40 ([return])
[ Williamson, Maine, I., 340, 341.]
41 ([return])
[ Mass. Col. Records, IV., pt. i., 157-165, 359-360.]
CHAPTER XVII
COLONIAL NEIGHBORS
(1643-1652)
Although the successive English colonies—Virginia, Maryland, Plymouth, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Haven, New Hampshire, and Maine—each sprang from separate impulses, we have seen how one depended upon another and how inextricably their history is connected each with the other. Even the widely separated southern and northern groups had intercourse and some transmigration. Thus the history of each colony is a strand in the history of England in America.
In the same way the history of each colony and of the colonies taken together is interwoven with that of colonies of other European nations—the Spaniards, French, and Dutch—planted at first distant from the English settlements, but gradually expanding into dangerous proximity. It was from a desire to protect themselves against the danger of attack by their foreign neighbors and to press their territorial claims that the New England group of English colonies afforded the example of the first American confederation.