[Footnote 25:  Herman Merivale, Colonisation and Colonies (London, 1841), PP. 92,93.]

CHAPTER IV

THE TOBACCO COLONIES

The purposes of the Virginia Company of London and of the English public which gave it sanction were profit for the investors and aggrandizement for the nation, along with the reduction of pauperism at home and the conversion of the heathen abroad.  For income the original promoters looked mainly toward a South Sea passage, gold mines, fisheries, Indian trade, and the production of silk, wine and naval stores.  But from the first they were on the alert for unexpected opportunities to be exploited.  The following of the line of least resistance led before long to the dominance of tobacco culture, then of the plantation system, and eventually of negro slavery.  At the outset, however, these developments were utterly unforeseen.  In short, Virginia was launched with varied hopes and vague expectations.  The project was on the knees of the gods, which for a time proved a place of extreme discomfort and peril.

The first comers in the spring of 1607, numbering a bare hundred men and no women, were moved by the spirit of adventure.  With a cumbrous and oppressive government over them, and with no private ownership of land nor other encouragement for steadygoing thrift, the only chance for personal gain was through a stroke of discovery.  No wonder the loss of time and strength in futile excursions.  No wonder the disheartening reaction in the malaria-stricken camp of Jamestown.

A second hundred men arriving early in 1608 found but forty of the first alive.  The combined forces after lading the ships with “gilded dirt” and cedar logs, were left facing the battle with Indians and disease.  The dirt when it reached London proved valueless, and the cedar, of course, worth little.  The company that summer sent further recruits including two women and several Poles and Germans to make soap-ashes, glass and pitch—­“skilled workmen from foraine parts which may teach and set ours in the way where we may set thousands a work in these such like services."[1] At the same time it instructed the captain of the ship to explore and find either a lump of gold, the South Sea passage, or some of Raleigh’s lost colonists, and it sent the officials at Jamestown peremptory notice that unless the L2000 spent on the present supply be met by the proceeds of the ship’s return cargo, the settlers need expect no further aid.  The shrewd and redoubtable Captain John Smith, now president in the colony, opposed the vain explorings, and sent the council in London a characteristic “rude letter.”  The ship, said he, kept nearly all the victuals for its crew, while the settlers, “the one halfe sicke, the other little better,” had as their diet “a little meale and water, and not sufficient of that.”  The foreign experts had been set at their assigned labors; but “it were better to give five hundred pound a tun for those grosse commodities in Denmarke than send for them hither till more necessary things be provided.  For in over-toyling our weake and unskilfull bodies to satisfie this desire of present profit we can scarce ever recover ourselves from one supply to another....  As yet you must not looke for any profitable returnes."[2]