Sir Thomas Dale was on the whole the most efficient and discreet Governor the colony had had.  One element of his success was no doubt the change in the charter of 1609.  By the first charter everything had been held in common by the company, and there had been no division of property or allotment of land among the colonists.  Under the new regime land was held in severalty, and the spur of individual interest began at once to improve the condition of the settlement.  The character of the colonists was also gradually improving.  They had not been of a sort to fulfill the earnest desire of the London promoter’s to spread vital piety in the New World.  A zealous defense of Virginia and Maryland, against “scandalous imputation,” entitled “Leah and Rachel; or, The Two Fruitful Sisters,” by Mr. John Hammond, London, 1656, considers the charges that Virginia “is an unhealthy place, a nest of rogues, abandoned women, dissolut and rookery persons; a place of intolerable labour, bad usage and hard diet”; and admits that “at the first settling, and for many years after, it deserved most of these aspersions, nor were they then aspersions but truths....  There were jails supplied, youth seduced, infamous women drilled in, the provision all brought out of England, and that embezzled by the Trustees.”

Governor Dale was a soldier; entering the army in the Netherlands as a private he had risen to high position, and received knighthood in 1606.  Shortly after he was with Sir Thomas Gates in South Holland.  The States General in 1611 granted him three years’ term of absence in Virginia.  Upon his arrival he began to put in force that system of industry and frugality he had observed in Holland.  He had all the imperiousness of a soldier, and in an altercation with Captain Newport, occasioned by some injurious remarks the latter made about Sir Thomas Smith, the treasurer, he pulled his beard and threatened to hang him.  Active operations for settling new plantations were at once begun, and Dale wrote to Cecil, the Earl of Salisbury, for 2,000 good colonists to be sent out, for the three hundred that came were “so profane, so riotous, so full of mutiny, that not many are Christians but in name, their bodies so diseased and crazed that not sixty of them may be employed.”  He served afterwards with credit in Holland, was made commander of the East Indian fleet in 1618, had a naval engagement with the Dutch near Bantam in 1619, and died in 1620 from the effects of the climate.  He was twice married, and his second wife, Lady Fanny, the cousin of his first wife, survived him and received a patent for a Virginia plantation.

Governor Dale kept steadily in view the conversion of the Indians to Christianity, and the success of John Rolfe with Matoaka inspired him with a desire to convert another daughter of Powhatan, of whose exquisite perfections he had heard.  He therefore despatched Ralph Hamor, with the English boy, Thomas Savage, as interpreter, on a mission to the court of Powhatan, “upon a message unto him, which was to deale with him, if by any means I might procure a daughter of his, who (Pocahuntas being already in our possession) is generally reported to be his delight and darling, and surely he esteemed her as his owne Soule, for surer pledge of peace.”  This visit Hamor relates with great naivete.