Title: The Virginia Company Of London, 1606-1624
Author: Craven, Wesley Frank, 1905-1981
Language: English
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THE VIRGINIA COMPANY OF
LONDON, 1606-1624



COPYRIGHT©, 1957 BY
VIRGINIA 350TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION
CORPORATION, WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA

Second Printing, 1959

Third Printing, 1964


[Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence
that the U. S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


Jamestown 350th Anniversary
Historical Booklet Number 5



THE VIRGINIA COMPANY OF LONDON, 1606-1624


This is the story of the Virginia Company and only indirectly of the
Virginia colony. Those who seek an account of the early years at
Jamestown should turn to another number in this same series. Here the
focus belongs to the adventurers in England whose hopes gave shape to
the settlement at Jamestown, and whose determination brought the colony
through the many disappointments of its first years. In terms of time,
the story is short, for it begins with the granting of the first
Virginia charter in 1606 and ends with the dissolution of the company
in 1624. It thus covers a period of only eighteen years, but during
these years England's interest in North America was so largely
expressed through the agency of the Virginia Company that its story
constitutes one of the more significant chapters in the history both of
the United States and of the British Empire.

In the beginning there were two companies of the Virginia adventurers,
the one having its headquarters in London and the other in the western
outport of Plymouth. Englishmen at that time used the name Virginia to
designate the full sweep of the North American coast that lay above
Spanish Florida. In the original Virginia charter the adventurers were
granted rights of exploration, trade, and settlement on the "Coast of
Virginia or America" within limits that reached from 34° of latitude in
the south to 45° in the north, which is to say from the mouth of the
Cape Fear River in lower North Carolina to a point midway through the
modern state of Maine. The Plymouth grantees had a primary interest in
the northern area that Captain John Smith would later name New England,
and there they established a colony at Sagadahoc in August 1607, only a
few weeks after the settlement of Jamestown. But the colony barely
survived the winter, and was abandoned in the spring of 1608.
Thereafter, the Plymouth adventurers gave up. In contrast, the London
adventurers persisted, and their persistence served to tie the name of
Virginia increasingly to them and to their more southerly settlement.
As a result, the London adventurers became in common usage the Virginia
adventurers, their company the Virginia Company, and their colony
Virginia.

The Virginia colony was especially fortunate in having the backing of
London. Indeed, it may not be too much to suggest that the chief
difference between the stories of Roanoke Island and of Jamestown was
the difference that London made. Consistently, the leadership of
Elizabethan adventures to North America, including those of Gilbert and
Raleigh, had come from the western counties and outports of England,
and with equal consistency hopeful projects had foundered on the
inadequacy of their financial support while London favored other
ventures--to Muscovy, to the Levant, and more recently to the East
Indies. It was not merely that London had the necessary capital and
credit for a sustained effort; it also had experience in the management
of large and distant ventures, such as those of the East India Company
over which Sir Thomas Smith presided, as he would preside through many
years over the Virginia Company. London had too the advantage of its
proximity to the seat of government in nearby Westminster, where King
James had his residence, where the highest courts of the realm sat
periodically, and where England's parliament customarily met. Already,
in 1606, it was possible to trace in the immediate environs of the
ancient City of London, itself still medieval in appearance and in the
organization of much of its life, the broad outlines of the great
metropolis that has been increasingly the focal point of England's
development as a modern state.

In thus emphasizing the importance of London to the early history of
Virginia, one runs the risk of misrepresenting the true character of
the Virginia adventure. Contrary to the impression that will be gained
from many of our modern textbooks, the Virginia Company represented
much more than the commercial interests of the port of London. Its
membership included many gentlemen and noblemen of consequence in the
kingdom. Some of them, no doubt, became subscribers to a Virginia
joint-stock for the same reason that often led members of the landed
classes in England into commercial ventures. But others, quite
evidently, subscribed because of a sense of public responsibility, or
simply because skilfully managed propaganda had put pressure on them to
accept a responsibility of social or political position. For the
Virginia adventure was a public undertaking, its aim to advance the
fortunes of England no less than the fortunes of the adventurers
themselves.

It would be helpful if we knew more about the original Virginia
adventurers than we do. The records are so incomplete as to make
impossible anything approaching a full list of the first subscribers.
However, enough is known to suggest the broad range of experience and
interest belonging to those who now joined in a common effort to build
an empire for England in America. The original charter of 1606 lists
only eight of the adventurers by name, they being the ones in whose
names the petition for the charter had been made. This list omits Sir
John Popham, Lord Chief Justice of the Kings Bench, who may well have
been the prime mover in the enterprise, and Sir Thomas Smith, who was
an active leader from an early date. Four of the eight men listed are
identified as belonging to the London group. Sir Thomas Gates was a
soldier and veteran of campaigns in the Netherlands who would later
serve as the colony's governor. Sir George Somers had led many attacks
against Spanish possessions in Queen Elizabeth's day, was a member of
parliament, and would meet his death four years later in Bermuda while
on a mission of rescue for Virginia. Edward Maria Wingfield was another
soldier who had fought in the Netherlands. He belonged to a family
which had acquired extensive estates in Ireland, and he too would go to
Virginia, where he served as first president of the colony's council.
The most interesting of the four was Richard Hakluyt, a clergyman whose
chief mission in life had been the encouragement of overseas adventures
by his fellow countrymen. To them he had literally given a national
tradition of adventure by compiling and editing one of the more
influential books in England's history--_The Principall Navigations,
Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation_, whose reading, in
Michael Drayton's words, inflamed "Men to seeke fame." Hakluyt had been
advisor to both Gilbert and Raleigh in their ventures, and since then
he had consistently promoted the idea that England might best find in
North America the opportunities that were needed for her prosperity and
her security.

A significant indication of the extent to which the public interest was
considered to be involved in the Virginia project is found in the
provision that was first made for the government of the two colonies.
The powers of government, which is to say the ultimate right to decide
and to direct, were vested in a royal council, commonly known as the
Virginia Council and having its seat in London. Its membership was
probably drawn exclusively from the two groups of Virginia adventurers,
but the members were appointed by the king and were sworn to his
special service. Among the first members were Sir Thomas Smith, chief
of the London merchants; Sir William Wade, lieutenant of the London
Tower; Sir Walter Cope, member of parliament for Westminster and
adventurer in a variety of overseas enterprises; Sir Henry Montague,
recorder of the City of London; Solicitor General John Doderidge,
subsequently justice of the Kings Bench; Sir Ferdinando Gorges, who
later would lead a reviving interest in the settlement of New England
and still later would become an enemy of the Puritans who so largely
accomplished that task; Sir Francis Popham, son and heir to the Lord
Chief Justice; and John Eldred of London, Thomas James of Bristol, and
James Bagge of Plymouth, each of these three being described as a
merchant. This assignment of the powers of government proved to be
awkward, and it denied the adventurers direct control over the more
important questions affecting their adventures, as in the choice of a
plan of government for the colony or in the appointment of its key
officers. Consequently, the adventurers secured a change in the second
Virginia charter, granted in 1609. It was then specified that members
of the council thereafter should be "nominated, chosen, continued,
displaced, changed, altered and supplied, as death, or other several
occasions shall require, out of the Company of the said Adventurers, by
the voice of the greater part of the said Company and Adventurers, in
their Assembly for that purpose." In language less repetitious than
that used by the company's lawyer, this meant that the council now
became an agent primarily of the adventurers. Even so, the king
retained a veto over any choice they might make, for members of the
council were still required to take a special oath administered by one
of the high officers of state, and refusal to give the oath could mean
disqualification for the office. The company's later history would
show, whatever its legal advisor may have assumed in 1609, that this
requirement was no mere formality.

It is not easy for the modern American to read with full assurance the
scanty record of Virginia's first years. How, for example, should he
interpret the suggestion at the beginning of the first charter that the
adventurers sought chiefly to propagate the "Christian Religion to such
people, as yet live in darkness and miserable ignorance of the true
knowledge and worship of God?" It is simple enough to point out that
the first adventurers in Jamestown showed very little of the
missionary's spirit, that they included only one minister, and that he
had enough to do in ministering to the English settlers. It is also
easy to draw an obvious contrast between the dedicated missionaries who
so frequently formed the vanguard of Spanish and French settlement in
America and the adventurous and often unruly men who first settled
Virginia. In the absence of immediate and continuing missionary
endeavors, one is naturally inclined to dismiss professions of a
purpose to convert the Indian as nothing more than a necessary gesture
toward convention in an age that was still much closer to the medieval
period than to our own. And yet, on second thought, one begins to
wonder just how sophisticated such a conclusion may be. He remembers
how deep was the rift between Protestantism and Catholicism at that
time, how fundamental to the patriotism of an Englishman was his long
defense of a Protestant church settlement against the threat of
Catholic Spain, and how largely the issues of religious life still
claimed the first thoughts of men. He then may feel inclined to observe
that the English adventurers, after all, did undertake to establish a
mission in Virginia at a relatively early date. True, ten years elapsed
before the effort to provide a school and college for the Indians had
its beginning, but these were years of a continuing struggle for the
very life of the colony itself. In the circumstances, perhaps ten years
should be viewed as a short time.

Be that as it may, there are other questions that have been even more
bothersome, if only because they have seemed more pertinent to the
modern interest in Virginia's history. The American has been accustomed
to view the Virginia colony as the first permanent settlement in his
country, as the point at which his own history has its beginning, but
he finds in the Jamestown colony a pattern of activity somewhat
different from that he associates with the later development of the
country. What kind of a colony was it? Was it really a colony? Just
what were the adventurers trying to accomplish in Virginia? Were they
actually interested in colonization, in the proper sense of the term,
or were their objectives commercial? These and other such questions
have claimed much of the attention of those who have sought to
interpret for their fellow countrymen the early history of Virginia.
The difficulty arises partly from the American's insistence that the
later history of his country be taken as the standard for judging
every action of the first adventurers, and partly from a failure to
appreciate the extent to which the earlier ventures in Virginia were
necessarily exploratory in character.

If one of us could ask the adventurers in 1606 what it was they hoped
to accomplish in America, he probably would be told that it depended
very much on what they might find there. Although Richard Hakluyt had
been most industrious in collecting available information from the
earlier explorations of North America, including those by Spanish and
French explorers, the specific information at hand was quite definitely
limited. By the close of the sixteenth century European explorers had
charted the broad outlines of the North American coast, and here and
there they had filled in much of the detail, as had the French in
Canada, the Spaniard and the Frenchman on the coast of Florida, and the
Englishman along the coastal regions to be later known as Carolina and
New England. But the information at the command of the adventurers in
one country was not always available to those of another; indeed,
within any one country there were shipmasters who carried in their
heads working charts of coastal waters wholly unknown to the
geographers and cartographers who sought to serve the larger interests
of the nation. Thus the London adventurers in 1606, though having at
hand a substantial body of useful information regarding the coasts, the
winds, and the currents running northward from the West Indies past St.
Augustine to Cape Hatteras, and comparable information regarding the
more northern waters explored by Frobisher, Davis, Gilbert, and others,
had only a sketchy knowledge of the intervening coastline that would
soon be explored by Captain Samuel Argall on commission from the
Virginia Company and by Henry Hudson, an Englishman temporarily in the
service of Dutch merchants. Even Chesapeake Bay, to which the London
adventurers dispatched their first expedition, was known to them
chiefly by the reports of Indians interrogated by Raleigh's agents as
they worked out from Roanoke Island. The first colonists in Virginia
gave to London detailed information regarding the lower Chesapeake and
the James River, but not until 1608 did Captain John Smith find the
time to explore the upper reaches of the bay and to identify the great
rivers emptying into it there. It hardly seems necessary to argue the
utility of such explorations, to which eloquent testimony exists in the
new bounds immediately fixed for the colony in the second charter. But
many have been the attempts to pass judgment on the success or failure
of the first settlers at Jamestown that have been written as though
their primary assignment had not been to explore.

