc’t to spye a fruit as I thought like a pine Apple, plated with scales. It was as big as the crown of a Woman’s hat.... (I) made bold to step unto it with an intent to have gathered it ... but no sooner had (I) touched it but hundreds of Wasps [burst out.]... At last I cleared myself of them, being stung only on the lip; and glad I was that I ’scaped so well.

His lip “swelled so extreamly” that by the time he had stumbled home “They hardly knew me but by my Garments.” When he had recovered, he would give further thought to the strange gray nest: “Of what matter it’s made no man knows, wax it is not, neither will it melt nor fry, but will take fire suddenly like Tender.” What he didn’t realize was that the nest was pulp paper made from wood fiber by the paper-making Hornet, and had he succeeded in mastering this technical process, he could have revolutionized the paper-making industry of his age, based as it was at the time on the iffy supply of cotton and linen rags, and transformed himself from a comfortable into an extremely rich man.9

Josselyn was bemused by the story of the “Mere-man” seen by one “Mr. Mitton” out in Casco-Bay ... “Who laying his hands on the side of the Canow had one of them chopt off with a hatchet, which was in all respects like the hand of a man, the Triton presently sunk, dying the water with his purple blood, and was not more seen.” One can almost see him, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, scribbling away before the winking fishermen. “These with many other tales they told me” he admits, “The credit whereof I will neither impeach nor impune, but will satisfy myself with — ‘There are many strange things in the world than are to be seen between London and Maidenstone’.” SEA SERPENT SIGHTINGS

Jocelyn was the first to mention the famed sea-serpent of Nahant and of Egg Rock, in this year. He wrote that the serpent had been observed “quoiled up on a rock at Cape Ann.” (This apparition would be repeatedly seen in Gloucester Bay in August 1817, and occasionally also in Nahant Bay, by hundreds of observers. One skipper would allege soberly that it was “longer than the main-mast of a seventy-four.” Another would compare its length to the height of the steeple of the Gloucester meeting-house.)

8. His “Beloved Brother” was agent for the heirs of Sir Ferdinando Gorges and Captain John Mason, the proprietors of old Maine and New Hampshire and would rise to be the deputy governor of the province. The town is at the mouth of the Nonesuch River in what is now Maine. A suburb of Portland, it originated as “Black Point,” Thomas Cammock’s settlement, which combined in 1658 with Blue Point and with Stratton’s Islands to form a community modeling itself upon the Scarborough that is a resort on the North Sea coast of England. 9. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow would make use of this incident in his THE NEW ENGLAND TRAGEDIES. In the verse play “John Endicott” the innkeeper Samuel Cole would be made to exclaim:

I feel like Master Josselyn when he found The hornets’ nest, and thought it some strange fruit, Until the seeds came out, and then he dropped it. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1646

Until about this point, Thomas Mayhew had been living in Watertown while working for Matthew Cradock. Unfortunately, some of the business affairs Mayhew had established for himself and for Cradock had not proven successful and his English boss had become displeased with him. Nonetheless, Mayhew had been elected Selectman for Watertown, Representative to the General Court, and Magistrate. He had become also a miller and a merchant and bridgebuilder, building in 1641 the first bridge across the Charles River in Boston. Despite all of these activities, Mayhew suffered financial reverses and was looking for new opportunities. At this time Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket Island were part of the province of Maine, which belonged to Sir Ferdinando Gorges who had received it from the King, Charles I. But title was a little unclear because the King had also given to Lord Stirling the title to Long Island, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket Island. Neither Gorges nor Lord Stirling had much interest in Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard nor were they concerned about the conflict in their titles. And so Mayhew, eager to leave his troubles behind, set out to acquire the title. He sought title from both of these gentlemen, so that there could be no disputing his own control over the two islands. These presents doth witness that I, James Forrett, Gentleman, who was sent over into these Parts of America By the honourable the Lord Sterling with a commission for the ordering and Disposing of all the Island that Lyeth Between Cape Cod hudsons river and hath better unto confirmed his agency without any consideration, Do hereby Grant unto Thomas Mayhew of Watertown, merchant, and to Thomas Mayhew his son, free Liberty and full power to them and their associates to Plant and inhabit upon Nantuckett and two other small Islands adjacent, and to enjoy the said Islands to them their heirs & assigns forever, provided that the said Thomas Mayhew and Thomas Mayhew his son or either of them or their associates Do Render and Pay yearly unto the honourable the Lord Sterling, his heirs or assigns such an acknowledgement as shall be thought tt [?] by John Winthrop, Esq, the elder or any two magistrates in Massachusetts Bay Being chosen for that end and purpose by the honourable the Lord Sterling or his Deputy and By the said Thomas Mayhew his son or associates: it is agreed that the government that the said Thomas Mayhew and Thomas Mayhew his son and their associates shall set up shall Be such as is now established in the Massachusetts aforesaid, and that the said Thomas Mayhew & Thomas Mayhew his son and their associates shall have as much privilege touching their planting Inhabiting and enjoying of all and evry part of the Premises as By the patent is granted to the Patent of the Massachusetts aforesaid and their associates. In witness hereof I the said James Forrett have hereunto sett my hand and seal this 13th Day of October, 1641. JAMES FORRETT. Signed Sealed and Delivered in the presence of Robert ...... Nicholas Davison 2 Richard Stileman 3 HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

