have 100
acres. Fifteen hundred acres were set aside for public buildings.]

[Footnote 3: Fiske's _Beginnings of New England_, pp. 80-87; Palfrey's
_New England_, Vol. I, pp. 176-232; Thatcher's _History of the Town of
Plymouth_.]

[Illustration: Fragment of _History of the Plymouth Plantation_.]

%35. A Puritan Colony proposed.%--Among those who obtained such
rights was a company of Dorchester merchants who planted a town on Cape
Ann. The enterprise failed, and the colonists went off and settled at a
place they called Naumkeag. But there was one man in Dorchester who was
not discouraged by failure. He was John White, a Puritan rector. What
had been done by the Separatists in a small way might be done, it seemed
to White, on a great scale by an association of wealthy and influential
Puritans. The matter was discussed by them in London, and in 1628 an
association was formed, and a tract of land was bought from the Council
for New England.

%36. The "Sea to Sea" Grant%.--Concerning the interior of our
continent absolutely nothing was known. Nobody supposed it was more than
half as wide as it really is. The grant to the association, therefore,
stretched from three miles north of the Merrimac River to three miles
south of the Charles River, along these rivers to their sources, and
then westward across the continent from sea to sea.[1]

[Footnote 1: You will notice that when this grant was made in 1628 the
Dutch had discovered the Hudson, and had begun to settle Albany. To this
region (the Hudson and Mohawk valleys) the English had no just claim.]

As soon as the grant was obtained, John Endicott came out with a company
of sixty persons, and took up his abode at Naumkeag, which, being an
Indian and therefore a pagan name, he changed to Salem, the Hebrew word
for "peace."

%37. The Massachusetts Charter, 1629%.--The next step was to obtain
the right of self-government, which was secured by a royal charter
creating a corporation known as the Governor and Company of
Massachusetts Bay in New England. Over the affairs of the company were
to preside a governor, deputy governor, and a council of eighteen to be
elected annually by the members of the company.[2]

[Footnote 2: The charter is printed in Poore's _Charters and
Constitutions_, pp. 932-942, and in Preston's _Documents_, pp. 36-61.]

Six ships were now fitted out, and in them 406 men, women, and children,
with 140 head of cattle, set sail for Massachusetts. They r