REV John White and the Dorchester adventurers back in England continue to support Conant and his group at Naumkeg. The settlers have found the soil and location ‘highly desirable’, so much so that they are anxious to get a new Patent from Sir Ferdinando Gorges and his Council for New England to make sure of their ownership of the land. Therefore Conant sends John Woodbury and William Trask to England to impress the urgency of this on White. Their worries are over however when White secures the Patent on 19 March, 1628. It is called the Rosewell Patent after Sir Henry Rosewell, one of the six patentees because to meet the requirement of the Council for New England the patentees, as with the previous one, must be ‘persons of honour or gentlemen of blood’. The patentees are now ‘The New England Company for a Plantation in Massachusetts Bay’ and not the Dorchester Company, which becomes irrelevant.

Rosewell, a wealthy merchant is due to be made High Sheriff of Devon next year. The five other well britched Puritans named on the Patent are, Sir John Young, Simon Whitcombe, John Humphrey, Thomas Southcote and one John Endicott. They move the old Dorchester Company HQ to London where they finalise their plans to send the ship Abigail to help Conant and his group at Naumkeg.

Endicott was born in 1588 in Chagford on Dartmoor in Devon. His father, Thomas, who died seven years ago, in 1621, is buried in Chagford church. As a young man he fought in the Low Countries against Spain. Subsequently he has married money – Ann Gower, cousin of affluent London merchant Matthew Craddock (1630 Winthrop panel) and invested some of it in the new Patent before accepting the role of the Governor of the Massachusetts settlement.

Even Endicott’s best friend, if he has one, would never describe him as a barrel of laughs. ‘Hang ‘em or flog ‘em’ seems to be his motto. He will probably be the most bigoted killjoy ever to set foot in Virginia and his brutal attitude is depicted in the main scene here as, tooled up, he journeys down to Weymouth in Dorset with his wife to board Abigail and eventually set sail on 20 June.