double purpose of promoting colonization and engaging in the fisheries. They conceived the idea that, when the fishing season was over, the spare men above those actually required to navigate the vessel home again might be left behind in the region of the fishing grounds; when the ship should return they would be there to assist in fishing as in the previous year, and in the meantime be employed in constructing buildings and in planting corn for another year. With this purpose in mind the Dorchester Company sent out, in the year of its organization, a small ship of fifty tons. She arrived late on the coast of Maine and for that reason did not secure a full fare in those waters. The vessel later sailed to Massachusetts Bay where more fish were caught. The return voyage was made by way of Spain, where a bad market caused a loss of six hundred pounds for the venture. Before setting sail for Europe the vessel left fourteen of her spare men behind at Cape Ann, in accordance with the instructions of the company. It is difficult to estimate accurately what influence this fact had on the colonization side of the company's project, for history fails to give further details of how the winter of 1623-24 was passed on Cape Ann by this plantation of fishermen. Doubtless some of them survived, if not all of them, and were found the following year when the vessel returned, else there would have been more difficulty encountered in finding men with courage to face a second attempt the next winter. The desolate experience of the fourteen men, shut off from the rest of the civilized world, can only be imagined. "The only other persons of the English race then in New England besides the people of Plymouth were a few at Nantasket; the remnant of Gorges' plantation at Weymouth; the settlers at Piscataqua River and Saco, who began these places the same year; a company at Monhegan, and perhaps one or two other residents on the coast of Maine." 1 In 1624 the Dorchester Company sent over two vessels but they met with little success. When the ships sailed away for home thirty-two men were left behind in the new country. In spite of the losses of the two previous years three vessels were sent forth in 1625. With the hope of better success a change was made in overseers. Roger Conant, who had withdrawn from the Plymouth colony because he did not sympathize with the Separatist views there, had come to Cape Ann on his own account. He was a man of good reputation, quiet and competent, and he was appointed overseer of the Cape Ann plantation by the Dorchester Company. But a change of management did not result successfully as far as the fisheries were concerned. To their own troubles at Cape Ann was added a quarrel with their neighbors. The Plymouth people had obtained a patent in 1623 to fish at Cape Ann. It has been shown already how disastrously their first venture at Cape Ann ended. Upon their return to the place in 1625, they found that the stage and other works that were built the summer before had been seized by the captain of an English vessel. He stoutly refused to give up the stage, whereupon Captain Standish was ordered by Governor Bradford to retake the works. The occupants were strongly entrenched behind a barricade of casks when Standish arrived, fully determined to carry out his orders. The affair was at the point of collision and bloodshed, when Conant and the master of another ship interposed their good offices with the result that the high-handed captain gave up his claim to the Plymouth works and used another stage.* 1 Babson, p. 32. 2 Bradford, p. 237. By 1626, the adventurers at Cape Ann were so greatly discouraged that they dissolved the company on land, and sold their provisions and fishing apparatus. This "Fisher Plantation at Cape Ann" had proved a failure both to the Plymouth fishermen and to the Dorchester Company; to the former, partly because they made so poor a business of their fishing, partly because of the exorbitant rates charged by English merchants for forwarding their goods. To the Dorchester Company it proved a failure partly for the same reasons, but principally because the spot originally chosen was a poor one for the establishment of a new plantation.1 What was their loss, however, became another's gain. Cape Ann proved to be the stepping stone to Salem. When the discouraged settlers left the rocky cape with their cattle and tools in 1626, Roger Conant, still their leader, found for them a new and safer abode a few miles to the southwest at a place called Naumkeag. During all the years of struggle and discouragement, the Rev. John White had kept up a lively interest in the Dorchester adventurers. After they had settled at Naumkeag he wrote encouragingly to them and sent advice for them to remain there. In the meantime, in England, he set on foot a scheme for permanent colonization of a scale greater than any previously undertaken. A company of six persons obtained from the Plymouth Company, in 1628, a strip of land sixty miles in extent along the shore, and in September of the same year, John Endicott, one of the patentees, arrived at Naumkeag with a company of sixty persons. Endicott superseded Conant in the management of the colony, and the name of the place was changed to Salem. After the coming of so eminent a personage as the new governor, Roger Conant became a less prominent figure 1 H. Adams, Johns Hopkins University Studies, Vol. I, Art. IXX, p. 4. in the colony. He should be placed in the list of strong men who were instrumental in establishing the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. When the Fisher Plantation of Cape Ann was dissolved, it was Conant who still kept together enough of the colonists to form the nucleus of the settlement at Salem, which, maintained by him and strengthened by Endicott, not only became great itself, but led easily to the establishment of other settlements in Massachusetts Bay. This humble overseer of fisheries, "a pious, sober and prudent man,' was a pioneer in establishing the fisheries in the New World. When it is remembered that the first founding of Massachusetts was for the establishment of fisheries the name of Roger Conant should find an assured place in early colonial history. In 1623, the Laconia Company under the leadership of Mason and Gorges sent from England a company to plant a colony and to establish fisheries within the limits of the company's grant. This lay between the Kennebec and Merrimac Rivers. The settlers were divided into two companies, one of which took up their abode on the south bank of the Piscataqua River at Little Harbor. Immediately they erected salt works to furnish the salt needed for curing their fish. The men turned their attention so exclusively to the fisheries that agriculture was neglected, and as late as 1630 there had been only three or four dwelling houses built. Other settlements were made in the vicinity. Prominent among these was the settlement made on the Isle of Shoals, which later became a famous station for the prosecution of the fisheries. When Laconia was divided, Mason obtained control of the part west of the Piscataqua, which he named New Hampshire in honor of his county in England. He was bred a merchant, was thoroughly familiar with the fishing business, and so intent on making a success of the colony at Portsmouth that he spent much of his time and fortune upon it. But the enterprise was so poorly managed on this side of the water that, after a decade of experience, it afforded the promoters no profit. For years the colony was in an unpromising condition, the growth of Portsmouth was slow, and during the remainder of the seventeenth century this region furnishes little of interest to the subject of the fisheries.1 The seat of the first permanent settlement in Maine was the island of Monhegan, a place famous in the Old World for its fisheries many years before the time of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. The first permanent settlement on the mainland, however, was at Pemaquid in 1625. Fishermen and hunters had settled at Cape Porpoise by 1630, and settlements of a similar character were made near Portland about the same time, the first house being built in old Falmouth in 1632. Other early settlements were made along the coast as far eastward as Penobscot Bay for the prosecution of the coast fisheries." In 1631, two merchants of Bristol, England, obtained a grant of land known as the "Pemaquid grant," which gave them the exclusive right to fish in their own waters. The grant included several thousand acres of mainland, the Damariscove islands, and all other islands within seven leagues of the shore, which included Monhegan. The grant lay wholly east of Gorges' claim, and, therefore, within the claims maintained by the French at that period. This region was already an old fishing resort for English vessels, but unfortunately there are only few records now remaining of the fisheries, and none of the doings of the fishermen as early colonizers. Thus it will be seen that by the time the settlement of Massachusetts Bay colony was well established, there was a chain of settlements stretching in a more or less interrupted line from Plymouth 1 Sabine, pp. 287–289 passim. 2 Winsor, III, p. 321. |