Exploration and fortification--these two terms are consistently linked
in the papers on which the early English adventurers jotted notes for
their guidance or for the instruction of their agents in America. The
very first objective of the explorers was to locate a suitable site for
fortification, in order that further explorations might be conducted
from a secure base. The fortifications to be raised had to meet
exacting standards, such as would be approved by the military engineers
with whom the adventurers consulted along with the geographers, the
cartographers, and the shipmasters who also possessed useful
information. For these fortifications were intended to provide security
not so much against the native Indian as against the ships and soldiers
of Spain. Over the years there had been some debate as to how the fort
might be best located, with the result that in 1607 it was decided to
locate it some distance up a river that would afford navigation for an
ocean-going vessel but would force the enemy to fight his way inland
against the disadvantage of the warning that could be given by an outer
guard at the mouth of the river. Such were the considerations that
shaped the choice of Jamestown as the site of the first permanent
English settlement in North America. To stand in the middle of the
Jamestown peninsula for contemplation of its many disadvantages for the
purposes of agricultural settlement, and even for the health of its
people, is to lose sight of the main point. One should walk over
against the river, and consider there the field of fire that was open
for well placed guns.

And just what was the Jamestown fort supposed to guard? Was it the few
acres of the modern county of James City, or the right of Englishmen to
possess the Virginia peninsula, where so much of importance to our
national history has found its place? Not at all. It was the right of
Englishmen to be in North America, to fish the waters that lay off its
coast, to trade with its inhabitants, and to exploit such other
opportunities as an unexplored and undeveloped continent might offer.
How far these opportunities might lead no one could tell in
advance--perhaps even to China.

A trade with China had been a major objective of English adventure
since the middle of the sixteenth century, when the Muscovy Company had
had its origins in an attempt to find a northeast passage around the
Scandinavian peninsula leading to Cathay--Marco Polo's fabulous kingdom
of northern China. The explorers found instead a profitable trade with
the territories of Ivan the Terrible, but the Muscovy merchants
continued to support a variety of ventures seeking the establishment of
an Oriental trade. Their agents looked into the possibilities of an
overland trade through Russia to Cathay, and experimented none too
profitably with a trans-Russia trade with Persia. They gave their
support to renewed attempts to find a northeast passage and claimed a
right of license for the numerous efforts that were made in Elizabeth's
reign to find a northwest passage around or through North America.
Failing in these efforts, the English merchants finally had challenged
Portugal's monopoly of trade with the East Indies by way of the Cape of
Good Hope. The East India Company, chartered by Elizabeth in 1600, had
gotten off to a good start, and was destined to become one of the great
empire builders of Britain's history. In 1606, however, the East India
merchants had had just enough experience with the new trade to begin to
appreciate some of its difficulties, as in the need to employ larger
and more expensive ships than were standard in England's maritime trade
and the great distance to China by way of the Cape of Good Hope.
Perhaps, after all, some route through America might have the advantage
over the Cape route. In the opinion of the late Sir William Foster,
through many years historiographer of the India Office, this was a
chief reason for the interest Sir Thomas Smith took in Virginia.

Let it be noted that Sir Thomas' interest in Virginia outlasted the
hope that a successful search for a passage to China might be based on
Jamestown. Nevertheless, the point may help to explain the marked
emphasis on this hope that one finds at the beginning of the project.
Instructions to the first expedition directed the choice of a seat on
some navigable river, and added, "if you happen to discover divers
portable rivers, and mongst them any one that hath two main branches,
if the difference be not great make choice of that which bendeth most
toward the North-West, for that way you shall soonest find the other
sea." The other sea, of course, was the Pacific, or as Englishmen were
likely to say, the South Seas, whose waters also washed the shores of
China. Vain as was this hope of trade with the Orient through America,
it was destined for survival, in one form or another, through many
years. As late as the middle of the nineteenth century, it would be a
principal argument for the construction of a trans-continental railway.

In 1606 the supposition was that the river system of North America
might be like that of Russia, where easy portages joining rivers
flowing in different directions made it possible to travel, most of the
way by boat, from the north to the south of the country and return.
"You must observe," advised the adventurers, "whether the river on
which you plant doth spring out of mountains or out of lakes; if it be
out of any lake, the passage to the other sea will be the more easy,
and [it] is like enough that out of the same lake you shall find some
spring which runs the contrary way toward the East India Sea; for the
great and famous rivers of Volga, Tanis and Dwina have three heads
near joynd, and yet the one falleth into the Caspian Sea, the other
into the Euxine Sea, and the third into the Polonian Sea." For this
information, the Virginia adventurers were indebted to the Muscovy
Company, with which Captain Christopher Newport, who commanded the
ships dispatched to Virginia, had formerly served. It was a good enough
working theory, based partly on knowledge of the geography of Russia
and partly on interrogation of the Indians in Carolina by Raleigh's
men. And the rivers of that part of North America which lies east of
the Mississippi form just such a system as the Virginia adventurers
envisaged, except for the fact that the Ohio and other westward flowing
streams do not empty into the Pacific.

The modern American has usually looked upon such a venture as this as
something distinctly apart from an agricultural type of endeavor, but
there is good reason for believing that the London adventurers took a
different view. They understood the dependence of agriculture upon an
opportunity to market its products, and they considered the success of
their commercial ventures to be the surest and the quickest way of
providing easy access to a market. If a new and practicable route to
China could be found in America, any colony located close at hand to
the portage along which the goods of the Orient were moved for
transshipment to England would find a ready market for food and other
provisions by supplying the ships engaged in a highly profitable trade.
More than that, the plenty and the regularity of this shipping would
provide easy freightage for the encouragement of a variety of
agricultural and horticultural experiments looking to the production of
such commodities as sugar, ginger, wine, or vegetable dyes and oils.
The adventurers well understood the advantage to be gained by
duplicating the success previously won by the Portuguese and Spaniards
with such experiments in the Azores, in Madeira, in the Canaries, and
more recently in the West Indies.

To put the point briefly, Virginia was founded upon many different
hopes for profitable undertakings--some of them commercial, some
agricultural, and some industrial. The records show an early interest
in several extractive industries, including mining, not just for gold
but for copper and iron as well. First instructions for trade with the
native Indians reveal an immediate concern for the establishment of
good relations with them and for laying in a good stock of Indian corn
as a food reserve, but they show too a concern for the policies that
would shape the development of a wider trade. Provision in the charter,
and in the instructions of the royal council, for the creation of
individual estates according to the laws and customs of England, not to
mention the guarantee of full legal rights for the inhabitants of the
colony and for their children, leave no more room for speculation as to
the intended permanence of the settlement than there is doubt as to the
expected diversity of its economic activity. But for the time being,
first things must take first place. Until it had been demonstrated that
Virginia could provide profitable freightage for the ships of England,
her future rested upon an insecure foundation. Hence, the initial
emphasis on the type of activity which promised the more immediate or
the greater return.

Newport's fleet of the _Susan Constant_, the _Godspeed_, and the
_Discovery_ sailed for Virginia in December 1606. While the adventurers
waited for his return and report on the first discoveries, the Spanish
ambassador excitedly reported to Spain that the English intended to
send two vessels to Virginia each month until "they have 2,000 men in
that country." Actually the plan seems to have been quite different.
Lord Chancellor Egerton is reported to have declared in 1609: "We ...
thought at first we would send people there little by little." Whatever
the plan, this was the practice. Newport's total complement in the
first fleet was 160 men of whom 104 remained in the colony. He was back
at Plymouth by late July 1607, and from Plymouth he came on to London
in August. For cargo he carried clapboard, and his sailors had picked
up so much sassafras root that the leaders of the colony feared that
the market for this established staple of the American trade might be
ruined. He brought with him also ore which he hoped an assay would
prove to be gold, and he declared the country to be rich in copper.
With some exaggeration, he announced explorations "into the country
near two hundred miles" and the discovery of "a river navigable for
great shippes one hundred and fifty miles." The adventurers responded
by sending him out again, in October 1607, with 120 prospective
settlers and what would be greeted in Jamestown as the first supply.

All told, Captain Newport would make five round trips between England
and Virginia before ending a career that included service of the
Muscovy Company by dying on the island of Java as an agent of the East
India Company. He has found no important place in the American
tradition, partly because Captain John Smith, the Virginia colony's
first historian, took care to see that Captain Newport did not have a
hero's role. But those of us who would understand the context in which
our history first developed will do well to consider the career of
Christopher Newport.

In carrying out the second supply, which reached Jamestown in September
1608, Newport had aboard 70 new colonists, including two women and
eight Polish and German experts in the manufacture of glass, tar,
pitch, and soap ashes. He had a broad commission for completing the
exploration of the James River above the falls that much later would
fix the site of Richmond, and for determining the fate of Raleigh's
lost colony. He found no answer to that riddle, which remains to our
own day an intriguing mystery; indeed, he seems not to have found the
time for any real investigation of the problem. As a result, he brought
back only rumors of four survivors living on the Chowan River. The
instruction gains its chief interest from the suggestion it conveys of
a renewed interest on the part of the adventurers in the area
previously explored by Raleigh's men. Perhaps the adventurers
anticipated the further disappointments resulting from the additional
exploration of the James, and so thought again of the Roanoke River,
which Captain Ralph Lane had partly explored in 1585 and 1586 with the
hope that it might lead to China. Perhaps they had an eye mainly for
the publicity that could be had for any news of Raleigh's colonists.
Whatever the fact, a renewed interest in the Carolina region would find
very concrete expression in a new charter the adventurers secured
shortly after Newport's return to England in January 1609.

The actual bounds of the Jamestown colony under the first Virginia
charter ran 100 miles along the coast and 100 miles inland from the
coast. This, at any rate, was the area to which title was promised by
the charter. The second charter gave title to an area reaching 200
miles both northward and southward along the coast from Point Comfort,
at the mouth of the James, and "up into the Land throughout from Sea to
Sea, West and Northwest." In these greatly enlarged bounds one
immediately detects three major interests: (1) a desire to control the
entire extent of any passage that might be found to the South Seas, (2)
the hope that something might be accomplished in Carolina, and (3) the
need for a title to the whole of the Chesapeake, whose exploration had
been completed by Captain John Smith in the preceding summer. In this
exploration Captain Smith had pointed the way for the colony's later
expansion, but at the moment the adventurers seem to have viewed the
Chesapeake as having value chiefly for its fish and trade and for
further exploration. Dissatisfied with Jamestown, as a place that was
both unhealthy and exposed to attack from the sea, they advised Sir
Thomas Gates, on the eve of his departure for Virginia in the spring of
1609 as the newly appointed lieutenant governor of the colony, to move
his principal city above the falls on the James, where he would enjoy
every advantage in an attack by a European foe, or better still, that
he locate it on the Chowan River in modern North Carolina, "foure
dayes Journey from your forte Southewards." In an earlier passage of
his instructions, he had already been advised that he should be guided
by the general principle of seeking the sun, "which is under God the
first cause both of health and Riches."

Those who bother to read Gates' instructions will notice the emphasis
they place on the choice of a _principal_ seat. There were to be other
towns, and Jamestown would be kept as the chief port of entry, though
not as the site of the main magazine and storehouse. All told, perhaps
three "habitations" would be enough for the settlers now to be
transported. Their number was nothing less than 600 persons, men,
women, and children--more than all the men who had been sent to
Virginia in the preceding two years. If the reported statement of Lord
Chancellor Egerton be accepted, the adventurers after two years of
exploratory effort had come to feel that "the proper thing is to
fortify ourselves all at once, because when they will open their eyes
in Spain they will not be able to help it, and even tho' they may hear
it, they are just now so poor that they will have no means to prevent
us from carrying out our plan." It was indeed a poor year for Spain,
which in 1609 had to agree to a truce in the long struggle with the
Dutch that ultimately brought legal recognition of the independence of
Holland. This was the year which also witnessed the exploration by
Henry Hudson of the river that has ever since borne his name, a river
on which the Dutch would soon lay the foundations of a shortlived North
American empire. Only the year before had the French built their fort
at Quebec. And now the English were determined to fortify Virginia "all
at once." A once proud monopoly of the new world, and of its
opportunities, was to be finally broken.

