of some 240 of the 295 individuals who arrived in Virginia before October 1608 show that they included, inter alia: 119 gentlemen, forty-seven labourers, fifteen artisans, seven tailors, four carpenters and four surgeons, some ‘boys’, and a cooper, a couple of blacksmiths, brickies and refiners, two apothecaries, a gunsmith, a fishmonger and a fisherman, and several other individual specialists among whom was the most remarkable defensive inadequacy of an army captain, a sergeant, a soldier and a drummer.
Reading the above list of occupations one might interpret it as representing those present at a gentlemen’s club picnic outing to an area where it had been rumoured some unruly behaviour had been reported but where it was still intended to construct a barbecue and spend some time choosing a selection of local valuables to take home as trinkets to pacify absent wives. In fact, as far as Jamestown was concerned, the majority of the gentlemen were a burden in several ways; firstly, they would not labour; secondly, they needed to be fed, and thirdly, they spent time in fractious intrigues that made a mockery of governance.
The contrast with the establishment proposed by the anonymous wellwisher of 1584 for Ralegh’s Roanoke voyage, which laid down the trades necessary to be deployed, is all the more remarkable not only because it was again ignored but also because no lessons had been learned from the failures of 1577, 1578, 1585 and 1587. No one, it seems, drew up a profile of the ideal group necessary for establishing a colony and then sought to recruit the skills indicated. Instead, a disparate collection of motley, unhardened, untested and disunited individuals were dispatched to their doom. Had the Charter, or even the Advice, laid down the trades required and told the leaders to concentrate on establishing a settlement before any other activity, the result might have been less tragic and more successful.
When it became obvious, after a short while, that the northern Virginian enterprise had failed and that the southern one was not going to reward its investors in accordance with their expectations, a second Charter was drawn up, in 1609, by the King ‘at the humble suit and request of sundry of our loving and well-disposed subjects’. If the first Charter failed to deliver mainly through its application rather than its text, the same could not be said of the second, which is one of the most over-optimistic pieces of paper ever penned in that, although it established a far better form of government for the settlers themselves, it created a vast joint-stock company, eager to benefit from the output of the plantation. Although not as stark as a death warrant, it was one of the longest assisted suicide notes in history, killing with kindness and an indigestible surfeit.
The kindness came with the land grant. Whereas the first Charter had granted land within fifty miles either side of the initial settlement and stretching up to a hundred miles inland, the second Charter was far less restrictive, offering the settlers dominion from sea to sea, stating:
we do also of our special Grace . . . give, grant and confirm, unto the said Treasurer and Company, and their Successors . . . all those Lands, Countries, and Territories, situate, lying, and being in that Part of America, called Virginia, from the Point of Land, called Cape or Pointe Comfort all along the sea coast to the northward two hundred miles and from the said Point or Cape Comfort all along the sea coast to the southward two hundred miles; and all that space and circuit of land lying from the sea coast of the precinct aforesaid up unto the land, throughout, from sea to sea, west and northwest; and also all the islands being within one hundred miles along the coast of both seas of the precinct aforesaid.
These boundaries encompassed the lands explored and mapped by John Smith but also kept alive the idea that somewhere in their inner regions lay the much-sought route to the Pacific.
The surfeit was created by the number of individuals and organizations who were encouraged to invest in the enterprise – pages of them. This multitude consisted of 659 individuals and 56 London livery companies as well as a number of the settlers themselves, all of whom invested in a share, or shares, worth £12 10s, or multiples thereof, a not insignificant sum, the attraction of which was partly based on the erroneous report by the returning Captain Newport that gold had been discovered in Virginia. Among those recruited to purchase stock were eight earls, one viscount, one bishop, five lords, seventy-two knights and thirty-nine naval captains, as well as the usual crowd of gentlemen and esquires. Among the guilds were the Grocers, Brewers, Fishmongers, Tallow-Chandlers, Masons, Plumbers, Brownbakers, Carpenters, Haberdashers, Gardeners, Ironmongers and Barber-Surgeons, many of whose members, if they travelled, would have had practical skills to offer the settlers; while some, such as the Company of Goldsmiths, had skills desired but unwarranted. The take-up was oversubscribed for what was on offer and included both the stay-at-homes and adventurers willing to travel towards a better life. Those who chose to venture across to Virginia were offered, for their one share, after seven years’ labour, a grant of land and a share of the profit from ‘such mines and minerals of gold, silver, and other metal or treasure . . . or profits whatsoever which shall be obtained’.
A clear indication that the investors realized, too late, that they were not on to a good thing, can be read in the third Charter of 1611, which stated that the Company had:
power and authority to expulse, disfranchise, and put out from their said Company and Society for ever, all and every such person and persons, as having been promised or subscribed their names to becoming adventurers to the said Plantation, of the said first Colony of Virginia, or having been nominated for Adventures in these or any other of our Letters Patent, or having been otherwise admitted and nominated to be of the said company, have nevertheless either not put in any adventure at all for and towards the said Plantation, or else have refused or neglected, or shall refuse and neglect to bring his or their Adventure, by word or writing, promised within six months after the same shall be so payable and due. And, whereas the failing and nonpayment of such monies as have been promised in Adventure, for the advancement of the said Plantation, hath been often by experience found to be dangerous and prejudicial to the same, and much hindered the progress and proceeding of the said Plantation, and for that it seemeth to us a thing most reasonable, that such persons, as by their hand writing have engaged themselves for the payment of their adventures and after have neglected their faith and promise, should be compelled to make good and keep the same; therefore, our will and pleasure is, that any suit or suits commenced, or to be commenced in any of our Courts of Westminster, or elsewhere, by the said Treasurer and Company, or otherwise against any such persons, that our judges for the time being . . . do favour and further the said suits so far as law and equity will in any wise further and permit.
This was a longwinded way of advertising the fact that the Company was in trouble: it would certainly not have been able to argue its case should a seventeenth-century credit agency have removed its AAA rating, if it had ever warranted one. Michael Lok, the Treasurer of the Cathay Company in 1578, had found himself in a similar position as far as non-payment of promised investment was concerned but, lacking the robust endorsement of his sovereign, it was he and not they who went to prison. The long quotation above serves to illustrate that the Charters were not just a means whereby the Crown gave and granted rights to a ‘suit of divers and sundry loving subjects’ but that they also served as a business prospectus to attract adventurers. For the most part their lengthy verbiage did not lead to long lines of emigrants queuing at the docks or investors’ carriages rolling into the City. Those people that did not go did not ignore a golden opportunity for, by staying away, the probability is that they either, in the case of voyagers, saved their lives, or, in the case of investors, kept their savings. It was, in the modern jargon, a no-brainer.
The first settler groups that had landed at Jamestown had been about the size of a small English village, such as Scrooby in Lincolnshire, from where William Brewster and many of the Pilgrim Father separatists hailed. From the sweat of their brow the households of such villages had to support themselves and, probably, the lord of the manor and his family, and the local priest, while a few artisans, millers, blacksmiths and thatchers provided support either of a fixed or seasonal nature. Thus, in such communities, the majority worked the land and produced a sufficient surplus to feed a few more mouths than were hungrily opened by their own family, for it was an age of both feast and famine.
