New Hampshire founder John Mason lost a fortune on his New Hampshire colony. Its settlers were supposed to find gold and plant vineyards for wine. That didn’t work. He hoped that his Piscataqua River connected him with Indian traders on the Great Lakes. And in a perfect world, his river went all the way to China.

If you don’t know much about the founding of New Hampshire, join the club. Historians too are uncertain about exactly who landed where, when and why. But one curious fact is clear. New Hampshire’s seaport, Portsmouth, was founded by mistake. Captain John Mason, the primary English investor in the colony at Strawbery Banke, pinned his hopes on bad information. Mason was looking for a shortcut to an imaginary place called "The Lake of the Iroquois." where he hoped to make his fortune trading in Indian furs. Mason hoped too that New Hampshire’s Piscataqua River was the secret "northwest passage" to the Indian lakes, and possibly, to China itself.

Like his investment partner Sir Ferdinando Gorges, Mason was convinced that the rivers in the New World were the gateway to the riches of the Orient. Gorges, the Governor of Plymouth, England funded George Weymouth’s 1605 expedition to find the elusive passage to the East. Weymouth returned, instead, with five kidnapped Maine natives, the first Indians ever seen in England. Weymouth presented three of them – Tisquamtum, Manida and Skidwarres – to Gorges, who entertained, housed and studied them for three years. Gorges presented the Indians to the English court as a public relations tool to drum up investors for high-stakes New World exploration. His PR campaign led, in part, to the creation of the London Company of investors who started Jamestown at Virginia in 1607.

The Plymouth Company, a second group of investors run largely by Gorges, formed at the same time. Their early voyages to "Northern Virginia", later called New England, are largely ignored by American history texts because they did not lead to "permanent" settlements. The groups first voyage misfired, ending up in Puerto Rico. Gorges group quickly launched another, bigger mission with 124 men, two ships and a prestigious leader named Sir George Popham. This group settled near the mouth of the Kennebec River in Maine just ahead of the southern expedition that set foot at Jamestown in 1607. The Popham Colony survived just over a year, abandoning a sophisticated fort and leaving behind the body of leader George Popham who died during the frigid winter in Maine. But this failure did not kill Ferdinando Gorges’ hope that he was on the right track. Before his death, Popham wrote to Gorges saying that the local Indians had assured him there was a great large sea only seven days journey from their fort.

"This cannot be other than the Southern Ocean, reaching to the regions of China," Popham wrote back, "which unquestionably cannot be far from these regions."

Whether Popham’s sources were talking about nearby Sebago Lake or Lake Winnepesaukee in New Hampshire or the distant Great Lakes is unknown. While the idea of sailing up the Piscataqua to reach the East Indies seems ridiculous today, it was downright logical to English entrepreneurs like Gorges and Mason whose explorers had scarcely pierced the skin of the mysterious American continent, and whose Indian guides spoke of great lakes to the west. When Henry Hudson discovered his giant Hudson’s Bay deep in the Canadian wilderness the following year in 1610, he assumed, at first, it was the Pacific Ocean. It wasn’t, but the game was on. Hudson’s voyage opened a lucrative new European fur trade with North American Indians.

CONTINUE with FOUNDING OF NH

When Captain John Smith stopped on Monhegan Island in Maine in 1614, his enthusiastic report kicked off another wave of British investors who hoped to cash in on the riches of the New World. Smith too believed in the existence of a Northwest Passage. Smith made three attempts to colonize this region. All three were financed by Ferdinando Gorges. All three failed due to bad luck, bad weather and bad pirates. The Plymouth Company was not a moneymaker, yet Gorges refused to give up. He created a new joint stock company named the Plymouth Council of New England. John Mason was among the investors.

Without the funds to launch their own colony, at first, the Plymouth Council authorized small private ventures including the Puritan colony at Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620. The English investment company also authorized private fishing settlements on the Piscataqua River at Rye, NH under David Thomson, and at Dover Point under brothers Edward and John Hilton in 1623.

