Ferdinando Gorges was a promoter of English exploration and colonization in New England. He was born in Ashton Phillips, Somerset, England, about 1565. He was the younger son of Edward Gorges of Wraxall and Cicely Lygon. Gorges' ancestors had come from Normandy in 1066 and the family was related to Queen Elizabeth I. He attended Oxford briefly. He took a commission in the navy during England's war with Spain and fought in Flanders. Wounded during the siege of Paris in 1589, he was carried to safety by France's King Henry of Navarre. He was knighted in 1591. In 1601, he became embroiled in a conspiracy against the queen. He was accused of treason but was exonerated after testifying against his old patron, the earl of Essex. In 1604 he was appointed military governor of the port of Plymouth.
In 1605 George Weymouth brought five Native Americans from Maine back to Plymouth, presenting three of them to Gorges. Gorges' experience with them excited in him a life-long interest in the New World. A royalist, he dreamed of establishing an English colony there composed of aristocrats that would be directly controlled by the English king. This idea would obsess him all his life, and he sponsored various settlement schemes to try to realize his dream. In 1606 he helped form the Plymouth Company which, with the London Company, was to establish settlements along the eastern coast of North America. The Plymouth Company was given rights to settle in the north and the London company in the south, in Virginia. The Plymouth Company sent several unsuccessful expeditions and in 1614 Ferdinando hired Captain John Smith, who gave up after three unsuccessful attempts to leave England.
The Plymouth Company reorganized in 1620, and Gorges received a royal charter on behalf of the Council for New England for the lands between the fortieth and forty-eighth parallels from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In 1623 another settlement was tried. In 1635, Gorges resigned his charter, and in 1639 was granted the Province of Maine. He was later named its lord proprietor. The company fell into debt and eventually was forced to sell its ship, depriving Gorges of any opportunity to visit the New World.
He wrote two books: A Briefe Relation of the Discovery and Plantation of New England, published anonymously in 1622, described the exploration and settlements made by the Plymouth Company; and A Briefe Narration of the Original Undertakings of the Advancement of Plantations into the parts of America was written shortly before his death and is a more personal account, describing the political issues in England during the time.
He died in about 1647 in Bristol.
Source: American National Biography. V9. Edited by John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.; American Heritage Encyclopedia of American History. Edited by John Faragher. Sachem Publishing Association, 1998.; Rowse, A.L. "New England in the Earliest Days: Before Plymouth Colony There Was Sagadahoc, the Short-Lived Settlement for Which Sir Ferdinando Gorges Had High Hopes." American Heritage Aug (1959): 23-28.; Baxter, James Phinney. Sir Ferdinando Gorges and his province of Maine. Including the Brief relation, the Brief narration, his defence, the charter granted to him, his will, and his letters. Edited with a memoir and historical illus. by James Phinney Baxter. New York: Burt Franklin, 1967.