any one to do so in their stead.  In the letter referred to, Cush man acknowledges in the name of the colonists the “bounty and grace of the President and Council of the Affairs of New England [Gorges, Warwick, et als.] for their allowance and approbation” of the “free possession and enjoyment” of the territory and rights so promptly granted Pierce by the Council, in the colonists’ interest, upon application.  If the degree of promptness with which the wily Gorges and his associates granted the petition of Pierce, in the colony’s behalf for authority to occupy the domain to which Gorges’s henchman Jones had so treacherously conveyed them, was at all proportionate to the fulsome and lavish acknowledgments of Cushman, there must have been such eagerness of compliance as to provoke general suspicion at the Council table.  Gorges and Warwick must have “grinned horribly behind their hands” upon receipt of the honest thanks of these honest planters and the pious benedictions of their scribe, knowing themselves guilty of detestable conspiracy and fraud, which had frustrated an honest purpose, filched the results of others’ labors, and had “done to death” good men and women not a few.  Winslow, in “Hypocrisie Unmasked,” says:  “We met with many dangers and the mariners’ put back into the harbor of the Cape.”  The original intent of the Pilgrims to go to the neighborhood of the Hudson is unmistakable; that this intention was still clear on the morning of November 10 (not 9th) —­after they had “made the land”—­has been plainly shown; that there was no need of so “standing in with the land” as to become entangled in the “rips” and “shoals” off what is now known as Monomoy (in an effort to pass around the Cape to the southward, when there was plenty of open water to port), is clear and certain; that the dangers and difficulties were magnified by Jones, and the abandonment of the effort was urged and practically made by him, is also evident from Winslow’s language above noted,—­“and the mariners put back,” etc.  No indication of the old-time consultations with the chief men appears here as to the matter of the return.  Their advice was not desired.  “The mariners put back” on their own responsibility.

Goodwin forcibly remarks, “These waters had been navigated by Gosnold, Smith, and various English and French explorers, whose descriptions and charts must have been familiar to a veteran master like Jones.  He doubtless magnified the danger of the passage [of the shoals], and managed to have only such efforts made as were sure to fail.  Of course he knew that by standing well out, and then southward in the clear sea, he would be able to bear up for the Hudson.  His professed inability to devise any way for getting south of the Cape is strong proof of guilt.”

The sequential acts of the Gorges conspiracy were doubtless practically as follows:—­

(a) The Leyden leaders applied to the States General of Holland, through the New Netherland Company, for their aid and protection in locating at the mouth of “Hudson’s” River;