In the same year, Robert Gorges, a son of Ferdinando, was appointed governor-general over the whole of the lands belonging to the Plymouth Company, and received as his private share in these lands three hundred square miles on Massachusetts Bay. The governor did not, however, care for his new possessions, and, after a flying visit to them, ceded them to Captain Levett, one of his assistants, who made a thorough exploration of Maine, and built a house on its shores, to which he gave the name of York. A permanent English settlement was also founded in Maine, in 1625, by two merchants of Bristol, Robert Aldworth and Giles Eldridge by name, who, having bought the Monhegan Island and a neighboring point of the mainland, quickly converted their desolate shores into flourishing colonies. In 1630, too, we find our old friend, Richard Vines, rewarded at last for his long years of work among the Indians by a grant of land on the Saco, while an estate of similar extent on the other side of the river was given to his comrade, John Oldham. From these two concessions sprung the towns of Biddeford and Saco; and looking round upon the results obtained at various points by different members of the Plymouth Company, under the energetic superintendence of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, before the expiration of its patent in 1635, we find English communities growing up throughout the length and breadth of Maine. It is round the little band of Puritans, however, who settled, by sufferance as it were, on the rocky shores of Cape Cod, in the neighboring province of Massachusetts, that the most absorbing interest gathers; and their history――as that of men who founded religious and political liberty in the future United States, and who are proudly claimed as ancestors by the noblest of our American cousins――must be given in some detail here. To account for the presence of English Puritans on American shores, it is necessary to go back a few years, to the beginning of the reign of James I., when the brief respite from persecution, enjoyed during the closing years of Elizabeth’s life by the aspirants after a purer ritual than that sanctioned by the State, was succeeded by yet greater oppression than any hitherto endured.