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college. The legislature, out of gratitude, ordered the new institution , the first English college in America, to be called by John Harvard's name. One of the curious pieces of information that I have encountered in the course of investigating early Harvard history, is the Pennoyer bequest, in 1670, of a farm in England, which provided scholarships for Harvard College during a period of two-hundred and thirty-four years. The history of these scholarships is a fine instance of faithful performance of !

a sacred trust.


William Pennoyer, citizen and clothworker in London, was one of a large group of city merchants interested in English colonization. With Maurice Thomson, sometime Governor of the East India Company, acquired early fishing interests at Cape Ann. During the English Civil War, the two partners showed their political sympathies, unmistakably, and often profitably. They subscribed six-thousand pounds for the reduction of Ireland, and received a share of confiscated Irish lands. They purchased saltpetre from the East India Company, and at one time were delivering a thousand barrels of gunpowder a month to the State. Their "private man of war" Paramoor received letters of marque and reprisal. Their frigate "Alum" took seven thousand pounds of their bullion to India, to purchase saltpetre. On another vessel they shipped "naggs" from England and "steeres" from Virginia to Barbados, where they owned sugar works. Their advice was asked by the Council of State as to "reducing Virginia to the interest of the Commonwealth," and they were joint adventurers in a project of the East India Company for establishing a colony in the island of Assada, now Nossi-be. Like many other London merchants, William Pennoyer was a Puritan and charitably disposed. Unlike most of them, he had no children. A member of the Society for the Propogation of the Gospel in New England (the president of which was another Harvard benefactor, the great Robert Boyle), he promised to give that society six hundred pounds for a building fund in return for an annuity of twenty pounds to be paid to, or for the use of, the College in New England. Before this agreement could be executed, William Pennoyer died, when it appeared that he had already made provision both for the company and the College by will. The pertinent extract from it reads thus in our early record

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