merchants has been somewhat neglected. In reality the nobles and courtiers were for long merely ornamental additions whose names looked well on what we should now call a "prospectus"; the real work was carried on by Smythe and his associates.

The Second Charter of 1609 was amplified by a Third Charter in 1612 and their provisions may be jointly considered.1 The general government of the Company was placed in the hands of the whole body of the shareholders assembled in the General Court, which was to elect a council in London to carry on the executive functions, and a treasurer, the supreme executive officer. The membership of the Company could be increased by the issue to "adventurers" of shares of £12. 10s. apiece in the common stock, while those who emigrated to the colony were termed "planters" who invested as their contribution their labour and that of their families and servants. The appeal of the enterprise was well and systematically advertised, and subscriptions were invited from all classes in the community. These invitations met with such success that practically all the Livery Companies in the City of London and many persons of influence in governing circles became subscribers. The subscribers to the Plymouth Company were invited to turn their interest to the new venture and many took shares. The restrictions on the area of the Company's planting activities were removed and, between the extreme parallels bounding their grant, a hundred miles north and south of Point Comfort on the Atlantic coast, the rights of the Company ran indefinitely west and north-west to the sea beyond the American continent. It is probable that those who drafted this provision had some vague knowledge of the great lakes in the north-west and mistook them for the farther ocean. The immense distance separating the two shores of the continent was as yet quite unrealised, but the provision was to have considerable influence on the enterprise of English-speaking people in later years. The business of the Company under the new charter was cleverly organised and efficiently carried on, and of ill-informed interference from England with their measures the colonists in Virginia had little to complain.

Smythe as treasurer was responsible for the appointment of a sole and absolute governor for the colony with functions similar to those of the commander of a fortress, and in the spring of 1609 Sir Thomas Gates, a soldier of high reputation who had seen considerable service in the Netherlands, was despatched with 500 colonists to recruit the meagre number of sixty men to which the 300 earlier settlers had shrunk. The ravages of hardships and disease had proved terribly costly, and the Indians when Smith's control was removed had become very hostile and had made several damaging attacks upon the settlement. Gates was provided with a carefully drawn set of instructions laying down the broad lines of policy which in concur1 Second Charter, Brown, Genesis of U.S. 1, 208-37; Third Charter, ibid. II, 540-53.

SIR THOMAS DALE IN VIRGINIA

83

rence with an advisory council in the colony he was to adopt. These instructions were similar in many respects to the later Instructions issued to colonial governors on their appointment to amplify and explain the more formal instruments by which they were appointed. Gates's expedition of 1609 was very unfortunate, for, encountering a violent storm, its vessels were wrecked upon the islands discovered by Juan Bermudez, which had proved so disastrous to the Spaniards that they were known as the "Isles of Storms". There Gates and his second in command, Sir George Somers, an old companion in arms of Raleigh, lost their ships with the larger part of the ships' companies. The survivors contrived to save themselves from starvation by catching turtles and hunting the wild pigs which abounded in the islands. They succeeded in building from the wreckage of their ships a pinnace in which they completed the voyage to Virginia, but they reached it only to find on their arrival that the few remaining colonists were on the verge of starvation. Men were therefore sent back to the Bermudas to replenish their stores. The famine was relieved and the islands now figured as a most desirable place for permanent settlement.

