THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE 49 



By 1626, the adventurers at Cape Ann were so greatly 

 discouraged that they dissolved the company on land, and 

 sold their provisions and fishing apparatus.. This "Fisher 

 Plantation at Cape Ann" had proved a failure both to the 

 Plymouth fishermen and to the Dorchester Company; to 

 the former, partly because they made so poor a business 

 of their fishing, partly because of the exorbitant rates 

 charged by English merchants for forwarding their goods. 

 To the Dorchester Company it proved a failure partly for 

 the same reasons, but principally because the spot originally 

 chosen was a poor one for the establishment of a new planta- 

 tion. 1 



What was their loss, however, became another's gain. 

 Cape Ann proved to be the stepping stone to Salem. When 

 the discouraged settlers left the rocky cape with their 

 cattle and tools in 1626, Roger Conant, still their leader, 

 found for them a new and safer abode a few miles to the 

 southwest at a place called Naumkeag. During all the 

 years of struggle and discouragement, the Rev. John 

 White had kept up a lively interest in the Dorchester ad- 

 venturers. After they had settled at Naumkeag he wrote 

 encouragingly to them and sent advice for them to remain 

 there. In the meantime, in England, he set on foot a 

 scheme for permanent colonization of a scale greater than 

 any previously undertaken. A company of six persons 

 obtained from the Plymouth Company, in 1628, a strip of 

 land sixty miles in extent along the shore, and in Septem- 

 ber of the same year, John Endicott, one of the patentees, 

 arrived at Naumkeag with a company of sixty persons. 

 Endicott superseded Conant in the management of the 

 colony, and the name of the place was changed to Salem. 



After the coming of so eminent a personage as the new 

 governor, Roger Conant became a less prominent figure 



i H. Adams, Johns Hopkins University Studies, Vol. I, Art. IX- 

 X, p. 4. 