In a second instrument which he drew up, James Forrett added “Martin’s” Vineyard and the Elizabeth Islands, and authorized the grantees to plant upon and inhabit those parts, as follows: Whereas By virtue of a commission from the Lord Sterling, James Forrett, Gentleman, hath granted Liberty and full Power unto Thomas Mayhew of Watertown, merchant, and Thomas Mayhew his son, and their associates to Plant the Island of Nantucket according to the article In a deed to that purpose expressed: Now for as much as the said Island hath not Been yett whole surrendered whereby it may appear that Comfortable accomodations for themselves and their associates will be found there, this therefore shall serve to testifye that I, the said James Forrett, by virtue of my said commission, Do hereby grant unto the said Thomas Mayhew and Thomas Mayhew his son and their associates, as much. to plant upon Martins Vinyard and Elizabeth Isles as they have by virtue heretofore of the Deed granted unto them for Nantuckett as therein plainly In all considerations Both on the Right honourable the Lord Sterling’s part and on the said Thomas Mayhew & Thomas Mayhew his son and their associates Doth appear In Witness whereof I, the said James Forrett have hereunto sett my hand the 3rd Day of October, Annoque Domini 1641. JAMES FORRETT. Signed and delivered In Presence of us his John X Vahane. mark Garret Church. However, even this was not entirely satisfactory, since still it ignored Sir Ferdinando Gorges’s claim and so he concluded to “make assurance doubly sure” by securing the rights as well from the Gorges interests; and two days later the following instrument, executed by Richard Vines, authorized the elder Mayhew to “plant and inhabit upon the Island Capawok alias Martins Vineyard,” as set forth in the following copy: I, Richard Vines of Saco, Gentleman, Steward General for Sir Ferdinando Gorges, Knight and Lord Proprietor of the Province of Maine and the Islands of Cappawok and Nautican, Do by these presents give full power and authority unto Thomas Mayhew, Gentleman, his agents and associates to plant and Inhabit upon the Islands Capawok alias Martins Vinyard with all privileges and Rights thereunto belonging to enjoy the premises to himself heirs and associates forever, yielding and Paying unto the said Ferdinando Gorges, his heirs and assigns annually, or two Gentlemen Independently By each of them chosen Shall Judge to Be meet by way of acknowledgement. Given under my hand this 25th Day of October, 1641. RICHARD VI QES. Witness: Thomas Payne Robert Long.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

This sewed up the deal. Being especially prudent, Mayhew also “endeavored to obtain the Indian right of them,” going to the islands and negotiating for permission for he and his group to intrude. Mayhew interested some of his Watertown neighbors to join him and among them, you will recognize the names of Daggett and Pierce, which are big names in present-day Edgartown. They made their first settlement there in what they called the East End where the Chief Sachem was Towanquatack. Initially, apparently due to the more violent contacts of previous decades, there was little contact between the indigenous red islanders and the new white settlers. Thus the Vineyard was no longer solely the land of the original Alquonquin Wampanoags, but had become home to Thomas Mayhew of Watertown, Massachusetts and before that Tisbury, Wiltshire. And so Thomas had become “Governor” Mayhew, the master of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket Island, his very own tight little islands. He would appoint a group of assistants to help adjudicate disputes between islanders. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1647

Major John Child, a realist think-ahead type, sounded the alarum that the American colonies might against the mother country’s interest be “growing into a nation,” and that England might anticipate at some point in the future, that there was going to be in these remote overseas colonies an attempt at insurrection.