The London to which Newport returned late in January, 1609, was already
astir with preparations for an adventure such as England had never seen
before. He sat in consultation with Sir Thomas Smith, as did Richard
Hakluyt, and Thomas Hariot, who as a young man just out of Oxford had
gone to Roanoke Island for Raleigh in 1585, and whose _True Report of
Virginia_, published in 1588, still remained a chief dependence of the
London adventurers. Hakluyt was preparing for publication a translation
of the Gentleman of Elva's account of De Soto's expedition through the
southeastern part of the later United States, an account published in
April as _Virginia Richly Valued_. To this he added in June a
translation from Marc Lescarbot's _Histoire de la Nouvelle-France_ for
the purpose of demonstrating that Virginia "must be far better by
reason it stands more southerly nearer to the sun." Broadsides
scattered about London announced the special opportunities awaiting
those who would join in the new venture, while clergymen in their
pulpits lent the aid of divine sanction, as in Robert Gray's _Good
Speed to Virginia_. The broad outlines of the new plan had been
presented to the public in February by Alderman Robert Johnson in a
tract entitled _Nova Britannia: Offering Most Excellent Fruites by
Planting in Virginia_. By the end of that month the adventurers had
also completed negotiations for the granting of the second charter, and
had opened their books for subscription to a new joint-stock fund.

The device of the joint-stock fund had been increasingly relied upon by
English adventurers as they sought the means for financing more distant
and more expensive ventures. It had the advantage of pooling the
resources of more than one individual, and of distributing the risk,
and the Virginia adventure had depended upon joint-stock methods of
finance from the beginning. It is impossible to speak with exactness
regarding the financial arrangements of the first years. A provision in
the first instructions directing the settlers to live, work, and trade
together in a common stock through a period of five years suggests the
possibility of a five-year terminable stock, i.e., a fund that would be
invested and reinvested through a term of five years before it was
divided, together with the earnings thereon. But other evidence
indicates that there may have been a separate stock for each of
Newport's voyages, as was the case with each of the early voyages of
the East India Company to the Orient. The so-called joint-stock company
of that day rarely had a permanent joint-stock of the sort identified
with the modern corporation. Instead, it functioned as a governing body
representing all of the merchants engaged in a particular trade, who
traded individually or through a variety of joint-stocks invested under
the general regulation of the company. And such was the character of
the Virginia Company.

Whatever may have been the specific terms offered earlier investors,
those offered in 1609 are clear enough. It was proposed that men
subscribe at the rate of £12 10s. per share to a common stock that
would be invested and reinvested over the term of the next seven years.
Although special good fortune might justify a dividend of some part of
the earnings at an earlier date, there would be no final dividend,
which at that time meant a division of capital as well as the earnings
thereof, until 1616. The dividend promised then would include a grant
of land in Virginia as well as a return of the capital with profit. How
much land depended, like the profit, on the degree of success that had
attended the venture meantime.

One of the inducements for subscription was a promise that all
adventurers would have a voice in determining the policies of the
company. Again, it is impossible to say just what had been the
organization through which the adventurers had previously functioned.
They probably followed custom by meeting in assemblies or courts (both
terms were common) when some joint decision was needed, and no doubt
they relied on the designation of such committees and officers as were
necessary for the execution of decisions reached in their assembly. It
may be that the adventurers sitting on the Virginia Council functioned
also in the character of an executive committee for their fellows. In
view of the well known tendency for institutions to evolve out of
earlier practices, with such adjustments as experience may dictate,
there is reason for believing that important features of the
organization outlined in the second charter were older than the charter
itself. But the charter of 1609 offers the first unmistakable evidence
as to the organization upon which the adventurers depended.

They were there incorporated by the name of "The Treasurer and Company
of Adventurers and Planters of the City of London, for the first Colony
in Virginia." Sir Thomas Smith was designated treasurer with power to
warn and summon the members of the council and of the company "to their
courts and meetings." The adventurers, "or the major part of them which
shall be present and assembled for that purpose" were empowered to make
grants of land according to "the proportion of the adventurer, as to
the special service, hazard, exploit, or merit of any person so to be
recompenced, advanced, or rewarded." They were to meet also as occasion
required for the election of members of the council, which was charged
with the management of the enterprise on the ground that it was not
convenient "that all the adventurers shall be so often drawn to meet
and assemble." The members of the council were listed by name, more
than fifty of them, beginning with Henry, Earl of Southampton, and
including the Lord Mayor of London, the Lord Bishop of Bath and Wells,
Thomas, Lord De la Warr, Sir William Wade, Sir Oliver Cromwell, Sir
Francis Bacon, Sir Maurice Berkeley, Sir Thomas Gates, Sir Walter Cope,
Sir Edwin Sandys, Sir Thomas Roe, Sir Dudley Digges, John Eldred, and
John Wolstenholme. These and their colleagues of the council, which
included of course Sir Thomas Smith, were the great men of the company,
not necessarily the heaviest investors but those whose experience, or
social and political position, argued that they should be on the
managing board. In short, the subscribers had a basic right to choose
the directors of the business and to determine the division of its
rewards, but the great men would run it.

For the assurance of the adventurers, each of them was listed by name
in the charter--all told, some 650 of them. In addition to the
individuals there named, the charter listed some fifty London companies
which had subscribed in their corporate capacity in response to the
appeals of London's clergymen and the Lord Mayor. To list all these
companies would be tedious, but some of them should be named, if only
for the picture they give of London itself. Here were "the Company of
Mercers, the Company of Grocers, the Company of Drapers, the Company of
Fishmongers, the Company of Goldsmiths, the Company of Skinners, the
Company of Merchant-Taylors, the Company of Haberdashers, the Company
of Salters, the Company of Ironmongers, the Company of Vintners, the
Company of Clothworkers, the Company of Dyers, the Company of Brewers,
the Company of Leathersellers, the Company of Pewterers, the Company of
Cutlers," and others, including the companies to which belonged the
city's cordwainers, barber-surgeons, masons, plumbers, innholders,
cooks, coopers, bricklayers, fletchers, blacksmiths, joiners, weavers,
plasterers, stationers, upholsterers, musicians, turners, and glaziers.
This was a national effort, but in a special way it was London's effort
to serve the nation in response to a call from its leaders.

There is reason to believe that the terms of the charter had been
agreed upon by the end of February, but the document remained unsealed
until May, when all who had subscribed could be listed. By that date,
too, some 600 subjects of the king had agreed to make the adventure in
person to Virginia. Some of them were smart enough to discount the
propaganda that had persuaded them, and so they settled for the wages
offered by the company. But others agreed to go on adventure, i.e. to
accept the adventurers' offer that their personal adventure to
Virginia would be counted as one share, at the minimum, in the common
joint-stock. This was to say that they would be entitled to whatever
rewards in 1616 might belong to any subscriber in England for £12 10s.;
and if the personal adventure of the settler in Virginia was considered
to be worth more, as in the case of a surgeon or one of the high
officers of the colony, then might the rights of an adventurer in
Virginia run as high as any belonging to the great adventurers in
England. The colonists who came to America in 1609 were thus encouraged
to view themselves as being in no way inferior to those who sent them.

Sir George Somers had been selected as admiral of the great fleet which
dropped down the Thames from London on May 15 and sailed from Plymouth
on the second of June with a full complement of nine vessels. Somers
rode aboard the _Sea Adventure_, whose master was Newport and whose
passengers included Sir Thomas Gates and William Strachey, the newly
appointed secretary of the colony. Ahead of them had gone Captain
Samuel Argall, to find a new route to Virginia running north of the
Spanish West Indies, and to make a test of the Chesapeake fisheries.
Somers guided his ships along a route that had long been familiar to
him, the route discovered by Columbus for Spain and the route that
Newport and other English adventurers had consistently followed to the
more southern parts of Virginia, but he tried to stay above the
channels regularly followed by the ships of Spain. Such, at any rate,
were his instructions, and for seven weeks out of Plymouth all went
well. But then a storm struck, no doubt an early hurricane of the sort
so familiar to residents of the east coast today, a storm which
separated the _Sea Adventure_ from the other vessels and carried it to
destruction off the coast of Bermuda. Providence brought crew and
passengers, all 150 of them, safely ashore to begin an idyll that would
be celebrated in Shakespeare's _Tempest_ and would be turned to
advantage by the adventurers in their later propaganda. In Bermuda they
found food in plenty--fish, fowl, and hogs that ran wild--and a most
healthful climate. But for almost a year Virginia would struggle
without the leadership of Somers, Newport, or Gates, and without the
sure authority of instructions and commissions they had carried aboard
the _Sea Adventure_.

After ten months the shipwrecked colonists had fashioned from the
cedars of Bermuda, which reminded them of the cedars of Lebanon, two
small vessels named the _Patience_ and the _Deliverance_. The ships
were stoutly enough built to carry the full company to Virginia in May
1610, but at Jamestown they found only want and confusion. The other
vessels in Somers' fleet had straggled into the bay the preceding
summer with their storm-tossed passengers, but the following winter had
been a nightmare. This was the winter that was destined long to be
remembered as the starving time, the time when one man was reported
even to have eaten his wife. Only a handful of the settlers, new and
old, had survived, and Somers and Gates saw no choice but to abandon
the colony. It was saved by the providential arrival early in June of
Lord De la Warr, who brought with him 150 new colonists and a
commission as the colony's governor. Somers went back to Bermuda in the
hope of laying in a stock of pork for Virginia, but there he died and
his seamen ran for England.

The disturbing news of these tragic events reached London piecemeal.
First came the news in the fall of 1609 that the _Sea Adventure_, with
Somers, Gates, Newport, and Strachey, had been lost. This was a severe
blow to the leaders of the company, who had planned to send De la Warr
out with perhaps as many colonists as Somers had carried. Already the
enthusiasm engendered by the promotional campaign of the preceding
spring had begun to decline, as some men took second thought.
Subscriptions at that time had been enlisted on an understanding that
they might be paid in installments, and the adventurers now often found
it difficult to collect what had been promised. During the winter they
published an extraordinarily frank promotional piece, _A True and
Sincere Declaration of the Purpose and Ends of the Plantation Begun in
Virginia_. In this pamphlet, they did the best they could to stir again
the high hopes of the preceding spring, but they had to admit what all
London knew, that the news was not encouraging. And so they appealed to
the honor of the subscribers, that they remember those in Virginia who
had staked their lives on the promises made by other men. It must be
said that the adventurers did very well indeed, in the circumstances,
to get De la Warr away in the spring with three vessels and 150
recruits for the colony.

Had he been able to send back a favorable report on the situation in
Virginia, the adventurers probably would have found their position not
too difficult. Instead, Sir Thomas Gates returned to London in
September 1610 with a report that caused the adventurers to consider
seriously whether the whole project should not be abandoned. Gates
himself was subsequently credited with having clinched the decision in
favor of continuance by arguing that sugar, wine, silk, iron, sturgeon,
furs, timber, rice, aniseed, and other valuable commodities could be
produced in Virginia, given the necessary time and support. The
adventurers saw also the promotional possibilities of Somers' shipwreck
at Bermuda, or rather, the remarkable experience which had followed it.
Was this not an encouraging sign of God's providential care? Of His
willingness to support the English in Virginia? This was a question
London was invited to contemplate again and again during the months
that followed.

