Unfriendliness characterized, from the first, the relations with the French.  They claimed that Acadia extended as far south as Pemaquid, and one day in 1631, when the manager of the Penobscot factory was away, a French privateer appeared in port and landed its crew.  In the story, as told by Bradford, the levity of the French and the solemn seriousness of the Puritans afford a delightful contrast.  The Frenchmen were profuse in “compliments” and “congees,” but taking the English at a disadvantage forced them to an unconditional surrender.  They stripped the factory of its goods, and as they sailed away bade their victims tell the manager when he came back “that the Isle of Rhe gentlemen had been there."[20] In 1633, after Razilly’s appointment as governor-general, De la Tour, one of his lieutenants, attacked and drove away the Plymouth men at Machias Bay,[21] and in 1635 D’Aulnay, another lieutenant, dispossessed the English at Penobscot.

The Plymouth people, greatly incensed, sent two armed ships to punish the French, but the expedition proved a failure.  Then they appealed to Massachusetts for help, but the great men of that colony, hoping, as Bradford intimates, to arrange a trade with the French on their own account, declined to be at any expense in the matter,[22] and so the Penobscot remained in unfriendly hands for many years.

This appeal to Massachusetts showed that another power had stepped to the front in New England.  After John Winthrop set up his government in 1630 on Massachusetts Bay the history of the Plymouth colony ceased to be of first importance, and therefore the remaining events in her annals need not take much space.  In 1633 the people of Plymouth established a fort on Connecticut River above the Dutch post, so as to intercept the Indian trade, and in 1639 they renewed the ancient league with Massasoit.[23] In 1640 they had a dispute with Massachusetts over the boundary-line, which was arranged by a compromise, and in 1641 William Bradford deeded to the freemen of the corporation of New Plymouth the patent of 1630, granted by the Council for New England to him as trustee for the colony.[24] Finally, in 1643, Plymouth became a member of the New England confederation.

A survey of these twenty-three years (1620-1643) shows that during the first eleven years the increase in population was very slow.  In 1624 there were one hundred and eighty settlers and in 1630 but three hundred.  The emigration to Massachusetts, beginning in 1629, brought about a great change.  It overflowed into Plymouth, and in twelve years more the population had increased to three thousand.[25] The new settlers were a miscellaneous set, composed for the most part of “unruly servants” and dissipated young men, whose ill conduct caused the old rulers like Bradford to question “whether after twenty years’ time the greater part be not grown worser."[26] Nevertheless, the people increased their “outward estate,” and as they scattered in search of fertile land, Plymouth, “in which they lived compactly till now, was left very thin and in a short time almost desolate.”  In 1632 a separate church and town of the name of Duxbury was formed north of Plymouth; and eleven years later the towns of the Plymouth colony were ten in number:  Plymouth, Duxbury, Scituate, Taunton, Sandwich, Yarmouth, Barnstable, Marshfield, Seeconck, or Rehoboth, and Nausett.[27]