To these English colonists fell the honour of the first contest for the flag. The French had occupied Acadia, and were quietly extending southward, when, in 1613, Commander Samuel Argall, of Southern Virginia,[81] finding them trading off Mount Desert, in what is now Maine, captured and destroyed their new shore settlement of St. Sauveur, and next year, heading an expedition sent out by his Colony, advanced farther northward, and destroyed their headquarters at Port Royal. Thus the colonists of Virginia, acting for their nation, defended the English claim, and repelled the interference made with the cross of St. George in its rights of prior discovery under Cabot. [81] Afterwards Governor of Virginia in 1618. The Plymouth Company had not been so energetic as were the London Company in the occupying of their "plantations," but, in 1614, Captain John Smith, on their behalf, settled a port which he called "New Plymouth," and gave the name of "New England" to the surrounding country. While these things were going on in America the migration of the Puritans from England to Holland had taken place. These non-conforming Independents left their homes in England, in 1609, not from any disloyalty to their native land, but because their religious views forbade them to bend to what they considered were the unbiblical Church requirements of James I. To his ritual regulations they would not conform, so they removed themselves and their families to Holland. Strong in their English nationality they remained for ten years at Leyden, an isolated and unsettled colony in a foreign land. To England they could not return, no place in Europe was open to them for settlement without losing their language and changing their flag, and they must, therefore, leave Holland and seek the New World lands across the ocean. The Dutch offered them assistance and favourable arrangements for colonization in their Dutch possessions in America. They were also offered inducements by the London Company to settle on the Delaware, in their colony of Virginia. As it was considered that complications might arise if an English colony were to proceed across the seas under the Dutch flag, they declined the offer of Holland and accepted the English proposition, and the consent of King James was obtained to their repatriation in the English territory in America without conforming to the religious conditions to which they had so devotedly objected in the Old Land. Thus they sought the new land, not as rebels, but as loyalists returning in gladness to their nation's flag.