have been absent at least eighteen months, which it is altogether improbable that Hampden would have done, running the risk of not being at home to stand for the next parliament, to which he undoubtedly expected to be returned, as we know he actually was. Besides, had this companion of Winslow been the great English patriot, the silence of the early Plymouth writers on the point is unaccountable. On publishing his “Good News from New England” immediately on his arrival in London, in 1624, one object of which was to recommend the new colony, how gladly would Winslow have appealed for the correctness of his statements to this member of parliament who had passed more than a year in their Plantation. How natural too would it have been for him to have mentioned the fact in his “Brief Narration,” published in 1646, only three years after the death of the illustrious patriot. Bradford, also, whose sympathies were all with the popular party in England, in writing an elaborate history of the Colony, would not have failed to record the long residence among them of one who, at the time he wrote, had become so distinguished as the leader of that party in the House of Commons. That his lost history contained no such passage we may be certain; for had it been there, it must have been quoted either by Prince or Morton, who make so free use of it, both of whom too mention this visit to Massasoit, and who would not have omitted a circumstance so honorable to the Colony. Again, Winslow’s companion was “a gentleman of _London_.” Now although John Hampden happened to be born in London, when his father was in parliament in 1594, he was properly of Buckinghamshire. Winslow, who was himself of Worcestershire, if he knew who Hampden was, would not have called him “a gentleman of _London_;” and we cannot suppose that this English gentleman would have spent so many months in the Colony without making himself known to its two leading men, Winslow and Bradford. Equally unfounded is the statement that has gained so wide a currency and become incorporated with the history of those times, and is repeated in Lord Nugent’s Life of Hampden, that John Hampden, in company with Cromwell, Pym, and Hazelrig, had actually embarked for America on board a fleet in the Thames, in 1638, but were detained by an order from the Privy Council. Miss Aikin, in her Memoirs of Charles I., ch. xiii., was the first to detect and expose this error of the historians.--For some of the views in this note I am indebted to the MS. suggestions of the learned editor of Governor Winthrop’s History of New England. [71] Probably the same which is now called Slade’s Ferry, in Swanzey. Belknap’s Am. Biog. ii. 292. [72] Conbatant or Corbitant, was the sachem of Pocasset, and was subject to Massasoit. See Baylies’ Plymouth, ii. 232.