No doubt, the courage of a few key leaders, among whom Sir Thomas Smith
was now quite definitely the chief, had a large part in the decision to
continue. Certainly, it took courage to launch the new campaign for
funds to which the adventurers committed themselves in the fall of
1610. The estimated need ran to £30,000. All former subscribers were
urged to subscribe another £37 10s. on agreement that the subscription
would be paid in at the rate of £12 10s. per year over the next three
years. Others were invited to subscribe on the same terms. The Lord
Mayor appealed once more to the London companies, and plans were made
for inviting the other towns of England to contribute. In November the
Company published _A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in
Virginia_ for the purpose of refuting "scandalous reports" tending to
discourage subscriptions. Richard Rich presented, probably at the
suggestion of the adventurers, his _Newes from Virginia, the Lost
Flocke Triumphant_, a poem celebrating the shipwreck of the _Sea
Adventure_ and the providential survival of its passengers. And to this
Silvanus Jourdan added his _Discovery of the Barmudas_, a pamphlet
recounting the experience of Somers and his colleagues in the islands.
It was written, declared the author, "for the love of my country; and
... the good of the plantation in Virginia."

It is not so remarkable that the adventurers failed to achieve their
goal of £30,000 as that they actually secured the subscription of
approximately £18,000 by the spring of 1611. The records of the company
are so incomplete for any time prior to 1619, when the only surviving
court minutes have their beginning, that it is impossible to give the
comparative figures one would like to have. But there is evidence
suggesting that the fund raised in 1609 may not have been larger than
£10,000. If this be true, the success of this second campaign for funds
becomes all the more remarkable. One can hardly explain it in terms of
the ordinary calculations of a business community. Perhaps the
adventurers believed their own propaganda, were themselves responsive
to the kind of patriotic appeal that was made in the spring of 1610,
when they were trying to get Lord De la Warr's expedition ready. "The
eyes of all Europe," said the adventurers, "are looking upon our
endeavours to spread the Gospell among the heathen people of Virginia,
to plant an English nation there, and to settle a trade in those parts,
which may be peculiar to our nation, to the end we may thereby be
secured from being eaten out of all profits of trade by our more
industrious neighbors."

With the new funds, the adventurers equipped two expeditions which
sailed for Virginia in the spring of 1611. The first to leave carried
300 men, in three ships, under the command of Sir Thomas Dale, another
veteran of the Netherlands fighting who had been commissioned as
marshal of the colony. It was impossible not to be impressed by the
evidence that a lack of discipline had contributed to the colony's
woes, and Dale, who sailed in March, undoubtedly was intended to draw
upon his experience as a soldier for the better discipline of the
colonists. Sir Thomas Gates, who followed Dale out in May, had a
broader task. He would continue to serve as the lieutenant governor
under Lord De la Warr, and, like Dale, he carried 300 passengers. But
his six ships also carried much more. One of the basic problems of
original colonization, though it has often been lost sight of, was to
stock the colony with cattle, hogs, poultry, etc. Later colonists, in
Maryland or Carolina, would buy these essentials in Virginia, but the
Virginia colonists had no established neighbor of their own nation on
which to rely, and during the starving time they had literally eaten
themselves out of stock. Nothing could better illustrate the fact that
the Virginia adventurers in 1611 had to begin all over again than the
100 cattle, the 200 swine, and the poultry in unspecified numbers Gates
had aboard his ships as they set their course westward. And if any one
wishes to estimate the value of a cow that had been transported across
the Atlantic, let him notice the penalty imposed by Dale's laws, so
called, for killing one.

As Gates dropped down the Thames in May, the adventurers must have
relaxed with the satisfaction that comes from real achievement. Twice
now, within the span of two years, they had raised a great fund with
which they sent each time nine vessels and 600 colonists to Virginia.
Indeed, they had done even more. Counting Argall's ship, which sailed
ahead of Somers in the spring of 1609, and the three vessels going over
with De la Warr in 1610, the company had dispatched to Virginia no less
than 22 vessels and close to 1,400 colonists in a two year period. But
Gates had hardly cleared the coasts of England before Lord De la Warr,
of all persons, turned up in London, to the great consternation of his
fellow adventurers.

A general assembly of the adventurers on June 25 listened to his
explanation, which was promptly published by order of the council.
The story briefly was this. Ever since he had reached Virginia
the preceding June he had suffered a succession of violent
sicknesses--fevers, the flux, gout, and finally scurvy, "till I was
upon the point to leave the world." In preference to this he left
Virginia in a vessel commanded by Argall, and in the hope that he might
recover his health with the aid of hot baths in the West Indies.
Contrary winds had forced him to alter his course to the Azores, where
oranges and lemons had cured him of the scurvy. He then resolved to
return to his post, but was persuaded to seek first a full recovery of
health "in the naturall ayre of my countrey." He deplored the ill
effects on the Virginia project of his return home, but argued that it
would have been far worse for Virginia had he remained there only to
die.

A nice advertisement this for the healthfulness of Virginia's climate.
One might wonder at the council's decision to publish the report were
it not for the obvious fact that the alternative would have been worse
still. Some explanation had to be given the public, for the adventurers
had counted heavily on the presence of Lord De la Warr in Virginia to
offset the discouragement of earlier reports from Jamestown, as their
promotional literature amply demonstrates. He was a nobleman, the head
of a great family, and a member of His Majesty's Council for Virginia.
"Now know yee," reads the commission he had received in February 1610,
"that we his Majesties said Councell upon good advise and deliberation
and upon notice had of the wisedome, valour, circumspection, and of the
virtue and especiall sufficiencie of the Right Honourable Sir Thomas
West, Knight Lord la Warr to be in principall place of authoritie and
government in the said collonie, and finding in him the said Lord la
Warr propensness and willingness to further and advance the good of
the said plantation, by virtue of the said authoritie unto us given by
the said letters pattents have nominated, made, ordained and apointed
... the said Sir Thomas West, Knight Lord la Warr to be principall
Governor, Commander and Captain Generall both by land and sea over the
said colonie and all other collonies planted or to be planted in
Virginia or within the limits specified in his Majesties said letters
pattents and over all persons, Admiralls Vice-Admirals and other
officers and commanders whether by sea or land of what qualitie soever
for and during the term of his natural life, and do hereby ordaine and
declare that he the said Lord la Warr during his life shall be stiled
and called by the name and title of Lord Governor and Captain General
of Virginia." And now, after little more than a year and before the
subscribers to the new joint-stock fund had paid in their second
installment, the Lord Governor and Captain General of Virginia was back
in London to make a public confession that in Virginia he had nearly
died of the ague, flux, and scurvy. From time to time thereafter the
company publicly suggested that the Lord Governor might soon return to
his post, but he did not undertake to do so until 1618 and then he died
on the way.

Once more the leaders of the company showed determination. Delinquent
subscribers were carried to court in a series of chancery actions
extending into 1614. How much was collected in this way cannot be said,
but the complaints entered in chancery have provided most helpful clues
to an understanding of the company's financial history. It seems
unlikely that anything collected as a result of these actions served to
do more than reduce an indebtedness incurred by the company in 1611 on
the promise of its subscribers. One thing is certain: there was no
chance of floating another subscription. By 1612 the adventurers were
complaining that only the name of God was more frequently profaned in
the streets and market places of London than was the name of Virginia.
After that year the Virginia lottery, its winning tickets entitling the
holder to an exchange for shares in the Virginia joint-stock, became
the company's chief dependence. Now and again there would also be found
some person who wanted to go to Virginia at his own cost, and was
willing to pay the cost in return for shares of stock guaranteeing an
ultimate title to land in the colony. These transactions, at a time
when Virginia's name had lost its magic, were perhaps too few to
suggest to any one of the adventurers that here was the future, not
only of the company, but of English colonization in North America.
Although the Virginia Company continued to be active for thirteen years
after 1611, the last of its great joint-stock funds was the one to
which men made their subscriptions just before Lord De la Warr came
home.

To this statement perhaps a qualification should be added. Virginia at
first had been to Englishmen America itself, and so it had remained in
a very real sense, despite an obvious tendency since 1609 for the
adventurers to pin their hopes increasingly on what might be found
within the reach of Jamestown. The continuance of the Virginia
adventure became thus not simply a matter of keeping the Jamestown
colony alive. What mattered was that somewhere in North America the
great task to which the company had committed itself should go forward.
And where better, after 1611, could this be tried than in the Bermudas?
Divine providence had pointed the way, so clearly that it might even be
possible to raise the needed funds in London. Moreover, Sir George
Somers, by being shipwrecked there and subsequently by dying there, had
provided a name for the islands that was both English and suggestive of
a climate so healthful that even Lord De la Warr might prosper there.
Accordingly, the leading members of the Virginia Company in 1612
undertook the colonization of the Somers Islands, a designation often
written as the Summer Islands, and for that purpose they subscribed to
a new joint-stock fund. The Bermuda joint-stock, however, seems to
have been a much more modest fund than that subscribed either in 1609
or 1611.

There was nothing unusual in thus creating within the framework of the
Virginia Company a special stock for investment under the direction of
its own officers and committees in the colonization of Bermuda. In the
great companies of London it was customary that each stock should be
separately administered. The only technical difficulty lay in the fact
that Bermuda was located outside the geographical limits granted the
Virginia adventurers. Under the second of their charters, rights at sea
(on both seas) had extended out from the coasts for only 100 miles,
which for the purposes of 1612 was not far enough. The adventurers,
therefore, sought and secured a third charter granting them rights
along the coast of Virginia, within the limits of 41° and 30° of
northerly latitude, to a distance of 300 leagues, in order to include
"divers Islands lying desolate and uninhabited, some of which are
already made known and discovered by the industry, travel, and expences
of the said Company, ... all and every of which it may import the said
Colony [of Virginia] both in safety and policy of trade to populate and
plant."

This extension of bounds undoubtedly represents the chief reason for
seeking the third Virginia charter, but the leaders of the company,
while they had the opportunity, also included other significant
provisions. Especially significant was a decision to enlarge the
authority belonging to the general assembly of the adventurers. To its
former prerogatives, which had been chiefly to elect members of the
council and to determine the apportionment of lands, the third charter
added three fundamental rights: to elect all officers of either company
or colony, to admit new members to the fellowship of the company, and
to draft laws and ordinances for the welfare of the plantation.
Heretofore, the council had been the true governing body, though
subject to a right of election and displacement by the adventurers in
general assembly. Now the general court of the adventurers was to
govern, with the council as its executive agency. Since voting in the
Virginia courts, as in those of other companies at the time, was by
head rather than by share, this provision of the charter can be
interpreted only as an attempt by the great men of the company to
encourage a renewed interest on the part of the general body of
adventurers by enlarging their influence on the conduct of the
company's affairs. It was the third charter which also authorized the
establishment of the Virginia lottery--the first of many attempts in
American history to exploit the gambler's instinct for the support of a
worthy cause. In the charter the king also gave assurance that his
courts would view favorably the company's suits against delinquent
subscribers.

[Illustration: Merchants of Virginia.

The Company of Merchants, called _Merchants of Virginia_, _Bermudas_,
or _Summer-Ilands_, for (as I heare) all these additions are given
them. I know not the time of their incorporating neither by whom their
Armes, Supporters, and Crest were granted, and therefore am compelled
to leaue them abruptly.

From John Stow, _Survey of London_, 1632

Photo by Virginia State Library.]

[Illustration: Virginia Seal

Courtesy Mrs. L. T. Jester and Mrs. P. W. Hiden]

[Illustration: A Declaration for the certaine time of dravving the
great standing Lottery

Heading for the Broadside issued by _The Virginia Company_, London,
1615

Photo by Virginia State Library. From photograph in Virginia Historical
Society.]

[Illustration: Royal Exchange, London. As it was in the time of the
Virginia Company.

Photo by New York Public Library]

[Illustration: Captain John Smith

From _The London Company of Virginia_ (New York and London, 1908)

Photo by Virginia State Library.]

[Illustration: THOMAS WEST, _Third Lord de la Warr_

From Alexander W. Weddell, _Virginia Historical Portraiture_

Photo by Virginia State Library.]

