CHAPTER IV 



THE CRISIS AND THE CONVOYS, 1656-1688 



The six colonies had melted away or merged into one The gues- 

 fishing colony with definite boundaries, with inhabitants ^H^Jot f^ (,^ 

 of one origin under one Governor, whose powers however tvas raised 

 were sometimes in commission and sometimes non-existent. 

 The Governor was moribund, or in a state of suspended 

 animation, and the infant colony seemed perishing of 

 inanition. The most permanent element in the colony 

 consisted of many transitory fishermen, who had fished for 

 nearly a century and a half, and did not wish a colony to 

 exist. The few fixed colonists, who followed the same 

 pursuits and haunted the same spots as the evanescent 

 visitors, had been there less than fifty years, and were hourly 

 menaced with extinction. A crisis occurred about the time 

 of the Restoration, and was acute for twenty years (1656-75). 

 Either the colony must be abandoned and its Governor must 

 be left to die a natural death, or the State must appoint 

 permanent or regularly recurrent Governors and make the 

 Colony go forward. No half-way course was possible. 

 Innumerable arguments were used one way or the other 

 without effect ; and the pressure of French rivalry, the stern 

 realities of war, and the watchfulness of the Royal Navy 

 proved the sole decisive factors. 



The issues of Life and Death were placed into the scales (i)?«i656, 

 on three occasions and on the first occasion by the Council 

 of State of the Commonwealth. At the close of 1656 the 

 Council of State ordered a Committee to report whether it 

 might be fit to offer to his Highness as the Council's advice 

 'that the prosecuting of the Plantation there should be 

 discontinued '} It is not known what report the Committee 



* State Papers: Domestic^ Interregnum /, vol. Ixxvii, fol. 532. 

 Nov. 27, 1656. 



