Jamestown Settlement, 417 Years Ago

     

     On the 400 year-anniversary (quadricentennial) of the Jamestown settlement on the coast of Virginia, Queen Elizabeth II toured its museum on May 4, 2007, to commemorate the first permanent English settlement in the New World.

     Three English ship, carrying 144 men and boys, set sail on December 20, 1606, bound for Virginia. Sailing the favored southerly course across the Atlantic Ocean, using trade winds and making stops at numerous islands to resupply, after more than four months at sea and 6,000 miles in very cramped quarters with unsanitary conditions, the English finally saw the Virginia coast.

    

Share of the Virginia Company

A reconnaissance party was sent ashore while the ships dropped anchor at Cape Henry. A small band of Indians attacked the scouting party and they retreated to the ships with two wounded men.

    

That night the Virginia Company orders were opened and the names of the seven men appointed to the colony’s council were read.

    

Several days later the settlers raised a cross and named the cape in honor of Prince Henry, the son of James I. This ceremony confirmed English claims to Virginia established twenty years earlier by the Roanoke colony.

     But England’s first successful colony in America was not established by the English government, but by a privately owned business called the Virginia Company of London. The investors hoped to profit from the potential wealth of the New World. In 1606 King James granted the organizers of the company exclusive rights to settle in Virginia.

     The Company was planning to find wealth, to convert the Indians to Christianity, to create jobs for the English unemployed, to seek a route to the Orient, and to tap whatever resources were found in the New World.

     “A charter granted land to two branches of the Virginia Company – the London branch was to plant a colony near the Chesapeake Bay, while the Plymouth branch was granted land in the New England area. The Company paid all the costs of establishing each colony, and in return owned all land and resources there and required everyone to work as a servant to the Company.”

     According to the museum, the investors were called “adventurers” who purchased shares of company stock to “help finance the costs of establishing overseas settlements or trading posts.”

     The money from the sale of stocks bought ships, supplies, and recruited laborers. The eventual profits were to be shared among all of the “adventurers.”

     One share of stock in Virginia Company cost 12 pounds 10 shillings, which represented more than six months’ wage of an ordinary worker. Shareholders could buy stocks individually or in groups. Almost 1700 people bought shares and the investors were found among people of different classes, occupations, wealthy women, guilds, towns, and cities. Merchants, especially from London, joined before 1610 and purchased more than half of the investments. As profits failed to materialize, the London merchants lost their interest even though they were the driving force of England’s expansion. Shares in New World companies, including the Virginia Company, were advertised in pamphlets, plays, sermons, broadsheets in order to raise awareness in the New World investments.

     The largest shareholder in the Virginia Company of London was the Third Baron De La Warr, Thomas West, who was appointed Lord Governor and Captain General of Virginia for life in 1610. When he arrived in Jamestown in June 1610, he was able to save the struggling colony from being abandoned. Thomas West was the cousin of Queen Elizabeth I and a member of the Privy Councils of both Elizabeth I and James I.

     In poor health, Thomas West returned to England in 1611. Lord and Lady de la Warr were Pocahontas’ sponsors for her court presentation to King James and Queen Anne on January 6, 1617.

     Thomas West died in 1618 while attempting to return to Virginia to resume his duties as governor.