When the Company at home learned of Gates's and Somers's disaster, Smythe decided to send out to Virginia a strong expedition with many farmers and artisans, and the command of it was entrusted to a man of high rank, who, it was supposed, would be able to claim a larger measure of obedience. Thomas West, Lord de la Warr, who had won considerable repute for his leadership of English soldiers in the Dutch service, was chosen for the appointment and was granted by his commission full martial and executive powers over everyone in the colony. He arrived in Virginia in 1610 just in time to save the colony from abandonment, and soon changed the condition of affairs; the colony was put into a proper state of defence, and by severe discipline all were compelled to work for the common benefit and were maintained from the common store. A stringent code of written laws was drawn up, modelled in part upon the military code prevailing among the armies in the Netherlands. Lord de la Warr died in 1611, and the enforcement of these laws was mainly left to his successor, Sir Thomas Dale, a rigorous soldier who had seen much service. The code remained in operation for a period of nine years, and though its provisions for enforcing discipline and regular work seem incredibly severe, even they failed to enforce satisfactorily the communistic system of labour and maintenance that had been adopted on the direct orders of the Company. In Virginia under Dale's code the system received its fullest trial at the hands of capable and energetic administrators, but though it always recommended itself to theoretical colonisers, yet, as in every other case where it has been tried, it gradually broke down and had to be replaced by a regulated individualism. By 1616 when the transition was well under way, the Virginia settlers consisted of three classes. The "officers" cared for the military

protection of the colony, looked after the distribution of the Company's communal stores that were sent out from England, and saw to their replenishment by trade with the Indians; the "labourers" included the agricultural servants who had been sent out at the Company's expense under the indentures, and most of the artisans. They had to work for the greater part of the year for the benefit of the colony, the profits of their labours going into the general store, but they were allowed to do a certain amount of work for themselves and could gradually acquire sufficient property to redeem their indentures, and thus join the third class of "free-farmers". These had come out to the colony with their families at their own cost, and were granted twelve acres apiece to be cultivated free of rent for the first year under an ordinary system of tenant right. In these farmers or planters the colony had a firm nucleus for future growth, and it gradually began to extend from James Town in scattered clearings along the banks of the creeks and rivers that formed the only avenues of transport through the primeval wilderness.

Dale left the colony in 1617 to take service under the East India Company. With the definite appointment of his successor, Sir George Yeardley, the colony was established on a sound basis and to the growth of its future prosperity the discovery of a profitable staple product for export made a valuable contribution. Originally the new colony of Virginia had been expected to supply naval stores together with potash and the silk, wines and drugs which were imported in large quantities from southern Europe. The hopes of finding supplies of the precious metals were very early disappointed, and none of the other commodities could be produced upon a profitable scale owing to lack of labour and of the skill necessary to start industries under the primitive conditions prevailing in the colony. Tobacco, despite the prohibitive duties at first imposed upon it as an illicit drug had, since the beginning of the century, been imported into England from the Spanish Indies in rapidly increasing quantities. It was soon found that it could be raised to great advantage with comparatively little labour in Virginia. The high prices that prevailed in the home market gave the colonists a large return on the parcels they sent to England and enabled them to pay for the manufactured articles which they had to import and which otherwise must be supplied at the cost of the shareholders of the Company. As early as 1616, therefore, tobacco became the principal article of export of the colony, and though the Government did all it could to divert the energies of the colonists to the production of other commodities, the effort was in vain, and the Company found it advantageous to encourage the growth of tobacco and to make this the standard of barter for all the articles it disposed of from its magazines. But such action necessarily soon led to over-production, a decline in price, and economic difficulties both in Virginia and the Bermudas.

