At the beginning of the winter of 1636-1637 about eight hundred people were established in three townships below Springfield.  These townships were first called after the towns from which their inhabitants removed—­Newtown, Watertown, and Dorchester; but in February, 1637, their names were changed to Hartford, Wethersfield, and Windsor.  The settlements well illustrate the general type of New England colonization.  The emigration from Massachusetts was not of individuals, but of organized communities united in allegiance to a church and its pastor.  Carrying provisions and supplies, erecting new villages, as communities they came from England to Massachusetts, and in that character the people emigrated to Connecticut.

In the mean time, the silence of the Connecticut woods was broken by other visitors.  The lands occupied by the Massachusetts settlers upon the Connecticut lay within a grant executed March 19, 1631, by the earl of Warwick, as president of the Council for New England for “all that part of New England in America which lies and extends itself from a river there called Narragansett River, the space of forty leagues upon a straight line near the seashore towards the southwest, west, and by south, or west, as the coast lieth towards Virginia, accounting three English miles to the league; and also all and singular the lands and hereditaments whatsoever, lying and being within the lands aforesaid, north and south in latitude and breadth, and in length and longitude of and within, all the breadth aforesaid, throughout the main-lands there, from the western ocean to the south sea.”  The grantees included Lord Say and Sele, Lord Brooke, and Sir Richard Saltonstall.[54]

Probably some report of the unauthorized colonies reached them and hastened Saltonstall to send out a party of twenty men in July, 1635, to plant a settlement on the Connecticut.  But the Dorchester settlers treated them with even less consideration than they had the Plymouth men.  They set upon them and drove them out of the river.[55] Then, in October, 1635, John Winthrop, Jr., the eldest son of John Winthrop of Massachusetts, came from England with a commission to be governor of the “river Connecticut in New England” for the space of one year.[56]

He was, however, a governor in theory, and made but one substantial contribution to the permanent possession of Connecticut by the English.  In November, 1635, he erected at the mouth of the river a fort called after Lord Say and Sele and Lord Brooke—­Saybrook—­which in the spring of 1636 he placed under the command of Lyon Gardiner, an expert military engineer, who had seen much service in the Netherlands.[57] Hardly had the English mounted two cannon on their slight fortification when a Dutch vessel sent from New Amsterdam on a sudden errand arrived in the river.  Finding themselves anticipated, the Dutch returned home, and the scheme of cutting off the English settlements on the upper Connecticut from the rest of New England was frustrated.[58]