The original colonists were kind and considerate to the aborigines, and for many years were the firm friends and allies of Massasoit, head chief of the Pokanokets, whose lands they had occupied. Whites were not always as comfortable neighbors as the savages. Thomas Weston, one of the London partners, sent out (1622) an independent colony of seventy men to Wessaugusset, about twenty-five miles north of Plymouth. They were an idle, riotous set, and after making serious trouble with the Indians, a year or two later returned to England. In 1623, Robert Gorges, son of Ferdinando, was appointed governor-general of the country by the Council for New England, and in person attempted to form a colony upon land patented to him "on the northeast side of Massachusetts Bay," but soon abandoned his enterprise and returned home. In 1625, Captain Wollaston appeared with a number of indented white servants and started a colony on the site of the Quincy of to-day. But this form of slave labor not being suited to the democratic conditions of New England life, Wollaston took his servants to the more congenial climate of Virginia, and his plant was taken possession of by his partner, Thomas Morton, who styled the settlement Merrymount. Morton was much disliked by the Puritans, who were scandalized at his free-and-easy habits, regarded the apparently innocent sports in which he encouraged his people as "beastly practices," and charged him with the really serious offence of selling rum and firearms to the natives. The Plymouth militia dispersed the merrymakers and sent Morton to England (1628). Several Church of England men, representatives of Robert Gorges,--who had a patent for a strip of territory ten miles coastwise and thirty miles inland,--had come out in 1623, among them William Blackstone, settling on Shawmut peninsula, now Boston, Thomas Walford at Charlestown, and Samuel Maverick at Chelsea. Blackstone afterwards vacated his peninsula in favor of the Puritans of Charlestown. Maverick, in his palisaded fort, was a man of importance, and afterwards a royal commissioner to the colonies. There was also a small trading station at the mouth of the Piscataqua, and another at Nantasket, with here and there an individual plantation. With most of these the Plymouth people had business relations, but little else in common. Sidenote: Form of government.