“5. Considering (upon frequent exceptions against Providence men) that we had no authority for civil government, I went purposely to England, and upon my report and petition, the Parliament granted us a charter of government for these parts, so judged vacant on all hands. And upon this, the country about us was more friendly, and wrote to us, and treated us as an authorized colony; only the difference of our consciences much obstructed. The bounds of this, our first charter, I (having occular knowledge of persons, places and transactions) did honestly and conscientiously, as in the holy presence of God, draw up from Pawcatuck river, which I then believed, and still do, is free from all English claims and conquests; for although there were some Pequods on this side the river, who, by reason of some sachems’ marriages with some on this side, lived in a kind of neutrality with both sides, yet, upon the breaking out of the war, they relinquished their land to the possession of their enemies, the Narragansets and Nianticks, and their land never came into the condition of the lands on the other side, which the English, by conquest, challenged; so that I must still affirm, as in God’s holy presence, I tenderly waved to touch a foot of land in which I knew the Pequod wars were maintained and were properly Pequod, being a gallant country; and from Pawcatuck river hitherward, being but a patch of ground, full of troublesome inhabitants, I did, as I judged, inoffensively, draw our poor and inconsiderable line. “It is true, when at Portsmouth, on Rhode-Island, some of ours, in a General Assembly, motioned their planting on this side Pawcatuck. I, hearing that some of the Massachusetts reckoned this land theirs, by conquest, dissuaded from the motion, until the matter should be amicably debated and composed; for though I questioned not our right, &c., yet I feared it would be inexpedient and offensive, and procreative of these heats and fires, to the dishonoring of the King’s Majesty, and the dishonoring and blaspheming of God and of religion in the eyes of the English and barbarians about us.