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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.