[114]. Gorges, “Briefe Narration,” p. 55.
[115]. Attempts have been made to magnify the importance of the colony, and even to insist upon its continued existence. Following the publication of the uncritical Popham Memorial, Portland, 1863, 98 pamphlets and articles appeared in six years. The literature is surveyed by Thayer, Sagadahoc, pp. 87-156.
[116]. Gorges, “Briefe Narration,” p. 56; “Briefe Relation,” Purchas, Pilgrimes, vol. XIX, p. 271.
[117]. Brown, Genesis, pp. 238-40.
[118]. G. M. Asher, Henry Hudson the Navigator (Hakluyt Society, 1860), p. 63.
[119]. Purchas, Pilgrimes, vol. XIX, pp. 73, 84.
[120]. Leaving out of consideration the early coasting voyages, in which the Dutch had no part whatever, they had recently been preceded to within a reasonable distance of both the mouth and the source of the Hudson. The English had made a detailed discovery as far as the entrance of the Sound, while Champlain was within a few miles of the source of the river some months before the Dutch ascended it. If rights of discovery were to be limited only to the points actually visited, with no extension thence in any direction, the country would have become a veritable checker-board of warring nationalities. The Dutch themselves held no such view, and claimed all the land from Cape Cod to Delaware Bay, with indefinite limits toward the interior. Acknowledgment of any such claim would have to be based upon a theory of extension which would seem, therefore, equally to validate the claims of English and French, arising in both cases from discovery prior to the Dutch.
[121]. Brown, Genesis, p. 534.
[122]. The accounts of the latter voyage are slight. John Smith, in a page, gives us all we know, and says nothing of Plastrier. Works (ed. Arber, Glasgow, 1910), vol. II, p. 696. Purchas had a full account, which he did not print and which is now lost. Pilgrimes, vol. XIX, p. 296.
[123]. Brown, Genesis, pp. 534 f.