Sir Francis Wyatt, who had been the London Company's Governor in the
period 1621-1624, was appointed Governor by James I the first year the
colony was under royal control. Although the King made no specific
provision for the continuation of a representative Assembly, Wyatt and
the Council called together representatives of the various settlements
to meet in a General Assembly on May 10, 1625, in Jamestown. There they
drew up a petition complaining of the old Company rule and the miserable
state in which it had kept the colony during the previous twelve years,
and pleading with the King not to allow a monopoly of the tobacco trade.
The King's advisers, they feared, were those who had formerly oppressed
them and who would do so again should the King consent to a "pernitious
contract" taking all their tobacco at unfair rates. To present their
case against the contract they chose Sir George Yeardley, former
Governor, to go to England as their agent. The willingness of Wyatt and
the Council to call such an Assembly and the unanimity of views deriving
from it, show how single in their economic interests all Virginians
were.
Governor Wyatt attempted to prevent disorderly expansion of settlement
and to build positions of strength in the colony, but he knew that the
"affection" of the planters to "their privat dividents" was too strong a
force to resist. Hence he recommended that a palisade be built from
Martin's Hundred on the James River to Chiskiack on the York River,
with houses spaced along it at convenient intervals. In this way the
Indians might be kept out of the entire lower portion of the peninsula,
the cattle kept in, and the colony provided with a secure base for the
development of its economy. After the economy was flourishing, there
would be a chance for finding the riches in the mountains to the west
and the longed-for passage to the South Sea, so confidently believed to
lie just beyond the Appalachians. All these enterprises presupposed the
"winning of the Forest" between the York and the James, which Wyatt
hoped to accomplish by means of his palisade scheme.
Wyatt's project was not immediately put into effect. In 1626 he was
replaced by Sir George Yeardley. Yeardley, like Wyatt, devoted much of
his time to devising means to promote the security of the colony against
attack by land or by sea.
It is hard for us to realize how desperately concerned with their
security were the few thousand Englishmen who inhabited Virginia at this
time. Separated from the mother country by 3,000 miles of ocean, a
dangerous crossing usually taking two months, the settlers had only a
precarious toe hold on a vast continent. From the ocean side the
settlers feared possible attack from other European colonizing powers:
the Spanish, French, or Dutch. The Spanish ambassador in London in the
early period of the Virginia settlement had frequently urged his
government to wipe out the struggling colony. But the indecision of
Spain's monarch had saved the colony.
The Virginians themselves had engaged in expeditions against the French
settled in Maine, and spoke menacingly of the Dutch who had established
a settlement on the King's domain in Hudson's River in 1613. The claims
of the European monarchs to the American continent conflicted with one
another, and there seemed little chance that a resolution would come by
any other means than war. So it proved to be, later. In the meantime, at
home, Virginia settlers stood on guard. Governor Yeardley appointed
Capt. William Tucker, one of the Virginia Council, to check at Point
Comfort all ships entering the James River. Tucker was provided with a
well-armed shallop and absolute authority to check all ships arriving.
He could not do battle with an enemy warship, of course, but he could
give the alarm in case the enemy appeared. A few years later a fort was
built at Point Comfort to defend the entrance to Virginia's great river.
Although the channel was too wide ever to be adequately commanded by the
cannon of the day, the fort provided some protection to the colony.
Yeardley made similar efforts to strengthen Virginia's position on land
against the numerically superior Indians. Like Wyatt he urged the
necessity of "planting the forest" rather than jumping beyond it to
areas far from existing settlements. As a means of controlling the
population Yeardley issued a proclamation requiring that anyone who
desired to move his place of residence within the colony must obtain
prior permission from the Governor and Council. Even to be absent for a
short time from his place of residence, a planter was required to get
permission from his "plantation commander." As was pointed out earlier,
"plantations" in this early period were usually not the
individually-owned, individually-operated plantations of later times,
but "private colonies" or "particular plantations," organized on a
joint-stock basis, on which more than a hundred men might live.
In keeping with his conception of the colony as a military outpost,
Yeardley made plans for an armed settlement on the York at Chiskiack,
and devised a project for a surprise attack on all the surrounding
Indians on the first day of August 1627. Each "particular plantation"
was to march against an Indian town, kill as many Indians as possible,
and seize or cut down what corn it could. The attack was a success, but
because of a scarcity of shot the English failed in their desired goal
of utterly extirpating the red men.
In November 1627 Yeardley died, and the Council chose one of its
number, Captain Francis West, to assume the role of Governor and Captain
General.