This committee sat for several months endeavoring, after hearing both sides, to effect this object ; but finding it impossible, they so reported, and the States General refused to give either party the wished for prize. In less than seven months after this rejection, " the long pending question of a grand armed commercial organization was finally settled; and an ample charter, (bearing date the third day of June 1621) gave the AVest India Company almost

unlimited powers to colonize, govern, and defend New Netherland."

In the year 1619 Captain Thomas Dermer, a navigator in the employment of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, one of the leading corporators of the " Council of Plymouth " (as the Company chartered by James I. in 1606, was styled) who terms him " a brave stout gentleman," was sent in command of a ship of two hundred tons on a voyage to Monhegan, an island on the Coast of Maine some distance east of the Mouth of the Kennebec. One object of this voyage was to obtain a cargo of fish, another was to return to his home Squanto, one of the twenty-seven Massachusetts Indians kidnapped, carried to Malaga in Spain, and sold as slaves, late in 1614, by Hunt, the master of one of the three vessels of Captain John Smith, which that famous explorer left behind him to complete her cargo on his departure from New England in July, 1614.'

By the good efforts of some benevolent monks of Malaga many of the kidnapped Indians were rescued from slavery, and eventually found their way back to America. One of these was Squanto, who on reaching London, was sent by Mr. Slaney, merchant and treasurer of the Newfoundland Company to that island. There Dermer met him, on touching at the island on his way to England on a previous voyage, and carried him back to that country, as the easiest way of returning him to New England.