When Captain George Weymouth in the summer of 1605 sailed into the harbour of Plymouth in Devonshire, with his five kidnapped savages and his glowing accounts of the country since known as New England, the garrison of that fortified seaport was commanded by Sir Ferdinando Gorges.  The Christian name of this person now strikes us as rather odd, but in those days it was not so uncommon in England, and it does not necessarily indicate a Spanish or Italian ancestry for its bearer.  Gorges was a man of considerable ability, but not of high character.  On the downfall of his old patron the Earl of Essex he had contrived to save his own fortunes by a course of treachery and ingratitude.  He had served in the Dutch war against Spain, and since 1596 had been military governor of Plymouth.  The sight of Weymouth’s Indians and the recital of his explorations awakened the interest of Gorges in the colonization of North America.  He became one of the most active members of the Plymouth, or North Virginia, Company established in the following year.  It was he who took the leading part in fitting out the two ships with which John Smith started on his unsuccessful expedition in 1615.  In the following years he continued to send out voyages of exploration, became largely interested in the fisheries, and at length in 1620 succeeded in obtaining a new patent for the Plymouth Company, by which it was made independent of the London Company, its old yoke-fellow and rival.  This new document created a corporation of forty patentees who, sitting in council as directors of their enterprise, were known as the Council for New England.  The president of this council was King James’s unpopular favourite the Duke of Buckingham, and its most prominent members were the earls of Pembroke and Lenox, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, and Shakespeare’s friend the Earl of Southampton.  This council was empowered to legislate for its American territory, to exercise martial law there and expel all intruders, and to exercise a monopoly of trade within the limits of the patent.  Such extensive powers, entrusted to a company of which Buckingham was the head, excited popular indignation, and in the great struggle against monopolies which was then going on, the Plymouth Company did not fail to serve as a target for attacks.  It started, however, with too little capital to enter upon schemes involving immediate outlay, and began almost from the first to seek to increase its income by letting or selling portions of its territory, which extended from the latitude of Philadelphia to that of Quebec, thus encroaching upon regions where Holland and France were already gaining a foothold.  It was from this company that the merchant adventurers associated with the Mayflower Pilgrims obtained their new patent in the summer of 1621, and for the next fifteen years all settlers in New England based their claims to the soil upon territorial rights conveyed to them by the Plymouth Company.  The grants, however, were often ignorantly and sometimes unscrupulously made, and their limits were so ill-defined that much quarrelling ensued. [Sidenote:  Sir Ferdinando Gorges, and the Council for New England]