The acknowledged founders of New England are, of course, the Pilgrim Fathers who, sailing from Plymouth, established the first permanent settlement in Massachusetts Bay in 1620.

Of the many brave "planters" who settled in New England between then and

1650, two-thirds came from the West Country.

The very first English colony, in Carolina, had been planted in 1585 under the sponsorship of Sir Walter Raleigh.

Setting sail from Plymouth this 100 strong settlement was established at a place which the natives called Roanoke, now known as Fort Raleigh.

Two years later, amidst some mystery, all the inhabitants at Roanoke had disappeared.

Over twenty years later, in 1607, Sir John Popham - Lord Chief Justice, a former Bristol judge and Somerset landowner - was the prime mover behind a colony in what we now call New England.

This brave venture, in Maine, at the mouth of the Kennebec river in the summer of 1607, lasted for little more than a year before being abandoned.

Just a few years earlier, however, the French had settled briefly on an island in the St Croix River, between what is now Maine and New Brunswick.

But Popham went on to claim Northern Virginia for the King of England.

Although neglected until recent times, archaeologists have now managed to relocate the remains of Fort St George, the home of the Popham colony.

A conservation programme will hopefully restore it – just like the lost colony of Roanoke – to its rightful place in the history of the American continent.

Historians don’t really know what happened at Roanoke, but they do know what happened at Fort St George.

When supply ships, the Mary and John, arrived from England, they discovered that the Governor, George Popham, had died and that his second - in - command wished, for legal reasons, to return to England.

Having had a very hard time of it, none of the colonists were willing to remain and all returned home in a supply ship and a vessel which they had miraculously managed to build themselves.

The hard luck stories spread by these disillusioned emigrants branded the American east coast "too cold for Englishmen".

According to explorer John Smith – the very man who was saved from death by Pocahontas, and who coined the phrase "New England" – people had come to regard it as a cold, barren, rocky place from which the planters had been driven by "extreme extremities".

Another colonisation fanatic, a man from Wraxall in North Somerset called Sir Ferdinando Gorges, had been involved in some of these ventures, but had then become disillusioned.

This relative of Raleigh then ceased, for a few years anyway, to have any further interest in them.

But in 1611, after having been presented with a real, live native American from Martha’s Vineyard, this was revived.

Ever the optimist, Gorges wasn’t convinced that conditions in New England were as bad as the disgruntled settlers made out.

This was confirmed, as far as he was concerned, when John Smith and others went out there and reported that, because the season opened earlier in Newfoundland, fish could be brought to market sooner.

And as the New England fishing banks were closer inshore than those of Newfoundland, Gorges reasoned, the processing could be more easily carried out from land.

There was no reason, he thought, why ships going out to North America with supplies and settlers couldn’t return to England with valuable cargoes of salted fish.

Smith’s observations convinced Gorges that he was right, and in petitioning the King for help he linked fisheries with colonisation.

In fact he hoped that the income from fish sales would give him some payback for his outlay.

Meanwhile, back in Bristol in the spring of 1610, a company styled "The Treasurer and Company of Adventurers and Planters of the Cities of London and Bristol for the colony or plantation in Newfoundland" was set up.

As well as Merchant Venturer John Guy the company backers included wealthy Bristol sugar merchants Philip and Thomas Aldworth.

Although this venture met with some success, it later ran into serious difficulties, and was wound up sometime in the 1620s.

Then, after an ill-fated mission to discover the north west passage, led by Captain Thomas James in 1631, which lost its backers some £800, the Bristol fraternity finally gave up any further attempts at colonisation, after around 150 years of trying.

From now on, the city and its business community - with the noted exception of Ferdinado Gorges - would take something of a back seat.

In 1629 Gorges had married wealthy widow Lady Elizabeth Smyth, of Ashton Court and gone to live in Bristol’s Great House (on the site of the present Colston Hall) on St Augustine’s Back.

It was this man – a colonisation optimist who had grown up in Wraxall – and his colleagues who gave the Pilgrim Fathers their land grant, and it was from his garrison at Plymouth that the famed Mayflower set sail.

Finally made Governor of New England in 1637 at the advanced age or 70 (he never actually got there) Gorges also helped organise the settlers who founded Virginia’s first permanent communities in the 1630s and 1640s.

An ardent Royalist who raised troops for King Charles during the civil war, Gorges died at Ashton Court in 1647 without ever receiving the recognition due to him for helping establish the English colonies in North America.