MAVERICK, Samuel, colonist, born in England about 1602; died about 1670. His father, John, known as the "godly Mr. Maverick," came to this country in 1630, and was one of the original pastors of the first church in Dorchester, Massachusetts Samuel arrived in New England several years before his father, settling as early as 1629 at Noddle's island (now East Boston), of which he received a grant from the general court, 1 April, 1633. Thomas Prince's "Chronology" (1630) says : " On Noddle's island lives Mr. Samuel Maverick, a man of very loving and courteous behavior, very ready to enter-rain strangers; on this island, with the help of Mr. David Thompson, he had built a small fort with four great guns to protect him from the Indians." In 1631 with others he held a patent for land in Maine under the president and council of New England, which was deeded to him in 1638 by the council and Perdinando Gorges. In 1635 he went to Virginia to purchase corn and stock, and remained there nearly a year, returning, as Governor John Winthrop says in his journal, "with two pinnaces, and brought some fourteen heifers and about eighty goats (having lost about twenty goats by the way). One of his pinnaces was about forty tons, of cedar, built at Barbathes, and brought to Virginia by Captain Powell, who there dying she was sold for a small matter." Maverick was one of the earliest slave-holders in Massachusetts, having purchased negroes in 1638. In 1640 he received a grant of 600 acres from Boston and an additional grant of 400 acres in Braintree. He was a stanch Episcopalian and royalist, and having suffered much persecution on this account went to England to complain to the king. On 23 April, 1664, he was appointed by Charles II. one of four commissioners to settle the difficulties with the New England colonies, and also to "reduce the Dutch at the Manhadoes," the other commissioners being Colonel Richard Nichols, Sir Robert Carr, and George Cartwright. They were intrusted with full power in all matters military and civil, but they were unsuccessful in Massachusetts, and Maverick relinquished his possession of Noddle's island and removed to New York. The exact date of his death is not known. The last trace of him is a letter from his hand dated 15 October, 1669, thanking Colonel Nichols for procuring for him "the gift of a house in the Broadway" for his fidelity to the king. In his autograph his name appears as Mavericke. See William H. Sumner's "History of East Boston" (Boston, 1858).