Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 36.djvu/435

 of a tract of land on the Piscataqua river. The association infused new life, both into the original colony and into the previous settlements on the Piscataqua, which became known henceforth by the name of New Hampshire. There was a constant influx of new settlers who cleared the land and built permanent houses.

Mason returned to England early in 1634, and was appointed by the government captain of Southsea Castle, and inspector of the forts and castles on the south coast. He had in the previous year been appointed on the council for New England, which frequently met at his house in Fenchurch Street (Colonial Corresp. 4 Nov. 1631, p. 15). He was also appointed treasurer of the ‘Association of the Three Kingdoms for a General Fishery’ (1633), and on 1 Oct. 1635 he was honoured by his nomination as first ‘vice-admiral of New England’ under Sir Ferdinando Gorges. Before, however, he could revisit the plantations, he was taken ill and died early in December 1635. The death of so energetic a churchman and royalist was regarded as a divine favour by the puritans of Massachusetts Bay. By his will, dated 26 Nov. and proved on 22 Dec. 1635, he left one thousand acres of land towards the maintenance of a church, and another thousand acres for that of a school in New Hampshire. He was buried in Westminster Abbey. A brass monument was erected to his memory in the church of the Domus Dei at Portsmouth by some residents in New Hampshire (including some of Mason's own descendants) in 1874.

Mason was married on 29 Oct. 1606 to Anne, second daughter of Edward Greene (d. 1619) of London, goldsmith, by whom he left one daughter, Anne, who married Joseph Tufton of Betchworth, Surrey. Robert Hayman in his ‘Quodlibets’ (1628, p. 31) addressed verses to ‘the worshipfull Captaine, John Mason’ and to ‘the modest and discreet gentlewoman Mistress Mason.’ Mason's widow died in 1655.

Mason's rights in New Hampshire were sold to Governor Samuel Allen in 1691, and proved a fruitful source of litigation to that official and his heirs; in January 1746 John Tufton Mason, a descendant, disposed of his rights for 1,500l. to twelve gentlemen of Portsmouth, henceforth called the ‘Masonian Proprietors’ (cf., Old Planter in New England, 1885). 

MASON, JOHN (1600–1672), New England commander, was born in England in 1600. His parentage and place of birth are unknown, but he is believed to have been related to his namesake, the founder of New Hampshire. After serving in the Netherlands under Sir Thomas Fairfax [q. v.], who is stated upon the outbreak of the civil war in England to have urged his speedy return, Mason went to Dorchester, Massachusetts, soon after its first settlement in 1630. He seems to have obtained military command as early as 1633, when an ensign was chosen to serve under him, and soon afterwards he was employed upon the fort at Boston. In 1635 he assisted the majority of the Dorchester settlers in their migration to Windsor in Connecticut. Their new home was thickly peopled with Indians, and collision was inevitable between the new-comers and the more powerful of the tribes in possession. Several parties of English settlers were cut off by the natives during 1635–6, and a series of outrages (hardly unprovoked) culminated in the Indians roasting alive an old minister named Mitchell, and scalping a party of nine colonists while at work in the fields near Wethersfield (23 April 1637). A preliminary expedition under John Endecott [q. v.] only served to exasperate the Indians. The most formidable of these were a tribe named Pequots, and at a general court of the colony held on 1 May 1637 it was resolved to exterminate the Pequots at all costs. Mason was put at the head of the new expedition, which left Hartford on 10 May, and dropped down the river in ‘a pink, a pinnace, and a shallop.’ Wisely disregarding the letter of his instructions, Mason sailed past the Pequot forts and landed his men some sixty miles further east, in Narragansett Bay, near Point Judith, thus securing the co-operation of two hundred of the tribe which hemmed in the Pequots on the east. His plan was to fall upon the latter unawares after a retrograde march along the coast, augmenting his force as he went along from the friendly Indians. Chief among these was the Mohegan sachem, Uncas, who had