Sir Ferdinando Gorges’s THE BRIEFE NARRATION OF THE ORIGINAL UNDERTAKINGS OF THE ADVANCEMENT OF PLANTATIONS INTO PARTS OF AMERICA. He died, destitute (Maine would eventually fall under the control of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, that colony would become a federated state of the United States of America, and eventually, in 1820, Maine also would achieve statehood: not at all what Sir Ferdinando had had in mind). HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1653

The land speculators Sir Ferdinando Gorges and Captain John Mason had been granted royal title to all the key colonies from Virginia to Maine. When the Piscataqua area failed to yield them any significant gold, copper, or precious spices, they found they were having to settle for lots of fish. Gorges and Mason divvied up the nine islands and rocky ledges making up the Isles of Shoals between the two of them, and thus, eventually, between

the provinces of New Hampshire and of Massachusetts (now Maine). A fortress of sorts was erected on Star Island as protection from the native Americans. Fort Star would be rebuild a number of times. The island was known originally as Gosport, the village of the famous “Shoaler” fishermen, but now its name indicates its general outline on the map. Today this is the only island served by ferry service and thus accessible to the general run of tourists. Its conference center is managed by the Star Island Corporation in association with the HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

Unitarian Universalist Church office in Boston. Star Island boasts Captain John Smith’s monument.

Its obelisk to the Reverend Tucke who “civilized” the Shoalers during the 18th Century is the state’s tallest tombstone. The island is a nesting sanctuary for Herring and Green Black-backed gulls. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1658

Sir Ferdinando Gorges’s A BRIEFE NARRATION OF THE ORIGINALL UNDERTAKINGS OF THE ADVANCEMENT OF PLANTATIONS INTO THE PARTS OF AMERICA, ESPECIALLY SHEWING THE BEGINNINGS, PROGRESS, AND CONTINUANCE OF THAT OF NEW ENGLAND. WRITTEN BY THE RIGHT WORSHIPFULL, SIR FERDINANDO GORGES, KNIGHT AND GOVERNOUR OF THE FORT AND ISLAND OF PLYMOUTH, IN DEVONSHIRE (London: Printed by E. Brudenell, for Nath. Brook, at the Angell in Corn-Hill) THE PLANTATION OF MAINE

Also, his grandson’s AMERICA PAINTED TO THE LIFE, THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE SPANIARDS PROCEEDINGS IN THE CONQUEſTS OF THE INDIANS, AND OF THEIR CIVIL WARS AMONG THEMſELVES, FROM COLUMBUS HIS FIRſT DIſCOVERY, TO THEſE LATER TIMES. AS ALSO, OF THE ORIGINAL UNDERTAKINGS OF THE ADVANCEMENT OF PLANTATIONS INTO THOſE PARTS; WITH A PERFECT RELATION OF OUR ENGLIſH DIſCOVERIES, ſHEWING THEIR BEGINNING, PROGREſS AND CONTINUANCE, FROM THE YEAR 1628. TO 1658. DECLARING THE FORMS OF THEIR GOVERNMENT, POLICIES, RELIGIONS, MANERS, CUſTOMS, MILITARY DIſCIPLINE, WARS WITH THE INDIANS, THE COMMODITIES OF THEIR COUNTRIES, A DEſCRIPTION OF THEIR TOWNS AND HAVENS, THE INCREAſE OF THEIR TRADING, WITH THE NAMES OF THEIR GOVERNORS AND MAGIſTRATES. MORE EſPECIALLY, AN ABſOLUTE NARRATIVE OF THE NORTH PARTS OF AMERICA, AND OF THE DIſCOVERIES AND PLANTATIONS OF OUR ENGLIſH IN VIRGINIA, NEW-ENGLAND, AND BERBADOES (LONDON, PRINTED FOR NATH. BROOK AT THE ANGEL IN CORNHIL), including his own “A Brief Description of Laconia, a Province in New England.” THE LACONIA PROVINCE

Governor Thomas Mayhew of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket Island, perhaps frustrated with the opinions of other islanders as to his governing of things, abolished his various assistant positions and declared himself Magistrate. This dismissal, along with his increasing rejection of Puritanism in favor of Baptism (or Anabaptism as it was then called) would lead his former assistant Peter Folger to leave the Vineyard in 1662 and settle in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. From this point forward, Magistrate Mayhew’s undiluted authority would be a source of island tension he would need to quell. The source for Mayhew’s authority, which had originally been Sir Ferdinando Gorges but had then become Stirling, had by this point become the Duke of York, courtesy of Charles II. This royal authority which had heretofore been unasserted over Mayhew now became something of a thorn in Mayhew’s side as the Duke, through his agent in New-York, Colonel Francis Lovelace, interceded in various island affairs. Mayhew would frequently ignore instructions received from the Colonel, or let them lay dormant on his desk before replying many months later. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1660

The selectmen of Concord sent a petition to the County Court that “sargeant Buss” be authorized to keep an “ordinary,” which is to say, a tavern. The petition stated that they had “found much difficulty in procuring such an one as we could rest well satisfied in.”