[Illustration: SIR THOMAS SMITH (or SMYTHE)

"The Right Worshipful Sir Thomas Smith, of London, Knight, one of his
Maiesties Councell for Virginia, and Treasurer for the Colonie, and
Gouernour of the Companies of the Moscovia and East India Merchants"

From the Original Portrait by an Unknown Artist, now in the possession
of The Skinners' Company, London.

From Alexander W. Weddell, _Virginia Historical Portraiture_

Photo by Virginia State Library.]

[Illustration: Henry Wriothesley

(Third Earl of Southampton)

From the painting by Michiel Jansz van Miereveldt

From _The London Company of Virginia_ (New York and London, 1908)

Photo by Virginia State Library.]

[Illustration: SIR EDWIN SANDYS

From the Original Portrait by an Unknown Artist, now in the possession
of Sir Edmund Arthur Lechmere, Bart, Bramham Gardens, London, England

From Alexander W. Weddell, _Virginia Historical Portraiture_

Photo by Virginia State Library.]

[Illustration: Sir Thomas Dale

Portrait by an unknown artist of the Anglo-Flemish School painted in
oils early in the 17th Century. The original portrait is preserved in
the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia

Photo by Virginia State Library.]

[Illustration: HENRY STUART

_Prince of Wales_

From Alexander Brown, _The Genesis of the United States_

Photo by Virginia State Library.]

The new charter having received the final seal in March 1612, a new
colony was established in Bermuda in the following July. Its early
history has a double significance for the later history of Virginia. In
the first place, the Bermuda colony emphasizes the growing interest of
the adventurers in what might be produced in America as against what
might be found by way of America. The occupation of the Bermuda Islands
might almost be described as a retreat from the earlier search for a
passage to China. The move could be viewed also as a reassertion of an
old interest in plundering the Spaniard, for the Bermudas lay athwart
the homeward route of Spain's treasure fleets. But in any case the
primary interest was in America and its own peculiar opportunities, and
the attention given by the early settlers in Bermuda to experiments
with tobacco, sugar, wine, ginger, and other such commodities suggests
that their purpose was not so much to plunder the Spaniard as rather to
emulate his success as a planter in the West Indies. Secondly, the
adventurers showed a marked inclination to encourage each adventurer to
meet his own costs. Provision was made for an early survey and division
of the land, with the result that men put their money chiefly into the
development of their own estates. A final survey was not completed
until 1617, but at that date some of the Bermuda adventurers at least
had known who their tenants were and approximately where their land
would lie for three full years. Whether for these or for other reasons,
Bermuda grew while Virginia languished. By 1616 over 600 colonists had
reached the Somers Islands, where most of them survived. In contrast,
Virginia had that year 350 people.

The Bermuda subscribers had been separately incorporated as the Somers
Island Company with its own royal charter in 1615. Indeed, ever since
1612, when the Bermuda adventurers helped to relieve the financial
embarrassment of the Virginia Company by paying £2,000 for its newly
acquired title to Bermuda, the Somers Island adventurers seem to have
functioned increasingly as a separate corporation. But the membership
of the two companies was much the same. It had been the more active and
interested of the Virginia adventurers who subscribed to the Bermuda
joint-stock in 1612, and for twelve years thereafter the active
membership of the Virginia Company came so close to duplicating the
membership of the Bermuda Company that the two bodies often met
virtually as one. Until 1619 Sir Thomas Smith served as governor of
both companies.

The growing interest of the London adventurers after 1612 in the
colonization of Bermuda did not mean that Virginia was wholly
neglected. Funds secured from the lottery and from suits against
delinquent subscribers were enough to keep the project alive. In 1612
the adventurers even sent out a stock of silkworms for a test of silk
production. Needless to say, returning ships brought back no silk; nor
did they bring sugar or wine. Lumber, including the valuable black
walnut, seems to have provided the chief cargo for return voyages. A
shipment of tobacco, Virginia's first, in 1614 gave some ground for
arguing that the agricultural experimentation to which the colonists
had been committed for several years now would pay off eventually. So
argued Sir Thomas Gates on his return home this same year after three
years of service in the colony, but the fact that he had come back
from Virginia apparently made more of an impression than did his
argument. Others also came home, their contracted term of service
ended, and rarely did they bring any news from Virginia which added
good to its name. Instead, they talked of the severe discipline under
which they had been forced to live, and made sport of the too hopeful
propaganda which had first persuaded them to become adventurers in
Virginia. The discipline, chiefly associated with Dale's office as
marshal, made his loyal decision to remain in the colony for another
two years as lieutenant governor a further contribution to the ill
repute of Virginia's name.

Dale finally came home in 1616, the year in which the dividend on the
1609 joint-stock fell due. The contrast between the high hopes of 1609
and the reality of 1616 was all too painfully apparent. Six hundred
men, women, and children had sailed for Virginia in the first of these
years under a plan to live and work together for a seven year period.
They would share, each according to his particular skill or aptitude,
in the common task of planting a colony, and they would live out of a
common store. By 1616, towns were to have been built, churches and
houses raised, and an increasing acreage brought under cultivation. A
variety of profitable crops would have been tested, and markets
established for them. The original stock of cattle would have increased
through care until there were enough for all. At the same time, the
trade with the Indians would have been put on a profitable basis, as
would have mining operations and perhaps even a trade to Cathay. Such
was the general prospect to which so many adventurers had responded in
1609. To the modern student all this seems so unrealistic as to be
almost unbelievable, but unless one grasps the reality of the original
dream he cannot hope to comprehend the extent of a later
disillusionment.

There were no funds to be divided in 1616, but the company did declare
a dividend of land--not the 500 acres per share that Alderman Johnson
had suggested as a possibility in 1609 but the more modest total of 50
acres. This 50 acres, however, was designated as a first dividend.
Others would follow, for an ultimate total of perhaps 200 acres per
share, as the area in the colony's "actual possession" was enlarged.
Plans were announced for dispatching a new governor to Virginia with
instructions for completing the necessary surveys, and the adventurers
were urged to seize the opportunity to gain a desirable priority in the
location of their shares by contributing £12 10s. toward meeting the
necessary costs. In return for this contribution, the adventurer would
be entitled to an additional 50 acres. The land now to be divided was
that lying along the James River, and only those adventurers who
submitted to the additional levy would be entitled to share in the
division, except apparently for adventurers then living in the colony.
These were the old planters, as they came to be called, whose rights
paralleled those of the old adventurers in England. It is evident that
the adventurers were in no position to claim a monopoly as the just
reward of their past sacrifices, for they also offered an immediate
dividend, on terms no different from those governing the rights of the
old adventurers, to any new adventurer who wished to join by paying £12
10s. per share. Such was the estate to which the Virginia Company had
been reduced after ten years of effort.

To employ a term that was destined to become common at a later period
of American history, the Virginia Company had become nothing more than
a land company. Its one asset was the land that had been bought with
the sacrifices of the first ten years, and after 1616 all of its plans
depended upon the hope that it might use its power to give title to
that land as an inducement for investment in the colony. In its
advertisement in 1616 adventurers, both old and new, were invited to
take up shares for occupancy by themselves or for development by
tenants sent for the purpose. Perhaps because the first response to
this appeal was disappointing, the company provided an additional
inducement in 1617 by promising 50 acres per head for every person
sent to the colony, the payment being due to the one who bore the cost.
This was the Virginia headright, as it came to be called, which was
destined to remain the chief feature of the colony's land policy
through many years after the demise of the company itself. Intended at
first to encourage the adventurers in England to send the labor that
was necessary for the development of the land, it served thereafter as
a land subsidy of the immigration on which the colony lived and grew.

By 1618 the fortunes of Virginia were taking a turn for the better. The
adventurers, or some of them at least, found encouragement in continued
shipments of tobacco. These shipments were small and the quality of the
tobacco could not be compared with the Spanish leaf of West Indian
production which was finding a growing market in London despite King
James's known disapproval of the habit on which the market grew. But
the quality of Virginia tobacco, for which Sir Thomas Smith seems to
have found a first market in the East Indies, no doubt could be
improved as the planters learned the art of its cultivation and the
adventurers found for them a better weed. No doubt, too, this success
with tobacco, whatever the imperfections of the current product, could
be viewed as a harbinger of other successful attempts to produce
commodities the Spaniard had for so long and so profitably grown in his
West Indian plantations.

Further encouragement came from the willingness of the handful of
planters already in Virginia to remain there, and from the decision of
Ralph Hamor and Samuel Argall, both of whom had formerly served the
company in the colony, to return there. Especially significant were the
arrangements under which Hamor and Argall planned their return early in
1617. One of the problems that had undoubtedly discouraged the
adventurers from taking up the company's offer of a land grant in 1616
was the question of the supervision that could be provided for such
tenants as they might elect to put on the land. In Bermuda, the
adventurers had found an answer, or rather thought they had, by
dividing the land into tribes, later designated as parishes, over which
a bailif would exercise an office that was partly civil and partly
traditional on the landed estates of England. In Virginia, Hamor and
Argall pointed the way to a solution by entering into an association
with several of the adventurers in England for the development of a
jointly held plantation. Thus, in January 1617, the company awarded 16
bills of adventure to Hamor and six associates for the 16 men they
proposed to transport to Virginia at their own charge. The following
month saw a similar transaction with Captain Argall and his associates,
five adventurers who had joined with this seasoned veteran to send out
a total of 24 men. Argall went also as lieutenant governor in
succession to George Yeardley, who had been left as deputy by Dale on
his return to England in 1616, but the cost of getting the new governor
out to his post seems to have been met entirely by his own associates.
The arrangement has an obvious pertinence to an understanding of
Argall's unhappy experience as governor, for he was later charged with
neglect of the public interest through too great concern for his own
personal interests. But here the emphasis belongs to the equally
obvious fact that some of the adventurers were responding to an
opportunity to send out tenants who would work under the management and
direction of an experienced colonist.

In 1618 George Yeardley was back in London consulting with other
adventurers, including some of the leading members of the company, who
were interested in forming associations for the development of
"particular plantations." Late in the year he sailed for the colony as
the newly designated governor of Virginia. With him he carried
instructions which record for us further developments in the company's
land policy. All adventurers, including delinquents who would pay up
their subscription, were now promised 100 acres of land on the first
dividend for each share of stock, and another 100 acres as a second
dividend after the first had been occupied. Such of the ancient
planters as had paid their own way to Virginia, which was to say those
who had settled at their own cost before Dale's departure in 1616, were
also to receive grants in like amount. The adventurers were encouraged
to pool their rights for a common grant of land by the promise that
their estate could be developed under their own management and would be
treated as a separate administrative unit for civil and military
purposes. What the company had in mind were the larger associations
already formed or on the point of being formed, such as that for the
settlement of Southampton Hundred, which eventually embraced a nominal
area of perhaps as much as 100,000 acres and in which the associated
adventurers invested a total of some £6,000. Another example is the
association of Sir William Throckmorton, Sir George Yeardley, Richard
Berkeley, George Thorpe, and John Smyth of North Nibley which early in
1619 received a first joint grant of 4,500 acres and which founded
above Jamestown the plantation known as Berkeley Hundred. These new
associations were very much the same as the association of the Virginia
adventurers which in 1612 had undertaken the colonization of Bermuda.
For the development of their common grant they pooled the necessary
capital in their own joint-stock fund and directed its investment
through their own courts, assemblies, or committees as they saw fit.
For every tenant sent to the plantation, the associated adventurers
were entitled to an additional headright of 50 acres. They were awarded
also an additional 1,500 acres for the support of public charges in the
hundred, such as those incurred for the maintenance of a church and
minister.

