Wessagusset Colony

Wessagusset Colony
Colony of England
Country	United States
State	Massachusetts
Coordinates	42°13′15″N 70°56′25″W / 42.220833°N 70.940278°W / 42.220833; -70.940278Coordinates: 42°13′15″N 70°56′25″W / 42.220833°N 70.940278°W / 42.220833; -70.940278
Population	Approximately 60 (1623)
Founded	1622
Approximate location of the Wessagusset Colony in Massachusetts
Location of Massachusetts in the United States

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. The colony was settled without adequate provisions, and was dissolved in late March 1623 after harming relations with local Native Americans. Surviving colonists joined Plymouth Colony or returned to England. It was the second settlement in Massachusetts, predating the Massachusetts Bay Colony by six years.

Historian Charles Francis Adams Jr. referred to the colony as "ill-conceived, "ill-executed, [and] ill-fated". It 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 was rechristened as Weymouth and 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.

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."