C. The Popham Colony.—It was unfortunate, as it was unnecessary, that any theological color should have been given to the discussion arising out of the claims made for this colony, since the merits of the case concerned solely the historical significance of secular events, upon which all were agreed in the main. The claim asserted by the Maine Historical Society, or by those representing it, was this: That the temporary settlement at Sabino, being made under the charter of 1606, was the first event to secure New England for the English crown, and should therefore be deemed the beginning of the existence of its colonies. The claim of those historical students who took issue was this: That the granting in 1606 of a patent by the king to his subjects concerned no further the question than that it simply formulated a pre-existing claim, while the actual attempts at colonization by Gosnold in 1602, whether authorized or not,—the latter alternative having of late years been brought forward by Dr. De Costa,—were more practically demonstrative of that claim, in accordance with the English interpretation of rights in new countries, namely, actual possession. Further, that the true historic beginning of New England was not in the abortive attempts of Gosnold and Popham to effect a settlement, however much, in connection with many other events, they helped in preparing a way, but in the permanent colonization which was made at Plymouth in 1620, which was the first founded upon family life, and which under greater distress than befell either of the others, was rendered permanent more by the spirit of religious independency, as evinced by their Holland exile, than by the mercenary longing, which was professedly the chief motive of the others. Strachey distinctly says of the Popham Colony, that mining was “the main intended benefit expected.”
It is susceptible of proof that the blood of the Pilgrims and of their congeners runs through the veins of a large part of the population of New England to-day. No genealogical tree has been produced which connects our present life with a single one of the Sabino party. How, then, was New England saved for the English race? The decisive historical event is never those scattering forerunners which always harbinger an epoch, but the fulfilment of the idea which comes in the ripeness of time.
The controversy as it was waged was a reaction from the views with which the Pilgrims had long been regarded for their devotion under trial and for the pluck of their constancy in first making English homes on this part of the continent. Maine writers like George Folsom and William Willis had never questioned such established claims, but had reasserted them. The leading spirit in this revocation of judgment was Mr. John A. Poor, of Portland. This gentleman, having done much to increase the material interests of his native State, entered with pertinacity into a process of rendering, as he claimed, the position of Maine in history more conspicuous. This required the aggrandizement of the fame of Sir Ferdinando Gorges; and he began his missionary work with a vindication of Gorges’ claims to be considered the father of English colonization in America. It was no new idea, for George Folsom had done Gorges justice in his Discourse in 1846. Mr. Poor’s lecture was printed, and was subsequently appended to the Popham Memorial. To emphasize this claim, he secured the naming of a new fort in Portland Harbor after Sir Ferdinando in 1860; and in 1862, when the General Government built a fortification on the old peninsula of Sabino, his efforts caused it to be named Fort Popham, and his zeal planned and directed a commemorative service in August of that year on the spot, when a tablet recounting the claims of which he was the champion was placed near its walls. The address which he then delivered, which showed the intemperance, if not the perversity, of an iconoclast, and which appeared with other papers and addresses more or less pronounced in the same way in a Popham Memorial, opened the controversy. See also Historical Magazine, Jan. 1863, and Sept. 1866, and Mr. C. W. Tuttle’s account of Mr. Poor’s agency in a “Memorial of J. A. Poor,” in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg., Oct. 1872. The committee charged with the preparation of the Memorial unwisely omitted a counter speech of the late J. Wingate Thornton, on “The Colonial Schemes of Popham and Gorges,” which was accordingly printed in the Congregational Quarterly, April, 1863, and separately, and is examined favorably by Abner C. Goodell in the Essex Institute Collections, Aug. 1863, p. 175. A similar unfavorable estimate of Popham’s colonists had been taken by R. H. Gardiner in the Maine Historical Collections, ii. 269; v. 226.