How many of the colonists who migrated to Virginia between 1618 and
1624 went by agreement with such associations as these is difficult to
say, but there can be no doubt that they were a very large part of the
total. The Virginia Company, which had served theretofore as the
immediate colonizing agent, was becoming more and more a supervisory
body for the encouragement of individual and associated adventurers in
their own colonizing efforts. For itself, the company looked forward to
a continuing revenue from quitrents to be paid, at the rate of two
shillings per hundred acres after a term of seven years from the
original grant, by all save the ancient adventurers and the planters
who had migrated before 1616 at their own costs. To this revenue from
quitrents could be added the benefit to be expected from the company's
control of the colony's trade.

As in 1609, there seems to be no doubt that all plans looked ultimately
to the establishment of individual land titles. Where the record has
survived, the associated adventurers clearly intended that their common
grant would in time be divided. In the case of Berkeley Hundred, the
evidence suggests too that the associates used the promise of a share
in this division for the recruitment of their first tenants. Yeardley's
instructions reaffirmed the company's promise of a headright in terms
inviting the migration of individual settlers at their own cost.

To understand the plans of 1618, the modern American needs to dismiss
any idea that the isolated farm house of later America represented the
ideal toward which men looked at this time. He should think rather of
the English village community, or of the New England town, where men
lived together with the advantages of a close social relationship and
where the land they cultivated lay close at hand to the village and its
church. If the associated adventurers continued to depend for a time on
variations of the original joint-stock plan, it was not merely because
they wanted to share the risk of a still uncertain venture or because
they were seeking some useful device for meeting the problems of
management. It was also because the plantation they hoped to establish
was to have at its heart a town, and it was thought that the town could
best be built through some common effort.

What has been said above is not intended to suggest that the company's
role after 1618 was to be purely supervisory. Although it had an
accumulated debt of some £9,000, or possibly because of this debt, the
company agreed for the encouragement of individual adventurers to
assume heavy responsibilities of leadership. It directed Yeardley to
lay out four towns, or boroughs, along the James in which grants to
individuals or the lesser associations would fall--Kecoughtan at the
mouth of the James, Henrico at the head of its navigation, and in
between Charles City and James City. From the Bermuda adventurers the
company borrowed the idea of establishing a public estate intended to
meet as nearly as possible all costs of government. In each borough
3,000 acres were to be set aside as the company's land for cultivation
by its own tenants, who would work at half shares. Out of the company's
moiety would come the support of all superior officers, excepting the
governor, for whom an additional 3,000 acres would be set aside in
James City. The company thus committed itself to a not inconsiderable
program of colonization on its own responsibility.

One wonders what it was that inspired this renewed, and most ambitious,
venture in Virginia--a venture that would carry to Virginia over the
next five years something like 4,500 colonists. Several possibilities
can be suggested. First of all, it should be noted that the interest of
the London adventurers in the colonization of America had never
faltered, despite repeated disappointment, since they had originally
laid their hands to the task in 1606. This, at any rate, is true of the
adventurers who led, and more especially of Sir Thomas Smith. After it
had become no longer possible to push the adventure in Virginia, they
had turned to Bermuda, where an initial success seems to have
encouraged another try in Virginia. The plans adopted for Bermuda and
later for Virginia indicate that the adventurers shrewdly capitalized
on the desire of Englishmen in many different walks of life for title
to the undeveloped lands of America. A newly stirring missionary
impulse had its part to play, if only by giving to the name of Virginia
more helpful associations. Argall had captured Pocahontas, the favored
daughter of Powhatan, and with her as hostage the colonists had forced
a peace with a heretofore implacable foe. More than that John Rolfe had
married the Princess Pocahontas, as the English liked to call her, and
Sir Thomas Dale as his last major service to the colony had brought her
to England in 1616. In London, at court, and elsewhere, she and her
entourage of Indian maidens had been a most effective advertisement of
Virginia. Even after her own death in 1617, her maiden consorts had
stayed on for many months before being finally returned to Virginia by
way of Bermuda. Since 1613 the Virginia Company had leaned heavily on
the missionary appeal in its efforts to encourage continued support of
the colony, and it may well have been the company itself which prompted
the bishops of the Church of England in the year of Pocahontas' death
to sponsor a collection of funds for an Indian mission in Virginia. In
any case, the approximately £1,500 raised for the purpose were turned
over to the company, which in 1618 ordered Yeardley to set aside 10,000
acres at Henrico for the support of an Indian college.

The adventurers in 1618 also decreed certain legal and political
reforms that were helpful in giving Virginia a better name than it had
enjoyed for several years past. Disgruntled colonists returning from
Jamestown had brought exaggerated stories of Dale's discipline, with
the result that Virginia had gained the reputation almost of a penal
colony. The company's renewed guarantee that the settlers would enjoy
the full common law rights of Englishmen at home was coupled with
provision for a general assembly of the colonists, a body which first
met at Jamestown in 1619. In short, the company had the benefit in
1618, as so frequently in the past, of leadership of the highest
quality.

Sir Thomas Smith was still the governor of the company in 1618, and
without question his leadership must be considered to be a major factor
shaping the new life then being infused into the colony. But a
factional strife that would soon help to destroy the company already
had made its appearance. The sources of this factionalism were varied,
and some of them had little to do with the affairs of Virginia. Thus,
at this time Sir Thomas found a determined enemy in the Rich family,
headed by the wealthy Earl of Warwick and represented most ably by Sir
Nathaniel Rich, who for many years was an active leader in the House of
Commons. Warwick had a way of investing in voyages which bordered
closely on piracy, and as a result of one such investment had become
involved in a long and bitter conflict with Smith as the governor of
the East India Company. Unquestionably of more fundamental importance
was a growing opposition to Smith that was based upon discontent with
the former management of the Virginia project. It seems almost as
though the Virginia adventurers, before they could place full
confidence in the new program for the colony's development, had to find
some more satisfying explanation for the company's previous failures by
charging gross mismanagement of its affairs. Such, at any rate, was the
conviction to which many adventurers came, chiefly it would seem the
lesser adventurers who were easily prejudiced against the great
merchants of London, of whom Sir Thomas was the chief. In a company
where the ultimate power to decide had been vested since 1612 in a
general assembly of the adventurers voting by head rather than by
share, the discontent of the lesser adventurers could become under the
guidance of an effective leader a very potent force.

The leader was found in Sir Edwin Sandys, one of the ablest
parliamentarians of seventeenth century England. Sandys himself was not
one of the lesser adventurers. He had been a member of the Virginia
Council since 1607, and in 1611 he had responded to the company's
appeal for a subscription of £37 10s. by subscribing double that
amount, thereby matching the subscription of Sir Thomas Smith. With the
aid of other prominent adventurers, including the Earl of Southampton,
and by making common cause for the moment with the Rich faction, Sir
Edwin won election to the governorship of the company in the spring of
1619. In the absence of anything approaching a full record, it is
impossible to say what justification there may have been for the
charges of mismanagement that were brought against Smith's
administration. It would not be surprising if over the long and
frequently discouraging years of his leadership, and especially in the
period since 1612, some irregularities, some carelessness had crept
into the conduct of the company's business. A very noticeable result of
Sandys' election was an effort to systematize the company's procedures
by adoption of new standing orders and regulations, and to bring order
out of an alleged confusion of the company's records, especially those
pertaining to the rights of the adventurers to land in Virginia. But it
is possible to speak with full assurance on only one point: no other of
the adventurers had shown more courage or more devotion to the colony,
no other of them deserves to be better remembered than Sir Thomas
Smith.

There can be no question, however, that the reviving interest in
Virginia received an additional stimulant from the fact that the
business now had a new management. At the close of 1618, and largely as
the result of emigration during that year, the population of the colony
stood at approximately 1,000 persons. During the year after Sandys'
election, a total of 1,261 emigrants left England for Virginia, over
800 of them at the company's charge. This substantial evidence of the
company's determination to assume the lead encouraged additional
associations of adventurers to take up patents for their own
plantations, with the result that by the summer of 1622 the council
could announce that over 3,500 people had migrated to Virginia since
the spring of 1619. This was a remarkable record, testifying to the
very great gifts Sir Edwin possessed as a leader and the confidence men
placed in his leadership.

The minutes of the company's courts have survived for the period after
the election of Sandys, and so it is possible to get a clearer picture
of the company's organization and procedures than can be had for any
earlier date. Further help comes from the "Orders and Constitutions"
drawn up after Sandys' election and published in 1620 as part of a
pamphlet skilfully written to convey the impression that Virginia's
affairs were then being managed much better than in the past. The
company depended basically upon decisions reached in four great quarter
courts, which were general assemblies of all the adventurers who wished
to attend and which were scheduled for regular meeting on next to the
last Wednesday of each of the quarterly terms in which the king's
courts sat at Westminster. Only a quarter court could elect officers,
either of the colony or of the company, enact laws and ordinances, or
determine policies governing the distribution of lands in the colony
and the conduct of its trade. On the Monday preceding each meeting of
the quarter court, a preparatory court would settle the agenda for the
following Wednesday, in order that the members might have warning of
the business to be taken up at that time. Each fortnight, except in the
"long vacations" between court terms, an ordinary court would meet,
again on Wednesday, with a quorum that required the presence of at
least five members of the council, the treasurer or his deputy, and
"fifteene of the generality." The hour of meeting for all courts was 2
P.M., and at no court could a question be put after 6 P.M. A decision
reached by any lesser court, including the extraordinary court that
might be called in case of special emergency, could be overridden by a
quarter court. This was the governing body of the company, a popular
assembly in which Sir Edwin often demonstrated his special talent as a
parliamentary tactician. Attendance varied according to the importance
of the business at hand, but as many as 150 might attend.

The quarter court meeting in Easter term was a court of elections,
where the members cast their votes for all principal officers by secret
ballot. Except for members of the council, all offices of the company
were held by annual election. The chief office was that of the
treasurer, as the governor of the company was still officially
designated. As frequently as not, in common usage he was known as the
governor, but the charters had fixed the title of his office and in so
doing had pointed up a primary responsibility of the office. The
governor of the Virginia Company was in fact its treasurer. After 1619
no man could hold the position for longer than three years, and no man
was eligible for election to it if already he was serving as the
governor of another company, except that he might also serve as the
governor of the Somers Island Company. The election court might vote a
reward for services rendered, but the treasurer, like other principal
officers, served without fixed compensation.

His chief assistant, and the second officer in rank, was the deputy. As
the title suggests, he might be deputized to perform virtually any
function of the governor, including that of presiding at courts in the
governor's absence. But he also had important functions of his own. He
is perhaps best described as the chief administrative officer of the
company. He was specifically charged with superintendence over all
lesser officers, and he had a primary responsibility for contracts and
other business arrangements relating to the dispatch of shipping,
provisions, and passengers to Virginia and to the receipt, storage, and
marketing of cargoes returned from the colony. At all times, he acted,
or was supposed to act, in accordance with instructions from the court,
council, or treasurer, but all such instructions were necessarily
general in character. Many were the opportunities to use his own
judgment, or to confer a favor, as he handled business transactions
involving hundreds or even thousands of pounds. For his assistance and
perhaps to keep a watch on him, he had a committee of sixteen men
chosen by the court under a provision requiring that a fourth of the
number should be changed each year "to the end [that] many be trained
up in the businesse." The committee may have been new, but the deputy's
office was old. It had been occupied for many years before the spring
election of 1619 by Alderman Johnson. Some of the more serious charges
brought against Smith's administration related to the management of
the magazine, as the stock of supplies periodically forwarded to the
colony was generally described. Johnson had managed the successive
magazines, each separately financed by its own joint-stock, until in
1619 he was replaced by John Ferrar.

