THE AGENCIES OF AMERICAN COLONIZATION

It was no light matter for the English to cross three thousand miles of water and found homes in the American wilderness at the opening of the seventeenth century.  Ships, tools, and supplies called for huge outlays of money.  Stores had to be furnished in quantities sufficient to sustain the life of the settlers until they could gather harvests of their own.  Artisans and laborers of skill and industry had to be induced to risk the hazards of the new world.  Soldiers were required for defense and mariners for the exploration of inland waters.  Leaders of good judgment, adept in managing men, had to be discovered.  Altogether such an enterprise demanded capital larger than the ordinary merchant or gentleman could amass and involved risks more imminent than he dared to assume.  Though in later days, after initial tests had been made, wealthy proprietors were able to establish colonies on their own account, it was the corporation that furnished the capital and leadership in the beginning.

=The Trading Company.=—­English pioneers in exploration found an instrument for colonization in companies of merchant adventurers, which had long been employed in carrying on commerce with foreign countries.  Such a corporation was composed of many persons of different ranks of society—­noblemen, merchants, and gentlemen—­who banded together for a particular undertaking, each contributing a sum of money and sharing in the profits of the venture.  It was organized under royal authority; it received its charter, its grant of land, and its trading privileges from the king and carried on its operations under his supervision and control.  The charter named all the persons originally included in the corporation and gave them certain powers in the management of its affairs, including the right to admit new members.  The company was in fact a little government set up by the king.  When the members of the corporation remained in England, as in the case of the Virginia Company, they operated through agents sent to the colony.  When they came over the seas themselves and settled in America, as in the case of Massachusetts, they became the direct government of the country they possessed.  The stockholders in that instance became the voters and the governor, the chief magistrate.

[Illustration:  JOHN WINTHROP, GOVERNOR OF THE MASSACHUSETTS BAY COMPANY]

Four of the thirteen colonies in America owed their origins to the trading corporation.  It was the London Company, created by King James I, in 1606, that laid during the following year the foundations of Virginia at Jamestown.  It was under the auspices of their West India Company, chartered in 1621, that the Dutch planted the settlements of the New Netherland in the valley of the Hudson.  The founders of Massachusetts were Puritan leaders and men of affairs whom King Charles I incorporated in 1629 under the title:  “The