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Wessagusset Colony (sometimes called the Weston Colony or Weymouth Colony) was a short-lived English trading colony in New England located in present-day Weymouth, Massachusetts. It was settled in August 1622 by between fifty and sixty colonists who were ill-prepared for colonial life. After settling without adequate provisions and harming relations with local Native Americans, the colony was dissolved in late March 1623 with surviving colonists joining Plymouth Colony or returning to England. It was the second settlement in Massachusetts, predating the Massachusetts Bay Colony by six years.〔Chartier, Craig S. (March 2011), (''An Investigation into Weston's Colony at Wessagussett, Weymouth, Massachusetts'' ), Plymouth Archaeological Rediscovery Project (PARP), http://www.plymoutharch.com〕 Called by historian Charles Francis Adams, Jr. "ill-conceived, "ill-executed, () ill-fated", the short-lived colony is best remembered for the battle (some say massacre) there between Plymouth troops led by Miles Standish and an Indian force led by Pecksuot. This battle scarred relations between the Plymouth colonists and the natives and was fictionalized, two centuries later, in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1858 poem, ''The Courtship of Miles Standish''. In September 1623, a second colony led by Governor-General Robert Gorges was created in the abandoned site at Wessagusset. This colony, rechristened as Weymouth, was also unsuccessful and Governor Gorges returned to England the following year. Despite that, some settlers remained in the village and it was absorbed into the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. ==Origins== The colony was coordinated by Thomas Weston, a London merchant and ironmonger. Weston was associated with the Plymouth Council for New England which, fifteen years earlier, had funded the short-lived Popham Colony in modern Maine. During the period when the Pilgrims were in the Netherlands, Weston helped to arrange the colonists' passage to the New World with help from the Merchant Adventurers. Historian Charles Francis Adams, Jr. writing in the 1870s glowingly called him a "sixteenth century adventurer" in the mold of John Smith and Walter Raleigh and that his "brain teemed with schemes for deriving sudden gain from the settlement of the new continent". In later years, Plymouth Governor William Bradford called him "a bitter enemy unto Plymouth upon all occasions." The primary purpose of Weston's new colony was profit, rather than the religious reasons of the Plymouth settlers, and this dictated how the colony would be assembled. Weston believed that families were a detriment to a well-run plantation and so he selected able-bodied men only but not men experienced in colonial life. In total, there were several advanced scouts and fifty to sixty other colonists.〔. Quoting with annotations from Edward Winslow's ''Good News from New England''〕 The final complement also included one surgeon and one lawyer. The party was outfitted with enough supplies to last the winter. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Wessagusset Colony」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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