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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.
So Virginia had failed in its first years, and only succeeded when settled by worthy and industrious people under a strong government. The example of Plymouth, as contrasted with Wessagusset, taught a similar lesson. We desire, said White, "to raise a bulwark against the kingdom of Antichrist."
Nevertheless, he joined with John Oldham, who came the year before, in a conspiracy to overturn the government; but was detected and finally banished from the colony. In March, 1625, Lyford and Oldham went to Wessagusset, from which they moved with Roger Conant and other friends to Nantasket, where, in the mean time, a new settlement had sprung up.
This company of settlers was composed of families, the heads of which were mechanics and farmers, and with them were two clergymen, Morrell and Blackstone, the whole constituting the greatest enterprise set on foot in America by the Council. Robert Gorges, bearing a commission constituting him Governor-General over all New England, made his settlement at Weston's old place at Wessagusset.
For trading purposes the patent also gave them a tract extending fifteen miles in breadth on each bank of the Kennebec. Among the "scattered beginnings" in the neighborhood of Plymouth, the most interesting, because the most contrasted with the Puritan colony at Plymouth, was Captain Wollaston's settlement, established in 1625 a little north of Wessagusset.
Of this settlement, which came to an untimely end after causing the Pilgrims a great deal of trouble, only a blockhouse and stockade remained. Another irregular trader, Captain Wollaston, with some thirty or forty people, chiefly servants, established himself in 1625 two miles north of Wessagusset, calling the place Mount Wollaston.
The severity of the diseases was ascribed to the lack of good water at Charlestown, and, accordingly, the settlers there broke up into small parties and sought out different places of settlement. On the other side of the Charles River was a peninsula occupied by William Blackstone, one of the companions of Robert Gorges at Wessagusset in 1626.
After Robert Gorges' departure most of his party dispersed, some going to England and some to Virginia, but a few remained at Wessagusset, which was never entirely abandoned. The relations between the colony and the London merchant adventurers, never very pleasant, became more unsatisfactory as time went on.
In the autumn, these men, sixty in number, went to a place which they had selected in Massachusetts Bay, then called Wessagusset, now the town of Weymouth, which they had selected for their residence. They left their sick behind them, to be nursed by those Christian Pilgrims whose piety had excited their ribald abuse.
In September, 1623, Gorges arrived at Plymouth attended by an Episcopal minister, William Morell, and a company of settlers, whom he planted at Wessagusset. He remained in New England throughout the winter, and in the effort to exert his authority had a long wrangle with Weston. In the spring of 1624 he received news from his father that discouraged his further stay.
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