Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/47

 -1629] The Massachusetts Company. 15 into conflict with Plymouth ; some disappeared or were absorbed ; some, as we shall see, became independent colonies. None had directly any lasting influence on the Puritan colonies of New England. They were in truth rather factories or stations for trade and fishing than regular colonies. For the present we are only concerned with one of these. In 1623 some Dorchester traders started a fishing venture with a permanent station at Cape Ann in Massachusetts Bay. In 1626 they abandoned it as a failure, but left a foreman with some cattle on the spot. One of the company, John White, incumbent of Dorchester and a man of Puritan leanings, saw the possibility of building on this slight foundation. He and others who thought with him set forth their view in pamphlets. From these it is clear that their schemes were at once more daring and more far-reaching than those of the Plymouth settlers. The Plymouth settlers were fugitives fleeing to the wilderness from the hardships of the Old World. White and his associates were deliberately establishing a refuge where Puritanism, and those political views which were so closely bound up with Puritanism, might flourish and react upon the religious and political life of the mother-country. In 1629 six partners, men of influence in the Puritan party, obtained from the New England Company a grant of land. They already possessed a fishing-station at Cape Ann in Massachusetts Bay. This station one of the partners, John Endecott, was at once sent out to occupy and develop. His encounter with a disreputable squatter named Morton, who had erected a maypole, the overthrow of the pole and the monition administered to Morton, form a dramatic incident, fitly regarded as symbolical of the new force brought to bear on English colonisation. In March, 1629, a step of the greatest importance had been taken. A royal charter was obtained, incorporating the Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay. One noteworthy feature of the charter was that it did not tie down the Company to hold its meetings in England. Thus it was easy to transfer what was in form an English trading Company into something like a self-governing colony. The next step was to establish a government resident in America and nominally subordinate to the Company, consisting of a governor, deputy-governor, and a council of twelve. In 1629 a fleet was sent out with 350 emigrants, three ministers of religion, and an abundant supply of live-stock. Later in the same year an important change was made. The whole interest of the Company was transferred to ten persons, all concerned in the prosperity of the future colony, while at the same time the management of affairs was transferred to America. With that the Company, as a body distinct from the colony, disappears. The choice of a governor fell on John Winthrop, a Suffolk squire forty-three years old, a graduate of Cambridge with some legal training. Cast in the same mould and trained in much the same school as Hampden, Winthrop represented all that was noblest CH. I.