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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."