For some years the spirit was kept alive by recurrent commemorations. Mr. Edward E. Bourne (see memoir of him in N. E. Hist and Geneal. Reg., 1874, p. 9, and Me. Hist. Coll., viii. 386) answered the detractors in an address, “The Character of the Colony founded by George Popham,” Portland, 1864. The statements of Poor and Bourne led to a review by S. F. Haven in the Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., April 26, 1865, and in the Hist. Mag. (Dec. 1865, p. 358; March, July, Sept., Nov., 1867; Feb. and May, 1869). There was a dropping fire on both sides for some time. Meanwhile the address in 1865 by James W. Patterson, on The Responsibilities of the Founders of Republics, led to a controversy between William F. Poole attacking, and Rev. Edward Ballard and Frederick Kidder defending, the colonists; and their papers were printed together as The Popham Colony: a Discussion of its Historic Claims, to which Mr. Poole appended a bibliography of the subject up to 1866. Poole also gave his view of Gorges and the colony in his edition of Johnson’s Wonder Working Providence, and in the North American Review, Oct. 1868. At the celebration in 1871 Mr. Charles Deane reviewed the erroneous conclusions presented at earlier anniversaries, in a paper on “Early Voyages to New England, and their Influence on Colonization,” which was printed in the Boston Daily Advertiser, Sept. 2, 1871. A paper by R. K. Sewall on “Popham’s Town of Fort St. George,” which contains a summary of the arguments and events on the side of its historic importance, is given in the Me. Hist. Coll., vii., accompanied by a map of the region. The latest statement of the claim, apart from the review in the Preface to The Voyage to Sagadahoc, referred to on an earlier page, is in General Chamberlain’s Maine: her Place in History, which is too moderate to provoke any criticism. Thus a reaction that at one time claimed the necessity of rewriting history, has in the end engaged few advocates, and is almost lost sight of.
D. Captain John Smith’s Publications.—The Description is now a rare book, worth with the genuine map, should one be offered, fifty pounds or upwards. There is some bibliographical detail regarding it in the Memorial History of Boston, i. 50, 52, 53. Latin and German versions of it were included in De Bry, part x. Michael Sparke, the London printer, issuing Higginson’s New England’s Plantation in 1630, appended this recommendation:—
“But whosoever desireth to know as much as yet can be discovered, I advise them to buy Captaine John Smith’s booke of the description of New England in folio, and reade from fol. 203 to the end; and there let the reader expect to have full content.”
Smith’s letter (1618) to Bacon, upon New England, is in the Hist. Mag., July, 1861, and the annexed autograph is taken from the original in the Public Record office. See Sainsbury’s Calendar of Colonial Papers, no. 42, p. 21; Popham Memorial, App. p. 104; Palfrey, New England, i. 97.
A little tract of Smith’s, New England’s Trials [i. e. Attempts at Settlements], needs to be taken in connection with the Description. Of this tract, of eight pages, published in 1620, there is no copy known in America, and Mr. Deane describes it and reprints it in the Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc. xii. 428, 449, from the Bodleian copy, which differs in the names of the dedication from the British Museum copy. In 1622 it was issued in a second edition, enlarged to fourteen pages, which is also very rare, though copies are in the Deane Collection and in that of John Carter-Brown, from the last of which a privately printed reprint has been made. It was this text which Force used in his Tracts, ii. See Brinley Catalogue, no. 363.
Smith had moved, April 12, 1621, in a meeting of the Virginia Company, that its official sanction should be given to a compiled history of “that country, from her first discovery to this day,” showing that the purpose of his Generall Historie was then in his mind. (Neill’s Virginia Company, p. 210.) The first edition of it was issued in 1624, and in it he included, besides abstracts of various other writings, substantially all his previous publications on America (see the chapter on Virginia in the present volume), except his True Relation, in the place of which he had put the Map of Virginia, a tract covering the same transactions. When reissued in 1626 it was from the same type, and again in 1627, and twice in 1632. An account of the various editions in the Lenox Library, which differ only in the front matter and plates, can be found in Norton’s Literary Gazette, new ser. i. pp. 134 a, 218 c. Mr. Deane has printed a part of the original prospectus. Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., ix. 454.