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 evidencethat the U. S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Jamestown 350th Anniversary
Historical Booklet Number 5
This is the story of the Virginia Company and only indirectlyof the Virginia colony. Those who seek an account of the earlyyears at Jamestown should turn to another number in this sameseries. Here the focus belongs to the adventurers in Englandwhose hopes gave shape to the settlement at Jamestown, andwhose determination brought the colony through the many disappointmentsof its first years. In terms of time, the story is short,for it begins with the granting of the first Virginia charter in1606 and ends with the dissolution of the company in 1624.It thus covers a period of only eighteen years, but during theseyears England's interest in North America was so largely expressedthrough the agency of the Virginia Company that itsstory constitutes one of the more significant chapters in the historyboth of the United States and of the British Empire.
In the beginning there were two companies of the Virginiaadventurers, the one having its headquarters in London and theother in the western outport of Plymouth. Englishmen at thattime used the name Virginia to designate the full sweep of theNorth American coast that lay above Spanish Florida. In theoriginal Virginia charter the adventurers were granted rights ofexploration, trade, and settlement on the "Coast of Virginia orAmerica" within limits that reached from 34° of latitude in thesouth to 45° in the north, which is to say from the mouth ofthe Cape Fear River in lower North Carolina to a point midwaythrough the modern state of Maine. The Plymouth granteeshad a primary interest in the northern area that Captain JohnSmith would later name New England, and there they establisheda colony at Sagadahoc in August 1607, only a few weeks[Pg 2]after the settlement of Jamestown. But the colony barely survivedthe winter, and was abandoned in the spring of 1608.Thereafter, the Plymouth adventurers gave up. In contrast, theLondon adventurers persisted, and their persistence served to tiethe name of Virginia increasingly to them and to their more southerlysettlement. As a result, the London adventurers became incommon usage the Virginia adventurers, their company the VirginiaCompany, and their colony Virginia.
The Virginia colony was especially fortunate in having thebacking of London. Indeed, it may not be too much to suggestthat the chief difference between the stories of Roanoke Islandand 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 westerncounties and outports of England, and with equal consistencyhopeful projects had foundered on the inadequacy of their financialsupport while London favored other ventures—to Muscovy,to the Levant, and more recently to the East Indies. It was notmerely that London had the necessary capital and credit for asustained effort; it also had experience in the management oflarge and distant ventures, such as those of the East India Companyover which Sir Thomas Smith presided, as he would presidethrough many years over the Virginia Company. Londonhad too t