264 THE OCEAN RIVER 



its present name, and returned to write a real -estate panegyric 

 of the new country. This same year, 1614, another northern i 



visitor from Virginia, Captain Argoll, attacked the French 

 settlement of Sieur de Mont at Somes Sound in Mt. Desert, 

 and raided Port Royal in Acadia where the French had settled 

 four years before. It is also sadly interesting to note that Sir 

 Walter Raleigh, the great romantic searcher after wealth and 

 honor in Virginia, the Carolinas, and at last in Guiana, com- 

 ing home to England in final defeat, was beheaded in 1618 for 

 having stirred up trouble with Spain. Kings recognized only 

 success. Two years later, without any of the grand dreams or 

 bold individual scheming that marked the sixteenth century's 

 courtly adventurers, the humble, ill-prepared, but persistent 

 group of Pilgrims made the first really permanent English set- 

 tlement north of Virginia. Fishermen had been wintering 

 along the coast off and on for almost a hundred years, but the 

 Pilgrims were the first who came to this region to found a 

 home. 



This Plymouth settlement, and the ones to follow shortly 

 after at Boston and Salem, marks the beginning of a force that 

 was eventually to challenge and finally control the codfishing 

 Banks, ''the silver mines of the sea,'' where the Ocean River 

 and the Labrador Current combined to create the basic wealth 

 of early New England. Meanwhile the merchants of western 

 England were still doing their best to prevent colonization in 

 Newfoundland, and thus indirectly helped New England pros- 

 per. Perhaps this is the place to draw a picture from the early 

 records of what went on offshore and onshore by the Grand 

 Banks. 



Actually the first effective colonization of the western world 

 north of the Caribbean was seaborne — the international 

 working colony of the Brotherhood of the Banks on the Cod- 

 fish Frontier along the northeastern course of the Ocean River. 

 The French, under Champlain, were penetrating the waters 