The court criticized the town for its failure to have created “a common house of entertainment” and warned that unless one were created before the sitting of the following Court, the town would be fined 2s 6d.

Because he had termed him a “Lying rascal,” John Gobble [Goble] had to pay 20s to Richard Temple.

Peter Bulkeley (2), namesake son of the Reverend Peter Bulkeley (1) in Concord, graduated from Harvard College. He would become an attorney. Peter Bulkeley, the youngest son of the Rev. Peter Bulkeley of Concord, was born August 12, 1643 and graduated in 1660. He settled in Concord and in 1673, and the four subsequent years represented the town in the General Court. In February, 1676, he was chosen Speaker of the House of Deputies; and in August of the same year was appointed with the Hon. william Stoughton, agent to England on the complaints of Gorges and Mason10 and reappointed in 1682. They sailed on the first mission October 30, 1676. On the 27th of February 1679, he was reappointed by King Charles the 2nd with Stoughton as agent to England respecting the Narragansett country. They returned December 23, 1679. In 1677 he was chosen one of the Judges or Court of Assistants and re-elected eight years. He was also one of the Commissioners of the United Colonies the greater part of the time. On the 8th of October, 1685 he was appointed by King James II, one of the Council, of which Joseph Dudley, Esq., was President, which constituted the government of the colonies after the charter was forfeited. In 1680 the militia in the county was divided into two regiments, and Major Peter Bulkeley appointed to command one of them. This was an office in those days of great distinction. In all these and other important offices he acquitted himself with honor and general acceptance. He was one of 20 who in 1683, made the “million purchase” in New Hampshire and had several special grants of land for public services. He died May 24, 1688, aged 44, and “was buried” says Judge Sewall “the 27th because he could not be kept, word of which was sent to Boston the same day to prevent any going in vain to his funeral.” He married Rebecca, the only daughter of Lieut. Joseph Wheeler, on April 16, 1667 and had, Edward, Joseph, John and Rebecca - the first and third children died young. His widow married Jonathan Prescott and his daughter married Jonathan Prescott, Jr. Joseph Bulkeley b. Sept 7, 1760 held a captain’s commission and was engaged in the public service. He married the widow Rebecca Minott, dau. of John Jones, in 1696. She died July 17, 1712, leaving by him Rebecca 10. That was Capt. John Mason of the New Hampshire Grants. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

who married Joseph Hubbard, granfather to Deacon Thomas Hubbard; Dorothy who married Samuel Hunt; John who held a Colonel’s commission and died in Groton, Dec. 1772 aged 69, father to John who was graduated at Harvard Coll in 1769 who was a lawyer and died in Groton Dec 16, 1774 aged 26. Captain Joseph Bulkeley m. for a 2nd wife Silence Jeffrey in 1713 and had Joseph, Peter, Charles (whose descendants live in Littleton) and perhaps other children.11

11. Lemuel Shattuck’s 1835 A HISTORY OF THE TOWN OF CONCORD;.... Boston: Russell, Odiorne, and Company; Concord MA: John Stacy HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1663

June 25, Thursday (Old Style): The first movement toward a purchase of the province of Maine by Massachusetts was in a letter written by Daniel Gookin to Ferdinando Gorges (printed in the NEW ENGLAND HISTORICAL AND GENEALOGICAL REGISTER).

Mary Barnes of Farmington, Connecticut, found guilty of witchcraft, was likely hanged in Hartford on this day.

Major American Witchcraft Cases

1647 Elizabeth Kendall, Alse Young 1663 Mary Barnes HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

Major American Witchcraft Cases

1648 Margaret Jones, Mary Johnson 1666 Elizabeth Seager

1651 Alice Lake, Mrs. (Lizzy) Kendal, Goody 1669 Katherine (Kateran) Harrison Bassett, Mary Parsons

1652 John Carrington, Joan Carrington 1683 Nicholas Disborough, Margaret Mattson

1653 Elizabeth “Goody” Knapp, Elizabeth 1688 Annie “Goody” Glover Godman

1654 Lydia Gilbert, Kath Grady, Mary Lee 1692 Bridget Bishop, Rebecca Towne Nurse, Sarah Good, Susannah Martin, Elizabeth Howe, Sarah Wildes, Mary Staplies, Mercy Disborough, Elizabeth Clawson, Mary Harvey, Hannah Harvey, Goody Miller, Giles Cory, Mary Towne Estey, Reverend George Burrough, George Jacobs, Sr., John Proctor, John Willard, Martha Carrier, Sarah Good, Martha Corey, Margaret Scott, Alice Parker, Ann Pudeator, Wilmott Redd, Samuel Wardwell, Mary Parker, Tituba

