All this took place in March, and, shortly after, the unfortunate Mr. Weston arrived on the coast of Maine, seeking news of his colony. He there heard of its ruin and, with one or two men, started in a small boat for Wessagusset. His ill-fortune pursued him. Overtaken by a storm he was cast away near where Newburyport now stands, and barely saved his life only to fall into the hands of the savages, who stripped him to his shirt. He succeeded, however, in finding his way back to the fishing stations in Maine and thence to Plymouth. The people there received him kindly, and loaned him some beaver-skins on which to trade: and again he returned to the eastward. There he found his smaller vessel, the Swan, and some of his people. Afterwards he seems to have been both very adventurous and very unfortunate. He made frequent voyages to Virginia, and now and again flits vaguely across the page of Plymouth history,--in debt, in trouble, in arrest. Finally he returned to England, where, long afterwards, during the wars of Cromwell, he died of the plague at Bristol. But Wessagusset was not destined long to remain a solitude. Deserted in March, it was again occupied just six months later; for, in the middle of September, 1623, Captain Robert Gorges, a son of that Sir Ferdinand whose name is so prominent in the early annals of New England, sailed up the Fore River, and landed at Weston’s deserted plantation. His enterprise was of a quite different character from that which had preceded it. He held a grant from the Council of New England, covering a tract of land vaguely described as lying on the north-east side of Massachusetts Bay, as what is now known as Boston Bay was then called, and covering ten miles of sea-front, while stretching thirty miles into the interior. He was also commissioned as Governor-General, and authorized to correct any abuses which had crept into the affairs of the company in America; for the more effectual doing of which he was further provided with a grand admiral and a council, of which the Governor of Plymouth for the time being was _ex officio_ a member. His jurisdiction was of the largest description, civil, criminal and ecclesiastical, for he also brought with him in his company one Mr. William Morell, a clergyman of the Church of England, holding a commission from the ecclesiastical courts of the mother country, which authorized him to exercise a species of superintendency over the churches of the colony. This whole expedition seems, in fact, to have been organized on a most ludicrously grandiose scale, probably to meet the views of its commander, who had recently seen some service in the Venetian wars and was now nourishing ambitious visions of an empire in the wilderness. The establishment of Episcopacy in New England had long been a favorite idea with Sir Ferdinand Gorges,[30] and now, when he sent his son thither, he provided him not only with a council and an admiral, but also with a primate.