- shire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut—were long
collectively known as New England. Its 65,000 square miles of fertile country had already been granted to the Plymouth Company by James I., in 1606, so that no new scheme of colonization was necessary; but Smith's report so stimulated the zeal of the English that in 1615, Richard Hawkins, then President of the Northern Company, himself sailed to Maine. So terrible a civil war was at that time raging among the natives, that Hawkins effected nothing; but in the following year, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, one of the most active members of the Company, sent out a physician named Richard Vines at his own expense, with instructions to make a settlement somewhere in New England.
Vines, a hero in the best sense of the term, spent the winter of 1616-17 at a place called Winter Harbor, the exact position of which we have been unable to ascertain, though it was probably somewhere between the mouth of the Penobscot and Cape Cod. He found the Indians afflicted with a terrible disease, which had succeeded, perhaps resulted from, the awful civil war alluded to above; and by the generous kindness and scientific skill with which he alleviated their sufferings, he so won upon their affections, that he was able to travel alone in the wildest forests, secure of a hospitable reception in every wigwam.
Thus protected by an invisible armor, Vines went up the Saco River till he came to its source at Crawford's Notch in the White Mountains of New Hampshire; and, when the spring permitted navigation, he cruised in and out of the harbors of Maine till he had acquired a thorough knowledge of their geography.
In 1619, while Vines was still peacefully at work among the Indians, a Captain Dermer was sent out by Gorges to explore the coast of New England. Leaving his vessel at the island of Monhegan, situate about twenty miles South-west of the mouth of the Penobscot, Dermer made his coast-survey in an open pinnace, discovering and passing through the now celebrated Long Island Sound, which divides Long Island from New York and Connecticut. On his return trip, Dermer landed on Martha's Vineyard, where he was severely wounded in a skirmish with the natives, and crossed the strip of country near Cape Cod destined to be the first home of the Pilgrim Fathers; but he did nothing to further the cause of colonization, and of his career after his voyage nothing is known beyond the fact that he died in obscurity in Virginia soon after its completion,