1655 Elizabeth Godman, Nicholas Bayley, 1693 Hugh Crotia, Mercy Disborough Goodwife Bayley, Ann Hibbins

1657 William Meaker 1697 Winifred Benham, Senr., Winifred Ben- ham, Junr.

1658 Elizabeth Garlick, Elizabeth Richardson, 1724 Sarah Spencer Katherine Grade

1661 Nicholas Jennings, Margaret Jennings 1768 —— Norton

1662 Nathaniel Greensmith, Rebecca Green- 1801 Sagoyewatha “Red Jacket” smith, Mary Sanford, Andrew Sanford, Goody Ayres, Katherine Palmer, Judith Varlett, James Walkley HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1718

June 14, Saturday: Judge Samuel Sewall recorded in his diary that “Mr. [Elisha] Cooke is sent for into Council to explain his Memorial, and he asserts his Meaning to be, that the Province of Main[e] being Granted by the King to Sir Ferdinando Gorges, and the Title and Right of the said Gorges being derived to the Massachusetts Colony, the Timber therein belongs to them; and King George may not take it away.” DIARY OF SAMUEL SEWALL HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

1847

David Greene Haskins was preaching “as supply” (that is, on occasion by special arrangement) in Christ Church, Gardiner, Maine (he would be, in addition, 1st rector of Grace Church in Medford, Massachusetts until sometime in 1852).

In this year the Maine Historical Society put out Volume II of its COLLECTIONS. This would be accessed by Henry Thoreau and show up in CAPE COD. COLLECTIONS OF THE MHS HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

CAPE COD: Even as late as 1633 we find Winthrop, the first Governor of the Massachusetts Colony, who was not the most likely to be misinformed, who, moreover, has the fame, at least, of having discovered Wachusett Mountain (discerned it forty miles inland), talking about the “Great Lake” and the “hideous swamps about it,” near which the Connecticut and the “Potomack” took their rise; and among the memorable events of the year 1642 he chronicles Darby Field, an Irishman’s expedition to the “White hill,” from whose top he saw eastward what he “judged to be the Gulf of Canada,” and westward what he “judged to be the great lake which Canada River comes out of,” and where he found much “Muscovy glass,” and “could rive out pieces of forty feet long and seven or eight broad.” While the very inhabitants of New England were thus fabling about the country a hundred miles inland, which was a terra incognita to them, —or rather many years before the earliest date referred to,— Champlain, the first Governor of CHAMPLAIN Canada, not to mention the inland discoveries of Cartier, Roberval, and others, of the preceding century, and his own earlier voyage, had already gone to war against the Iroquois in their forest forts, and penetrated to the Great Lakes and wintered there, before a Pilgrim had heard of New England. In Champlain’s “Voyages,” printed in 1613, there is a plate representing a fight in which he aided the Canada Indians against the Iroquois, near the south end of Lake Champlain, in July, 1609, eleven years before the settlement of Plymouth. Bancroft says he joined the Algonquins in an expedition against the Iroquois, or Five Nations, in the northwest of New York. This is that “Great Lake,” which the English, hearing some rumor of from the French, long after, locate in an “Imaginary Province called Laconia, and spent several years about 1630 in the vain attempt to discover.” (Sir GORGES Ferdinand Gorges, in Maine Hist. Coll., Vol. II. p. 68.) Thomas Morton has a chapter on this “Great Lake.” In the edition of Champlain’s map dated 1632, the Falls of Niagara appear; and in a great lake northwest of Mer Douce (Lake Huron) there is an island represented, over which is written, “Isle ou il y une mine de cuivre,” - “Island where there is a mine of copper.” This will do for an offset to our Governor’s “Muscovy Glass.” Of all these adventures and discoveries we have a minute and faithful account, giving facts and dates as well as charts and soundings, all scientific and Frenchman-like, with scarcely one fable or traveller’s story. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2014. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: November 9, 2014

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project The People of Cape Cod: Sir Fernando Gorges HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF CAPE COD: SIR FERDINANDO GORGES PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD