ime thereafter the
company publicly suggested that the Lord Governor might soon return to
his post, but he did not undertake to do so until 1618 and then he died
on the way.

Once more the leaders of the company showed determination. Delinquent
subscribers were carried to court in a series of chancery actions
extending into 1614. How much was collected in this way cannot be said,
but the complaints entered in chancery have provided most helpful clues
to an understanding of the company's financial history. It seems
unlikely that anything collected as a result of these actions served to
do more than reduce an indebtedness incurred by the company in 1611 on
the promise of its subscribers. One thing is certain: there was no
chance of floating another subscription. By 1612 the adventurers were
complaining that only the name of God was more frequently profaned in
the streets and market places of London than was the name of Virginia.
After that year the Virginia lottery, its winning tickets entitling the
holder to an exchange for shares in the Virginia joint-stock, became
the company's chief dependence. Now and again there would also be found
some person who wanted to go to Virginia at his own cost, and was
willing to pay the cost in return for shares of stock guaranteeing an
ultimate title to land in the colony. These transactions, at a time
when Virginia's name had lost its magic, were perhaps too few to
suggest to any one of the adventurers that here was the future, not
only of the company, but of English colonization in North America.
Although the Virginia Company continued to be active for thirteen years
after 1611, the last of its great joint-stock funds was the one to
which men made their subscriptions just before Lord De la Warr came
home.

To this statement perhaps a qualification should be added. Virginia at
first had been to Englishmen America itself, and so it had remained in
a very real sense, despite an obvious tendency since 1609 for the
adventurers to pin their hopes increasingly on what might be found
within the reach of Jamestown. The continuance of the Virginia
adventure became thus not simply a matter of keeping the Jamestown
colony alive. What mattered was that somewhere in North America the
great task to which the company had committed itself should go forward.
And where better, after 1611, could this be tried than in the Bermudas?
Divine providence had pointed the way, so clearly that it might even be