THE FOUNDATION OF THE BERMUDA COLONY 85

The glowing reports of the fertility of those islands brought to England after Somers's shipwreck in 1610 induced the Virginia Company to secure such an extension of its charter as would include them in its field of plantation, and this was effected by the new letters patent or Third Charter procured in 1612. As usual, the Company needed to attract fresh capital if it were to undertake fresh responsibilities or even to discharge properly those with which it was already burdened. But the time was very unpropitious. During the three years since the granting of the Second Charter the Government had embarked upon a very large and costly plantation of Englishmen and Scotsmen upon the confiscated Irish lands in Ulster. This absorbed all the spare capital and energies of those who might have been expected to subscribe new capital to the Virginia Company, and the burden of planting the Bermudas was left to be undertaken by those who were personally interested in the Company and its fortunes. Nothing was done, however, to occupy the islands until certain of the more active members of the Virginia Company in 1615 took over its rights and founded a new Company known as "The Company of the Plantation of the Somers Islands". The organisation of this new enterprise was closely similar to that founded under the Virginia Charter of 1609, and Sir Thomas Smythe became the first governor. The islands were systematically surveyed and mapped out into "tribes" and hundreds called after the principal members of the Company. Each of the large subscribers had an area of land allotted to him and sent out at his own cost a number of indentured servants to work and cultivate it. The development of the colony was closely bound up with that of Virginia, and parallel with it both economically and politically. Its well-preserved early records1 are therefore of interest, since Bermuda is the colony that has owed the longest uninterrupted allegiance to the British Crown. But it was always small and it did not exercise much influence on the general course of imperial development. It came into public notice principally because of the difficulties that were caused with the Spanish Government by the piratical tendencies of the colonists, and the Bermuda Company was thus involved in the acutely debated controversies that raged round the unpopular foreign policy of the King.

Though the Spaniards were unable to take effective steps to expel the English colonists from their new colonies, they made repeated protests through diplomatic channels against what they claimed to be an intrusion on their territory. Secret agents were employed to report what was going on in Virginia, and Philip III was kept almost as fully informed as the English Government of the progress of the colony. But in reality Spain had ceased to be an effective

1 Printed in Lefroy, J. H., Memorials of the Bermudas.

2 See Brown, Genesis of U.S., passim.

competitor in the territory north of St Augustine, and a new international rivalry for colonial power was beginning in which the French and the Dutch competed with England for control of the North American coast and its fur trade and fisheries. Dutch expeditions and notably that commanded by the Englishman, Henry Hudson, were busily exploring the coast to the north of the Virginia colony; they laid claim to all the land between Cape Cod and the Delaware with indefinite limits towards the interior, but they did not undertake any permanent occupation until 1621. The English feared more their French rivals who had established settlements to the north, and in 1612 the Virginia Company determined on a serious effort to expel them.1 Captain Samuel Argall was ordered to clear the territory as far as the English claims extended, and in the summer of 1613 he proceeded to break up the French settlements that had been recently established. He took as captives to James Town several of the Jesuit missionaries who had begun a mission to the Indian tribes at Mount Desert, and burned Port Royal, the French colony on the Acadian peninsula. Thus began the long struggle between England and France for the possession of North America.2

The maritime nations were entering into competition not only on the American coast to the north of the limits of effective Spanish occupation, but English, French and Dutch were also trying to build up a trade with the Indian tribes in the ill-explored region known as Guiana between the easternmost Spanish settlements at the mouth of the Orinoco and the delta of the Amazon beyond which lay the Portuguese colonies in Brazil.

One of the principal articles of trade was tobacco, and it seems to have been in Guiana that Englishmen first attempted to cultivate the plant instead of purchasing it from the Spaniards. The first settlement there was planned in 1602 by the Captain Charles Leigh who had made the attempt at Ramea in the Gulf of St Lawrence in 1597. Leigh was financed by his brother Sir Oliph Leigh, and from 1604 to 1606 he tried tobacco planting on a small scale on the banks of the River Wiapoco in eastern Guiana. Friendly relations were established with the Indian tribes on the coast, but the colony was troubled with dissensions from the first. The promoters in England sent out supplies and reinforcements in 1605 by a vessel called the Olive Branch, but the powerful currents along the Guiana shore carried them past the entrance to the river and they found it impossible to return. Only a remnant of the colonists survived the unhealthy climate, and they could not afford to purchase from the Dutch slavers the negroes required for their plantations. The 1 Brown, Genesis of U.S. 11, 709-23.

2 See Purchas, S., Pilgrims, XIX, 214-16; Biggar, H. P., Trading Companies of New France, pp. 263-5. See Williamson, J. A., The English in Guiana, 1604-68.

Now called the Öyapock in the colony of French Guiana.