ers, the Company of
Cutlers," and others, including the companies to which belonged the
city's cordwainers, barber-surgeons, masons, plumbers, innholders,
cooks, coopers, bricklayers, fletchers, blacksmiths, joiners, weavers,
plasterers, stationers, upholsterers, musicians, turners, and glaziers.
This was a national effort, but in a special way it was London's effort
to serve the nation in response to a call from its leaders.

There is reason to believe that the terms of the charter had been
agreed upon by the end of February, but the document remained unsealed
until May, when all who had subscribed could be listed. By that date,
too, some 600 subjects of the king had agreed to make the adventure in
person to Virginia. Some of them were smart enough to discount the
propaganda that had persuaded them, and so they settled for the wages
offered by the company. But others agreed to go on adventure, i.e. to
accept the adventurers' offer that their personal adventure to
Virginia would be counted as one share, at the minimum, in the common
joint-stock. This was to say that they would be entitled to whatever
rewards in 1616 might belong to any subscriber in England for L12 10s.;
and if the personal adventure of the settler in Virginia was considered
to be worth more, as in the case of a surgeon or one of the high
officers of the colony, then might the rights of an adventurer in
Virginia run as high as any belonging to the great adventurers in
England. The colonists who came to America in 1609 were thus encouraged
to view themselves as being in no way inferior to those who sent them.

Sir George Somers had been selected as admiral of the great fleet which
dropped down the Thames from London on May 15 and sailed from Plymouth
on the second of June with a full complement of nine vessels. Somers
rode aboard the _Sea Adventure_, whose master was Newport and whose
passengers included Sir Thomas Gates and William Strachey, the newly
appointed secretary of the colony. Ahead of them had gone Captain
Samuel Argall, to find a new route to Virginia running north of the
Spanish West Indies, and to make a test of the Chesapeake fisheries.
Somers guided his ships along a route that had long been familiar to
him, the route discovered by Columbus for Spain and the route that
Newport and other English adventurers had consistently followed to the
more southern parts of Virginia, but he tried to stay above the
channels regularly followed by the s