In these years of the early settlements the Indians had given little trouble, and they had been willing enough to sell their lands for considerations that were valuable to them and not ruinous to the whites. The matter of the natives’ claim to the soil was reasoned out in certain “General Considerations for the Plantation in New England.” “The whole earth is the Lord’s garden and he hath given it to the sons of Adam to be tilled and improved,” ran the ingenuous document. “But what warrant have _we_ to take that land which is, and hath of long time been possessed by others of the sons of Adam? That which is common to all is proper to none,” is the answer thereto. “This savage people ruleth over many lands without title or property.... And why may not Christians have liberty to go and dwell amongst them in their waste lands and woods (leaving them such places as they have manured for their corn) as lawfully as Abraham did among the Sodomites?” Fortified by such doctrine, the settlers took up the waste lands, paid for the corn, and went on, when need arose, to pay for the cleared land; though later Andros, characteristically, was to declare that these Indian deeds were no better than “the scratch of a bear’s paw.” Prices were easy of adjustment. “A great brass kettle of seven spans in wideness round about and one broad” fell to one Paupunmuck, of Barnstable, who, however, reserved “the right freely to hunt in the lands sold, provided his traps did no harm to the cattle.” And of Monohoo, the Reverend Mr. Walley, lover of justice and peace, bought some threescore acres for “ten yards of trucking cloth, ten shillings in money, one iron kettle, two knives, and a bass-hook.” And so were matters arranged to the satisfaction of all concerned: to the settler his farmland; to the Indian a brass pot and bass-hook, and often a small plot was reserved to him for tillage. But his right to hunt or fish was inevitably encroached upon as the settlements absorbed more and more of the wild lands, and before 1660 Richard Bourne, of Sandwich, perceived that some special reservation should be made for the fast dwindling tribes.