While it is true that the first New Hampshire settlers came to fish, founder John Mason had very different plans for his colony at Strawbery Banke, established between the Thompson and Hilton sites (near Prescott Park and Strawbery Banke Museum today). Mason intended a faster, bigger return on his growing investment than any plantation or fishing camp could provide. On November 17, 1629, Mason and Gorges received a vaguely defined grant to the land bordering "the rivers and lakes of the Iroquois", assumed today to be from Lake Champlain north to Lake Superior and west halfway to Lake Ontario. This land along these great lakes in the "Laconia" grant also included 1,000 acres on the seacoast of New Hampshire. The strange combination of seemingly disconnected tracts was based on the 17^th century theory that Lake Chanplain was the source of the Piscataqua River. Mason’s settlement at Strawbery Banke was intended as the key trading post for goods, mostly furs, obtained at the "Lake of the Iroquois", transported by river to Strawbery Banke and exported to England. Should Mason’s men also find the elusive outlet to the Orient – his ultimate dream -- all the better for New Hampshire’s tiny seacoast that would have exclusive trading rights with China.

Mason’s Laconia Company lost no time in getting boots on the ground in New Hampshire in 1630. The company needed to quickly populate and manage the new territory and pay back its hungry investors. Captain Walter Neal, an English army officer reportedly arrived with eight or ten ex-military adventurers aboard the bark Warwick in the spring or summer of 1630. As governor, Neal had wide-ranging powers. He set up operations at Pannaway Manor in Rye. David Thompson had stayed only three years before moving to Boston. His fortified stone house, fish-drying operation, a small fleet of ships, the farm and saltworks appear to have been largely abandoned by 1630. Possession is nine-tenths of the law, so Gorges and Mason’s grant was quickly amended to include this area and the lucrative fishing posts at the Isles of Shoals.

History offers no portrait of Walter Neal, John Mason or Ferdinando Gorges. Like Captain John Smith, they were all professional English soldiers -- adventurous, determined, ambitious, perhaps thuggish at times. Neal likely dressed and acted the part of an ex-Tudor soldier. Sporting a bushy beard, ruffled collar, armor breastplate, sword and helmet, he was likely a figure of authority in the earliest days when Strawbery Banke was little more than a single large house and a few huts along the river surrounded by a dense and dangerous wilderness.

In 1632 Captain Walter Neal and a small group plunged bravely into Indian territory toward the distant white peaks in search of the fabled Lake of the Iroquois. The best report of their journey comes years later in a 1658 biography of Neal by a grandson of Ferdinando Gorges. Neal figured the journey to the White Mountains would be 90 to 100 miles from "Pascataway", the temporary capital of Mason’s colony at Rye.

The group traveled by boat and on foot and were just a day away from ascending the great mountain, Thomas Gorges reports, when they ran out of food and were forced to return. The explorers did help establish trade relations with the local Indians and they did bring back treasure. The men picked up "chrystall stones" which, without horses, they were forced to carry on their backs on the return hike to Strawbery Banke. Neal shipped the white crystals to the eager John Mason who had them quickly analyzed in London. They were worthless.

Other prospecting trips and mining expeditions were fruitless too. Mason had hoped for precious metals, but Walter Neal returned to England empty-handed in 1633, leaving behind, according to genealogists, only an illegitimate son with an unknown Piscataqua mother. Mason, clearly frustrated with the lack of return from his colony, wrote to one of his agents at Strawbery Banke on May 5, 1634. He still clung to the hope of connecting New Hampshire and the Orient. "I have disbursed a great deal of money in ye plantacon and never received one penny," Mason said, "but hope if there was once a discoverie of the lakes, that I should, in some reasonable time, be reimbursed againe."

There were no great lakes, of course, and no Northwest Passage up the Piscataqua to China of the Indies. Captain Mason, having sunk a fortune into his New Hampshire colony, ordered a ship built at England and fit out with even more colonists and supplies. Mason had once been the governor of the colony at Nova Scotia, and it was time, he decided, to come to Strawbery Banke and find the treasure himself. But just as the ship was about to sail from England in 1635, John Mason died. His dream died with him, but his tiny abandoned colony managed to survive.

Copyright © 2006 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved. This article is adapted from the author’s forthcoming book on the history of Strawbery Banke due late in 2007.