him showed that his visit was at least partly in the interest of Sir Ferdinando Gor ges, who had a claim on the Bay colony's lands; and the strange knight was suspected to be in a scheme to divert this property from its possessor. The Puritan stomach was nauseated; and the authorities were soon furnished with cause for action by letters to Governor Winthrop from two women in England, each claiming to be his wife. One besought the governor to send her recreant husband back to her, while the other requested that he be put to death off-hand. The knight is represented as having brought quite a retinue with him, and ap pears to have had a town house, though his country seat figures chiefly in Longfel low's rhyme, — which says: — "His dwelling was just beyond the town, At what he called his country seat, —" though this was found by the officers who came in search of him to be "little more than a cabin of logs," with "A modest flower bed in front of the door." The knight was accompanied in his mis sion by a lady whom he represented as his cousin, but whom the suspicious Bostonians believed to sustain a more intimate relation. Observing the approaching officers, the gay Sir Christopher took a precipitate de parture from the rear of his house; and, unable to find the person for whom they had been sent, they seized, instead, "A little lady with golden hair," and brought the " weeping damsel " before the governor. The poem goes on to say that the latter " read her a little homily "On the folly and wickedness of the lives Of women half cousin and half wives : And seeing that naught his word availed, He sent her away in a ship that sailed For merry England over the sea." Meanwhile "Sir Christopher wandered away Through pathless woods for a month and a day,"
but was finally captured, — it is said, by means of Indians with whom he had found refuge, under the temptation of the reward offered by the Bay people. The accepted authority says that he was sent back to meet alike his pining spouse and the re vengeful one, in a ship which sailed from Salem. Here comes in — beside the outrage on the rights of a well-born Englishman — a conflict of testimony in the matter of dates of sailing and the fates of the unwilling sailors; for in Tucker's action he declares that Sir Christopher obtained the articles from him about " nine years ago," — which shows the knight to have been otherwheres than in England; while his " lady cousin" had previously been married to Thomas Furchas in Boston — in 163 1, — according to other trustworthy chroniclers, and as ap pears to be proved by the York County records; which also show that she bore her lord three children. It was for the comfort of this lady that the warming-pan was borrowed; to whom, in the year just indicated, Sir Christopher made a visit at her legal residence in the mansion of her husband in what is now the good old college town of Brunswick, Maine. The fowling-piece, it is stated, was bought six months later. Tucker was raising grain extensively on his land along Back Cove, opposite the present city of Portland; while Purchas carried on an extensive salmon fishery in its season, and a profitable trade with the Indians at all times. He had been one of the commissioners-assistant of the governor whom proprietor Gorges sent over in 1636; but on the departure of this governor the government lapsed; therefore Purchas turned to Massachusetts, and, in 1639, be came an adherent of that government, for his own protection against the intrusion of fishing vessels, the encroachments of neigh boring proprietors, and the ever dangerous Indians.
