Note 463 — NEW ENGLISH CANAAN OR NEW CANAAN. (continued 2)

Weston, in 1622, got into serious trouble with the English government, in regard to some ordnance and military stores, which he had obtained a license to send to New England, and had then sold to the French, with whom the English were at war. (Bradford, p. 150.) He seems to have been in hiding in consequence of this transaction; and early in 1623 went on board of one of the fishing-vessels in the disguise of a blacksmith, and came out in her to the stations on the Maine coast. There he must have learned of the extreme straits, if not of the abandonment, of his plantation at Wessagusset, and he set out, with a companion or two, in an open boat, for Massachusetts Bay. He was wrecked near the mouth of the Merrimac, and barely escaped with his life. The savages there stripped him to his shirt, and in this plight he reached Thomson’s plantation at Piscataqua. Thence he found his way to Plymouth, arriving there, not as Morton says, “with supply and means to have raised [his company’s] fortunes,” but in absolute destitution. Bradford’s account of his reception and of what ensued (pp. 133-4, 149-53) is very different from that given in the text; and, it is hardly necessary to add, reads much more like the truth.