“ [87] Mr. Allerton fished with eight boats.” Jossylyn speaks of Mr. Cradock's plantation, in 1638, “on the west of Mystick River, where he has impaled a park;” unquestionably the first park for deer impaled in this country. In 1630, Mr. Cradock provides a man (Richard Waterman), “whose chief employment,” he says to his men at Medford, “will be to get you good venison.” The Company in England say (April 17, 1629), “William Ryall and Thomas Brude, coopers and cleavers of timber, are entertained by us in halves with Mr. Cradock, our Governor.” To express their sense of the value of Mr. Cradock's services for the Colony, the General Court, held at Newton, March 4, 1634, make him a grant of land in the following words: “All the ground, as well upland as meadow, lying and being betwixt the land of Mr. Nowell and Mr. Wilson on the east, and the partition betwixt Mistick bounds on the west, bounded with Mistick River on the south, and the Rocks on the north, is granted to Mr. Mathew Cradock, merchant, to enjoy to him and his heirs for ever.” Some of the earliest grants of land were made before any boundary lines of towns were fixed. “March 3, 1635: Ordered that the land formerly granted to Mr. Cradock, merchant, shall extend one mile into the country from the river-side in all places.” This tract is supposed to have embraced three thousand five hundred acres. In proof of this gentleman's profound attachment to the Puritan enterprise, we will here quote a few sentences from the “First Letter of the Governor and Deputy of the New England Company for a Plantation in Massachusetts Bay, to the Governor and Council for London's Plantation in the Massachusetts Bay, in New England.” April 17, 1629: Many men and various articles for trade and use having been sent from London, the letter says:--
We pray you give all good accommodation to our present Governor, Mr. Mathew Cradock, who, with some particular brethren of the company, have deeply engaged themselves in their private adventures in these ships, and those to come; and as we hold these men, that thus deeply adventure in their private, to be (under God) special instruments for the advancing and strengthening of the plantation, which is done by them without any charge to the company's general stock, wherein, notwithstanding, they are as deep or deeper engaged than any other. We have sent six shipwrights, of whom Robert Moulton is
