Jamaica; she in turn yielded the primacy in sugar to Hayti
only to have that French possession, when overwhelmed by its great negro
insurrection, give the paramount place to the Spanish Porto Rico and Cuba.
In each case the opening of a fresh area under imperial encouragement would
promote rapid immigration and vigorous industry on every scale; the land
would be taken up first in relatively small holdings; the prosperity of the
pioneers would prompt a more systematic husbandry and the consolidation of
estates, involving the replacement of the free small proprietors by slave
gangs; but diminishing fertility and intensifying competition would in the
course of years more than offset the improvement of system. Meanwhile more
pioneers, including perhaps some of those whom the planters had bought out
in the original colonies, would found new settlements; and as these in turn
developed, the older colonies would decline and decay in spite of desperate
efforts by their plantation proprietors to hold their own through the
increase of investments and the improvement of routine.[25]

[Footnote 25: Herman Merivale, _Colonisation and Colonies_ (London, 1841),
PP. 92,93.]

CHAPTER IV

THE TOBACCO COLONIES

The purposes of the Virginia Company of London and of the English public
which gave it sanction were profit for the investors and aggrandizement
for the nation, along with the reduction of pauperism at home and the
conversion of the heathen abroad. For income the original promoters looked
mainly toward a South Sea passage, gold mines, fisheries, Indian trade, and
the production of silk, wine and naval stores. But from the first they were
on the alert for unexpected opportunities to be exploited. The following of
the line of least resistance led before long to the dominance of tobacco
culture, then of the plantation system, and eventually of negro slavery. At
the outset, however, these developments were utterly unforeseen. In short,
Virginia was launched with varied hopes and vague expectations. The project
was on the knees of the gods, which for a time proved a place of extreme
discomfort and peril.

The first comers in the spring of 1607, numbering a bare hundred men and
no women, were moved by the spirit of adventure. With a cumbrous and
oppressive government over them, and with no private ownership of land nor
other encouragement for steadygoing thrift, the only chance for personal
gain was through a stroke of discove