In all his plans and hopes, Davenport associated his friend Eaton; and the two, now accompanied by a number of persons like-minded with themselves, many of them being of the congregation of Davenport, arrived in Massachusetts. This was an advent very welcome to the churches there; but the new-comers, like Hooker and his party, required more space. They had large views of a commercial station, as well as of a select church; and after carefully exploring the coast southward, they fixed upon Quinnipiack, afterwards called New Haven, south of the settlement of Saybrooke, where they removed the following year. A strict sense of justice regulated the conduct of this excellent colony as regarded the Indians. Wishing to form a large settlement, and to maintain peace with the natives, the land was purchased by treaty with them, the new-comers covenanting to protect them against their enemies the Mohawks. A day or two after their arrival, they celebrated their first Sabbath under a large, spreading oak. It was on the 18th of April; nature had not yet arrayed the forests in verdure, and the preacher, suiting his sermon to the circumstances of his hearers, took for his subject the temptations of Christ in the wilderness.[3] Spite of the provision which the colonists had made for their early wants, the sufferings and anxieties for several months were great. The winter was long and severe, and the early corn rotted in the ground, so that the process of sowing had to be repeated several times. They were alarmed by fears of famine; at length the warm season came on, and the rapid and exuberant vegetation seemed like the visible blessing of God in answer to their prayers. “Soon after their arrival at Quinnipiack, at the close of a day of fasting and prayer, they entered into what they termed a plantation covenant. By this they solemnly bound themselves ‘that, as in matters that concerned the gathering and ordering of a church, so also in all public offices which concerned civil order, they would all be governed by the rules which the Scriptures held forth to them.’” A committee of twelve persons was appointed, who chose seven men of piety to organise the government. Eaton, Davenport, and five others, constituted the seven pillars of the House of Wisdom; church members were alone allowed to exercise the elective franchise; their first constituent assembly was held in a barn. These settlers of New Haven were the most opulent company which had arrived in New England. Eaton had been deputy-governor of the East India Company, and had himself been in the East, as well as English ambassador to Denmark, and brought over with him much money; tradition to this day speaks of his great amount of valuable plate, and of a ewer and basin weighing sixty pounds, double gilt and curiously wrought in gold, with which the East India Company had presented his wife.