The council, still described as His Majesty's Council for Virginia, had
become a large and unwieldy body, with many of its members inactive.
Its influence on the conduct of Virginia's affairs was now decidedly
less important than in the earlier years. According to the Orders and
Constitutions, no one "under the degree of a Lord or principall
magistrate" was thereafter to be elected to the council except "such as
by diligent attendance at the courts and service of Virginia for one
year at least before, have approved their sufficiency and worth to the
Companie." As this statement strongly suggests, a place on the council
was for many members an honorary post through which one might lend the
prestige of a great name to a worthy undertaking without assuming much
real responsibility. Nevertheless, the legal powers of the council
under the Virginia charters made its services indispensable, and made
it desirable that at least a few of its members should be intimately
acquainted with the business. The treasurer was supposed to consult
with the council on important occasions, and especially on matters
pertaining to the government of the colony. All formal instructions to
officers in the colony had to be sent in the name of the council and
over its seal. In any case of removal from office, in London or at
Jamestown, the cause had to be considered in council before it could be
taken before the adventurers. But any seven members made a quorum
giving full power to actions taken in council, and the treasurer, who
was always a member of the council, had the custody of its seal.

Two of the seven auditors now required for annual review of
disbursements and receipts had to be members of the council. The
auditors' office had grown out of the disputes over the accounts of Sir
Thomas Smith, and in addition to the annual auditing of the
treasurer's report, which had to be submitted to the Easter court, they
were charged with responsibility for a close review of all earlier
records of the company. The primary purpose was to establish a full and
exact list of all subscriptions, with notation especially of
delinquencies. Salaried officers of the company were a secretary, a
bookkeeper, a husband (or as we would say, an accountant), and a bedel
or messenger. The secretary served all courts held by the adventurers,
the council, and the auditors, or by standing and special committees,
of which last the adventurers appointed quite a number. In addition,
the secretary was custodian of the company's records.

Although Sir Edwin Sandys continued to be the actual leader of the
company until its dissolution in 1624, his tenure of the treasurer's
office was limited to a single year. When the adventurers assembled for
the annual elections in the spring of 1620, they were much disturbed to
receive instruction from the king that Sir Edwin was not to be
re-elected. Instead, the king suggested the choice of some merchant of
means and wide experience--perhaps Sir Thomas Smith, Sir Thomas Roe,
Alderman Robert Johnson, or Mr. Maurice Abbott.

Whether Sandys could have been elected in the absence of this
interference by the king, which the adventurers protested as an
unwarranted invasion of their liberty, is itself an interesting and
debatable question. By his many criticisms of the previous conduct of
the company's affairs, Sandys had won the undying enmity of Sir Thomas
Smith and his important friends. More than that, he had quarreled with
his ally of the preceding year, the Earl of Warwick, who had
connections hardly less impressive than those enjoyed by Sir Thomas.
The quarrel with Warwick was over a question of piracy, as Sir Edwin
chose to regard it. One of Warwick's ships, the _Treasurer_, had sailed
from England in April 1618 with a license to capture pirates, which was
one way of getting a ship cleared from English ports for depredations
against the Spaniard at a time when the king had set his face against
all such activity. The _Treasurer_ had called at Jamestown, where
Governor Argall, who had rendered important services to the colony but
who had special reason to understand that his position in Virginia
depended upon the good will of important members of the company, helped
to outfit the vessel for a raid on the West Indies. Recent studies, and
especially those of David Quinn, a British scholar, argue strongly that
the earlier ventures of Gilbert and Raleigh had been inspired very
largely by the desire to establish some base on the North American
coast that would be useful in attacks upon Spanish possessions and the
trade routes which joined them to Spain. But it is evident enough that
by this time the leaders of the Virginia Company were chiefly fearful
that Spain might attack their colony before it was securely fortified,
and before it had fulfilled the promise of rewards far greater than
anything freebooting ventures could offer. As a result, Governor
Yeardley, on instruction from London, denied the courtesies of
Jamestown to the _Treasurer_ on its return in 1619, and won for Sandys
thereby the bitter resentment of the Rich family.

The king's interference in the election of 1620 has naturally become a
celebrated incident in the history of Virginia. Sir Edwin was a leader
in parliament, which before the century was out would establish its
supremacy in the government of England, and the Virginia Company in
1620 had only recently established the first representative assembly in
North America. To historians who have sought the larger meaning of the
American experiment, it has often seemed that the king must have been
guided by a fear of representative government--in other words, that his
motives were largely political. No doubt, he was more easily persuaded
to enter an objection to Sandys' re-election because of Sir Edwin's
opposition to royal policies in the house of commons, but there is no
contemporary evidence to suggest that the king had even noticed the
Assembly which met at Jamestown in 1619. Moreover, that Assembly had
been authorized before Sandys' election, at a time when Sir Thomas
Smith was still in the chair, and anyone who thinks the motion had been
carried over Smith's opposition should take note that the same kind of
representative assembly was established in 1620 for Bermuda, over whose
fortunes Sir Thomas would continue to preside until 1621. Not until the
middle of the seventeenth century, at the time of Cromwell, does it
appear that anyone even suggested that the primary reason for the
king's interference was fear of a significant development in the
history of representative government.

What actually happened in 1620 would seem to be clear enough. Sir
Thomas Smith had connections that reached all the way into the king's
bedchamber, and there he effectively argued that Sandys did not know
his business. It was an argument that found not a little justification
in the fact that the company had to admit by a broadside published in
the very month of the election court that hundreds of the colonists
sent to Virginia in the preceding year had died within a short time of
their arrival there, and it may be that Sir Thomas apprehended the even
greater disasters soon to overtake the colony. A more likely
supposition, however, is that he seized upon this news from the colony
as an opportunity to vent his resentment against Sandys, a resentment
that must have become more bitter with each of Sir Edwin's promotional
releases advertising the great improvements now to be found in the
management of Virginia's affairs. The legal basis on which the king
acted was probably debatable. No doubt, he depended upon the provision
in the charter requiring that all members of the council, of which the
treasurer was the head, be sworn to the king's service. But membership
on the council was for life, and Sir Edwin had taken his oath as a
member of the council as early as 1607. Perhaps the king took advantage
of the company's regulations requiring an annual election and that the
treasurer be sworn following his election. Whether this was a new
requirement cannot be said. It can only be suggested that the king
intended to say that if Sir Edwin were re-elected he would not give him
a necessary oath of office. It may be, too, that he stood quite simply
on the prerogative of his office to insist that his subjects in
Virginia were entitled to royal protection. In any case, the
adventurers chose not to defy the king's wish.

Having protested his interference as unwarranted, the quarter court in
May 1620 adjourned without electing a treasurer. Instead, the
adventurers appointed a special committee to call on the king for the
purpose of acquainting him with the true facts regarding "the managing
of their business this last year" and to ask for a free election.
Sandys himself appealed to the royal favorite, the young Duke of
Buckingham, but with no effect on the king's decision. When the
adventurers reassembled late in June, they elected the Earl of
Southampton as treasurer. Thus, in a sense both parties to the dispute
emerged victorious. Sandys was no longer treasurer, but the adventurers
had refused to elect a merchant and Southampton would preside
thereafter in behalf of Sandys. There can be no doubt that Sandys
continued to be the leader of the company. Moreover, in 1621 he
extended his power by gaining control of the Somers Island Company
through the election of Southampton to its governorship.

A question that naturally arises is that of how, or why, Sir Edwin was
able to survive this challenge to his leadership. The news from
Virginia was by no means encouraging. Given the long record of
disappointment there, and the many men who previously had died there,
the fact that several hundred of the most recent settlers had succumbed
might have been expected to unsettle any administration. Perhaps it was
the king's interference, serving as it did to rally the adventurers in
defence of the company's liberty. Perhaps Sir Thomas was guilty of too
naked a display of his power, with the result that the lesser
adventurers, who already had been taught to view the great merchants of
the company with suspicion, rallied to the support of Sandys. Perhaps
it was because the Earl of Warwick and Sir Thomas had not learned yet
the need for effective teamwork; both men disliked Sandys, but they had
their own quarrels and they would not form a real coalition against him
for another two years. All these possibilities must be given
consideration, but there would seem to be still another reason,
possibly the most important of all.

Sir Edwin Sandys was a man of remarkable gifts, and nowhere are these
gifts better demonstrated than in his ability to stimulate the highest
hopes for Virginia. Before him only Richard Hakluyt, a patriot now dead
four years, had managed better to depict the promise America held for
Englishmen. Sandys wrote no major work on the subject, and even the
company's promotional pamphlets, which he undoubtedly shaped in some
large part, lacked the fire that Hakluyt, or even Alderman Johnson,
could impart to that branch of literature. It must be said also that
Sandys added no new idea to those which for a generation past had
guided Englishmen in their American ventures. His program included not
a single objective that the Virginia Company had not theretofore tried
to realize; the chief contrast with former programs was the absence of
any emphasis on the prospect that a route to the South Seas might be
found, an objective the adventurers had dropped for all practical
purposes a good many years before Sandys became their treasurer. But
Sandys had confidence, a systematic and orderly mind, and a persuasive
way of talking in the quarter court or in conference with the
individual adventurer who contemplated some new risk of capital. As a
result, he managed to convey the impression that plans had now been so
well thought through that Hakluyt's objectives in America had at last
become attainable.

Leaving aside the search for a passage to China, which may never have
been so important to Hakluyt as it was to the people whose interest in
America he sought to enlist, Sandys undertook to carry through, all at
once, the program Hakluyt had outlined for Queen Elizabeth as early as
1584 in his famous "_Discourse on Western Planting_." It was a program
that looked to the development in America of products that would free
England of dependence upon trades with other parts of the world which
were in any way disadvantageous to England, and that would guarantee to
any Englishmen who developed such products a sure profit on their
investment. It was a program that had taken its shape first from the
prospect, in Raleigh's day, of an early war with Spain, and perhaps it
should be noted that when Sandys came to office in 1619 the Thirty
Years War had only recently had its beginning with the king's own
son-in-law a central figure. The war has gone down in our history books
as the last of the great religious wars, and many were the Englishmen
who thought that England should be, or would be soon involved.

In Virginia, Sandys promised to produce iron. It is strange that the
attempt to develop an iron industry in Virginia, on which the company
spent all told something like £5,000, should have made less impression
on modern historians than has an early and brief search for gold that
was incidental to other explorations. The iron industry in England was
suffering from the depletion of the island's wood supply, which was
still depended upon for smelting, and Virginia promised an unlimited
supply. Other industries that he hoped to develop in the colony are
suggested by a list of tradesmen the company invited to adventure to
Virginia in 1620: among them, sawyers, joiners, shipwrights,
millwrights, coopers, weavers, tanners, potters, fishermen,
fishhookmakers, netmakers, leather dressers, limeburners, and dressers
of hemp and flax. Even more important because so much depended upon
persuading the individual adventurers to invest their own money in the
development of their land, were plans for the production of sugar,
wine, indigo, silk, cotton, olive oil, rice, etc. In the development of
these products Sandys intended the public lands--those cultivated under
the direct supervision of the company and by its own tenants--to serve
more or less in the capacity of experimental farms. For their planting
he sought seeds and plants from various parts of the world. On the
college land he had some 10,000 grapevines set out, and sent for their
care foreign experts imported from the continent. To make sure that
private estates would not be devoted wholly to tobacco, as yet the
colony's only proven staple, he wrote into land patents a stipulation
that other staples would be given a trial.

To find the money for investment in the public lands was no easy task.
No common joint-stock fund could be raised in 1619, if only because the
company's plans depended chiefly upon the hope of inducing the
adventurers to invest in their own lands. It cannot be said how
successful were the renewed attempts to collect from delinquent
subscribers, but perhaps some help came from that source. Sandys
depended also, as had Smith before him, on the Virginia lottery,
perhaps more than upon any other source, for the lottery was terminated
early in 1621 by order of the privy council on grounds that included
the complaint of parliament that the lottery had become a public
nuisance. A very substantial help to Sir Edwin was the bishops' fund
for an Indian college and additional funds raised for the support of an
Indian school in the colony. The total ran to better than £2,000. It
had been decided in 1618, well before Sandys' election, that the money
from the bishops' fund would be invested in an estate to be known as
the College Land, and the precedent thus set was followed in disposing
of funds subsequently made available to the company for an Indian
school. In practical terms, these decisions meant that all mission
funds were used to send out tenants on the promise that a half-share of
the wine and other such commodities as they might produce would in time
provide a permanent endowment for the school and the college. The
decision reflects both the extraordinary poverty of the company and the
extraordinary confidence with which its leaders approached their new
ventures in Virginia.

