full and
exact list of all subscriptions, with notation especially of
delinquencies. Salaried officers of the company were a secretary, a
bookkeeper, a husband (or as we would say, an accountant), and a bedel
or messenger. The secretary served all courts held by the adventurers,
the council, and the auditors, or by standing and special committees,
of which last the adventurers appointed quite a number. In addition,
the secretary was custodian of the company's records.

Although Sir Edwin Sandys continued to be the actual leader of the
company until its dissolution in 1624, his tenure of the treasurer's
office was limited to a single year. When the adventurers assembled for
the annual elections in the spring of 1620, they were much disturbed to
receive instruction from the king that Sir Edwin was not to be
re-elected. Instead, the king suggested the choice of some merchant of
means and wide experience--perhaps Sir Thomas Smith, Sir Thomas Roe,
Alderman Robert Johnson, or Mr. Maurice Abbott.

Whether Sandys could have been elected in the absence of this
interference by the king, which the adventurers protested as an
unwarranted invasion of their liberty, is itself an interesting and
debatable question. By his many criticisms of the previous conduct of
the company's affairs, Sandys had won the undying enmity of Sir Thomas
Smith and his important friends. More than that, he had quarreled with
his ally of the preceding year, the Earl of Warwick, who had
connections hardly less impressive than those enjoyed by Sir Thomas.
The quarrel with Warwick was over a question of piracy, as Sir Edwin
chose to regard it. One of Warwick's ships, the _Treasurer_, had sailed
from England in April 1618 with a license to capture pirates, which was
one way of getting a ship cleared from English ports for depredations
against the Spaniard at a time when the king had set his face against
all such activity. The _Treasurer_ had called at Jamestown, where
Governor Argall, who had rendered important services to the colony but
who had special reason to understand that his position in Virginia
depended upon the good will of important members of the company, helped
to outfit the vessel for a raid on the West Indies. Recent studies, and
especially those of David Quinn, a British scholar, argue strongly that
the earlier ventures of Gilbert and Raleigh had been inspired very
largely by the desire to establish some base on the North American
coast that w