Although not its official head, and ranked at its board by dukes and earls, Sir Ferdinando Gorges was—­as he had been in the old Plymouth (or Second) Virginia Company—­the leading man.  This was largely from his superior acquaintance with, and long and varied experience in, New England affairs.  The “Council” was composed of forty patentees, and Baxter truly states, that “Sir Ferdinando Gorges, at this time [1621] stood at the head of the Council for New England, so far as influence went; in fact, his hand shaped its affairs.”  This company, holding—­by the division of territory made under the original charter-grants—­a strip of territory one hundred miles wide, on the North American coast, between the parallels of 41 deg. and 45 deg.  N. latitude, had not prospered, and its efforts at colonization (on what is now the Maine coast), in 1607 and later, had proved abortive, largely through the character of its “settlers,” who had been, in good degree, a somewhat notable mixture of two of the worst elements of society,—­convicts and broken-down “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 apparently did not take their patent with them,—­it would have been worthless if they had,—­and they