Ebook Three Episodes of Massachusetts History

The first of these "Three Episodes" is entitled "The Settlement of Boston Bay." This, to a certain extent, is a misnomer and deceptive, inasmuch as the settlement therein described was not the famous one of 1630, still commemorated on Boston's civic seal, but an anterior, and, so to speak, prehistoric settlement, of wholly different character. Of this settlement, unbroken from September, 1623, Weymouth - then known as Wessagusset - was the site; and from what is now Weymouth went forth the original occupants of the localities since known as Boston, East Boston, and Charlestown. This first settlement, moreover, was so obliterated by the more considerable migration of 1630, and the years immediately subsequent thereto, that in time the recollection of it passed away. It thus escaped the notice of historians even that the earliest attempt at the colonization of the shores of Boston Bay was feudal in character, originating with Sir Ferdinando Gorges, and representative, not of Puritanism and the Commonwealth, but of Church and State.