"gentlemen."

"In 1607," says Goodwin, "Gorges and the cruel Judge Popham planted a
colony at Phillipsburg (or Sagadahoc, as is supposed), by the mouth of
the Kennebec. Two ships came, 'THE GIFT OF GOD' and the 'MARY AND JOHN,'
bringing a hundred persons. Through August they found all delightful,
but when the ships went back in December, fifty five of the number
returned to England, weary of their experience and fearful of the cold
.... With spring the ships returned from England; "but by this time the
remainder were ready to leave," so every soul returned with Gilbert [the
Admiral] . . . . For thirty years Gorges continued to push
exploration and emigration to that region, but his ambition and
liberality ever resulted in disappointment and loss." The annals of the
time show that not a few of the Sagadahoc colonists were convicts,
released from the English jails to people this colony.

Hakluyt says: "In 1607 [this should read 1608], disheartened by the death
of Popham, they all embarked in a ship from Exeter and in the new
pynnace, the 'VIRGINIA,' built in the colony, and sett sail for England,
and this was the end of that northern colony upon the river Sachadehoc
[Kennebec]."

No one knew better than the shrewd Gorges the value of such a colony as
that of the Leyden brethren would be, to plant, populate, and develop his
Company's great demesne. None were more facile than himself and the
buccaneering Earl of Warwick, to plan and execute the bold, but--as it
proved--easy coup, by which the Pilgrim colony was to be stolen bodily;
for the benefit of the "Second Virginia Company" and its successor,
"the Council for New England," from the "First (or London) Company,"
under whose patent (to John Pierce) and patronage they sailed. They