By the spring of 1621, when the bulk of the college funds had been
expended and the lottery was terminated, Sir Edwin's financial
resources had become even more skimpy and uncertain. Some projects,
such as that for the settlement of Italian glass-workers who were to
manufacture pottery and beads for use in the Indian trade, could be
financed by subscriptions to a special joint-stock, but this device
offered no help in meeting general expenses. As a result, Sandys
continued to take certain shortcuts, or perhaps the blame should rest
rather on Deputy John Ferrar. In any case, the colonists complained
that shipping came out so overloaded with passengers as to invite the
epidemic disease with which they usually suffered on landing, and which
made of newcomers a useless burden on the colony for some time after
their arrival. The deathrate among the colonists continued to be high.
The time and energy required to house them, or to feed them,
unavoidably forced delay with projects on which Sandys had pinned his
chief hopes. He was especially disappointed over the slow progress of
agricultural experimentation. Accordingly, when Yeardley's three year
term was ended in 1621 and Sir Francis Wyatt was sent as his
replacement, Sir Edwin also sent his brother, George Sandys, as
appointee to a new office of treasurer. He was given special charge of
all projects looking to the development of new staple commodities and
was intrusted with the collection of rents, of which the company
claimed £1,000 were presently due. These rents, which were to be
collected largely from half-share tenants who had migrated within the
preceding three years, undoubtedly now constituted the company's main
hope for an immediate revenue. Except in a very few instances, no
quitrents would be payable until 1625, and so general had been the
disappointment experienced so far with special projects that further
time would have to be allowed before any return from them could be
expected. In short, the company had exhausted its very limited
resources in getting Wyatt and George Sandys out to Virginia, and had
nothing left but hopes for the future and the anticipation of a small
immediate revenue from the rents of its own tenants, most of which had
already been assigned to such special charges as the support of public
officers in the colony. In London, virtually the only asset left to the
company was the will and determination of Sir Edwin Sandys.

In these circumstances, Sandys necessarily devoted his main energies
after 1621 to the problem of tobacco, the only marketable staple the
colony had as yet produced. It was an old problem, but one now filled
with new difficulties. In earlier days, when it had been hoped that
tobacco might be one of a variety of staples produced in the colony,
the Virginia Company, like the Bermuda Company, had lent encouragement
to efforts looking to its production. But hardly had early experiments
proved successful before the adventurers faced the risk that tobacco
would take over the colony entirely. There is nothing surprising in
this development, for a tobacco plant, unlike a grapevine or an olive
tree, matures within a few months of its planting, and the tobacco
habit at this time was a thing of comparably rapid growth in many parts
of the world. To settlers who had been staked by adventurers ever
insistent upon a prompt return of their capital, or who wondered how
best to procure the means to make payment for the supplies brought in
the next magazine ship, the obvious answer was to plant the land to
tobacco. After doing this, if time and energy remained, they might try
some of Sir Edwin Sandys' ideas--maybe set out a few grapevines or
mulberries, as they had been instructed to do. There was good reason
for the growing fear among the leading adventurers in London that
tobacco might put a blight on all other projects.

More than that, the increasing shipments of tobacco, especially in view
of the still relatively poor quality of the Virginia leaf, gave the
colony a bad name just when its good name was so important to the
promotional efforts of the company. The tobacco habit did not yet have
the respectable associations it would later acquire in the eighteenth
century. Instead, it was associated with tippling or bawdy houses,
where in truth a pipe was most easily had by the contemporary resident
of London. Moral considerations were reinforced by an additional
concern for the public interest. So much of the weed consumed came from
Spain that thoughtful men were inclined to consider how much England
paid out, to the profit of the Spaniard, for a commodity which added
nothing to the well being of the country. Had it not been for the
influence of Virginia and Bermuda adventurers in the House of Commons,
Parliament in 1621 might well have prohibited all importation of
tobacco into England. And in all England there was no more vigorous
opponent of tobacco than the king himself. Indeed, the king had even
written a book on the subject.

The attitude of King James had a most important bearing on another
angle of the problem. Under its charter, the company had been allowed a
seven year exemption from import duties on cargoes brought from
Virginia. When this exemption expired in 1619, the government
immediately imposed a duty that was fixed early in 1620 at 1s. per
pound of tobacco. Though this was only half the duty paid by Spanish
tobacco, it was nonetheless a heavy burden to be imposed upon leaf that
was declared never to have sold at more than 5s. a pound and that
brought an average of only 2s. for the better grade in 1620.[A] The
adventurers' attempted escape by shipping their tobacco to Holland won
them a sharp reprimand from the privy council, and an order to bring
all of Virginia's tobacco to England for payment of his majesty's
customs. As negotiations with the king's ministers for some relief
continued, it was proposed in 1622 that the Virginia and Bermuda
adventurers might take over the tobacco monopoly, which was a grant of
the sole right to import tobacco of any sort into the kingdom in return
for a fixed contribution to the royal revenues. The holder of such a
monopoly--a very common device at the time--was entitled to collect the
customs and to hope that what he collected, plus the advantage of a
monopolistic control of the market, might enable him to clear a profit
on the transaction. Here, in other words, was a proposal that might
provide the needed relief, even some income for the company's hard
pressed treasury. The Virginia Company by 1622 was in no position to
ignore such an opportunity and fortunately, the Sandys faction was now
in control of the Somers Island Company. A joint committee of the two
companies, headed by Sir Edwin himself, entered into negotiations for
what was known as the tobacco contract.

The bitterest factional strife in the history of the London adventurers
soon followed. It is a complicated story, too complicated and too long
to be told fully here. Briefly, both the terms agreed upon by Sandys
and his proposals for the management of the contract, proposals which
left Sandys and his cohorts in full control, touched too closely the
vital interests of some of his bitterest enemies. In Bermuda, as in
Virginia, the hope of an early profit from the production of sugar,
silk, wine, indigo, and other such commodities had proved vain, and
like Virginia, Bermuda lived by the tobacco it grew. The Earl of
Warwick and members of his family had made especially heavy investments
in their Bermuda properties, and Sir Nathaniel Rich became the floor
leader, as it were, of an attempt to defeat the contract. Sir Thomas
Smith and his friends joined in the effort. Especially objectionable in
the view of the opposition were plans for placing the management of the
contract in the hands of salaried officials, with Sir Edwin as director
at a salary of £500. At one Virginia court, meeting early in December,
the debate got so out of hand that it required several additional
sessions to straighten out the minutes in order that appropriate
penalties might be imposed upon Mr. Samuel Wrote, a member of the
Virginia council whose unrestrained charges of graft violated the
company's rules and offended the court's sense of its own dignity. In
the end the opposition elected to make the final test in a Bermuda
court, whose consent was necessary to close the contract and where
Sandys' opponents included the more substantial investors in that
colony. The test came in February 1623, and Sandys won. But it could be
demonstrated that had the vote been by share rather than by head, as
was the rule in both companies, he would have been defeated. Sandys'
opponents in the Bermuda Company all along had complained of a plan to
distribute the charges of the contract equally between the two
companies, arguing that the Virginia tobacco had a greater value and
should therefore carry a proportionately larger charge. And now they
were in a position to argue that the Virginia Company, in whose courts
for some time they had steadfastly refused even to vote on the salary
question, sought to exploit the younger plantation, as was evidenced by
the opposition of the adventurers to whom Bermuda's tobacco chiefly
belonged. With this argument, Sandys' opponents promptly carried the
whole question before the privy council.

This was in the spring of 1623. During the course of the preceding
debate, news had come of an Indian massacre in Virginia that had cost
the lives of over 350 colonists. The faction-ridden and bankrupt
company had stirred itself to send such aid as it could, but now came
the word that this had not been enough. By the testimony of Sandys' own
brother, though this testimony may not have been immediately available
to his enemies, another 500 colonists had died before the year was out
as a result of the dislocations occasioned by the massacre, and as a
result of the failure of the company to send enough aid. The tobacco
contract dropped into a position of secondary importance as Sandys'
opponents, with Alderman Johnson taking the lead, petitioned the king
for a full investigation of the situation in Virginia and of the recent
conduct of its affairs.

Whatever one may think of Sir Edwin Sandys, or of the motives which
inspired his opponents, there can be no question as to the correctness
of the action taken by the government. The leaders of the two factions
were called before the privy council on April 17, where they displayed
so "much heat and bitterness" toward one another as to make it
difficult to get on with the business. In the end, the council won
agreement that a special commission should be established for an
investigation of the state of the colony's affairs, the agreement
coming finally when the council conceded the demand of Sandys'
supporters that the investigation should begin with the administration
of Sir Thomas Smith. Accordingly, on May 9, a commission was issued to
Sir William Jones, justice of the Court of Common Pleas, and six other
gentlemen "to examine the carriage of the whole business." Meantime, a
letter had been prepared by the privy council to acquaint the colonists
with the fact that their affairs had been taken into "His Majesty's
pious and princely care" and to encourage them "to go on cheerfully in
the work they have in hand." The central issues all pertained to
Virginia, but in the circumstances there was no choice but to include
both companies in the province of the Jones commission.

The appointment of the Jones commission ended, for all practical
purposes, the control of the Virginia Company over the colony. The
company lingered on as an agency chiefly through which the Sandys
faction prepared its briefs for the attention of the commissioners, or
through which orders from the commissioners might be implemented. All
of the company's records were impounded by the commission, which also
took charge of all correspondence with the colony. The records of the
company demonstrated all too clearly the bankrupt state of its
finances. The hearings before the commissioners demonstrated with equal
clarity the hopeless division of the adventurers by bitter factional
strife. Correspondence from the colony brought evidence of a desperate
situation. Even Sandys had to admit that no more than 2,500 colonists
were still alive in the colony, which was to confess an attrition,
mainly by death, of something over 40 percent of the colonists residing
in Virginia, or sent to Virginia, since he had assumed responsibility
for the management of its affairs. Actually, the situation was much
worse than these figures suggested, for a census taken in Virginia
early in 1625 showed a total population of only 1,275. In the fall of
1623 the privy council invited the company to surrender its charter on
the promise that a new one would be issued to cover all individual
rights and grants, but with a revision of the plan of government that
would place the control of the colony under the more immediate
supervision of the king. In effect, the proposal was to return to
something close to the original plan of 1606. When the adventurers, in
a court from which Sandys' enemies largely absented themselves,
rejected this proposal, the government began quo warranto proceedings
against the company in the court of Kings Bench. On May 24, 1624, that
court gave its decision for recall of the Virginia charters. And so
ended the Virginia Company.

The Bermuda Company had been dragged into the investigation chiefly
because of the close ties joining it to the older company. There was no
emergency in the colony, and its debts were not beyond the capacity of
Sir Thomas Smith and other leading adventurers to pay. As a result, the
Somers Island Company lasted on for another sixty years.

One who looks back from 1624 over the brief and frequently troubled
history of the Virginia Company may debate, as historians have often
done in the past, just what should be said by way of conclusion.
Perhaps it is this: here were men who out of their disappointment
quarreled bitterly and by their quarrels helped to destroy an agency
through which in the past they had worked together, with a remarkable
devotion to the public interest, for the achievement of great
objectives. No doubt, their greatest fault had been to set their goals
too high. Certainly, their greatest virtue was persistence in the faith
that great things could be done for England in America, a faith
destined in time to be justified by the course of history.


FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote A: For purposes of comparison, it may be noted that Spanish
tobacco was declared to have been sold for as much as 20s. a pound. The
"filthy weed" was not yet "the poor man's luxury."]





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