Other portions were governed either by the Massachusetts Bay Colony, either through land claims made based on the geographic descriptions in its charter, or by outright purchase.
The Popham Colony was founded on the coast of present-day Phippsburg, Maine in 1607 as a colonization attempt by the Virginia Company of Plymouth.
[2] The Province of Maine is first mentioned in a charter to Sir Ferdinando Gorges and John Mason in 1622 from the Plymouth Council for New England, covering territory between the Merrimack and Kennebec rivers.
Rigby sent George Cleeve, a settler who had fallen out with Gorges and then engineered the sale, back to Maine with a commission as his deputy president.
Although Godfrey at first strenuously objected to these claims, popular opinion eventually fell against him, and in November 1652 Massachusetts took control of Maine.
Massachusetts then purchased the claims of the Gorges heirs (as reduced by the 1646 decision separating Lygonia) for £1,250 in May 1677, and in 1680 constituted a new government in this territory.
The dominion collapsed after the arrest of its governor, Sir Edmund Andros, and the previous government was restored until the inception of the Province of Massachusetts Bay in 1692, which claimed all of present-day Maine as part of its territory.