Within a few years, on the general conditions of settlement granted to Sandwich, the four original townships of the Cape came into being. Scattering colonists had broken the ground. In 1638 “liberty was granted to Stephen Hopkins [one of the Mayflower men] to erect a house at Mattacheese and cut hay there this year to winter his cattle—provided, however, that it be not to withdraw him from the town of Plymouth.” Two other men were granted a like privilege. The rich salt meadows of the Cape were coveted by Plymouth for cattle, which seem to have been brought over from England first by Edward Winslow in a voyage made in 1624; and it was not uncommon later for cattle to be sent out to the colony as a speculation, for one half the profits of their increase. In the early winter of 1637-38 an attempt at settlement was made in a portion of Barnstable known as “Old Town,” by one Stephen Batchelor, who for some twenty years was a stormy petrel among the clergy of New England. In 1632, at the age of seventy-one, lured no doubt by the hope of freedom—there were not lacking those who accused him of license—he had arrived in Boston and went on to Lynn, where he was soon in trouble with the authorities. “The cause,” writes Governor Winthrop, “was for that coming out from England with a small body of six or seven persons, and having since received in many more at Saugus”—in short, his flavor of liberalism did not please the elders, and after a long wrangle, upon his “promise to remove out of town within three months he was discharged.” It is said that among the settlers at Sandwich were some relatives of his little flock; and whether for that reason or not, in the bitter cold of an early winter, he led them, on foot, the weary hundred miles from Lynn to Mattacheesett. But the settlement, rashly undertaken, was not a success, and in the spring Batchelor was off to Newbury. Thence he went to Hampton and Exeter, and at eighty was formally excommunicated by the Puritans. His life here had been “one constant scene of turbulence, disappointment, discipline and accusation,” and home again in England, in peace we may hope at the last, he died at the age of ninety. In 1639 came the formal permission to settle Yarmouth. Stephen Hopkins’s farm was incorporated in the new settlement, and the group of undertakers was headed by Anthony Thacher, who four years previously had been cast away on Thacher’s Island, Cape Ann, in a memorable storm. His children were among those lost; but he and his wife, and, quaintly, a covering of embroidered scarlet broadcloth that is still an heirloom in the family, were saved. Thacher had been a curate of Saint Edmund’s, Salisbury, and after his tragic entry into the country, had settled first at Newbury and then at Marblehead.