shares might earn. The
undertaking was widely advertised; and when the charter passed the
seals, shares had been subscribed by 659 individuals, including 21
peers, 96 knights, 58 gentlemen, 110 merchants, and 282 citizens, and by
56 of the companies of the City of London.

The affairs of the new company were to be managed by a treasurer and
council, resident in England, and appointed and controlled by the
freemen assembled in general court. The little colony in Virginia was
but an adjunct to the company, and its management was left, without
other than conventional and perfunctory restrictions, to the treasurer
and council, subject to the approval of the freemen. The first treasurer
was Sir Thomas Smythe, who was also the first president of the East
India Company, a great merchant in his day, whose influence in Virginia
was a predominant one until he was succeeded as treasurer by Edwin
Sandys in 1618. Smythe and his associates were little interested in the
transmission of English institutions to the New World. They did not
regard Virginia, as the historian is apt to do, in the interesting light
of an experiment in constitutional liberalism, or conceive of the
company as the mother of nations. Their object was to pay dividends to
the shareholders, and the colonist was expected to exploit the resources
of Virginia for the benefit of the company of which he was a member.
Virginia was in fact a plantation owned by the company; its settlers
were the company's servants, freely transported in its vessels, fed and
housed at its expense, the product of their labor at its disposal for
the benefit of all concerned.

With these ideas in mind, and enlightened by past experience, the
company appointed Sir Thomas Gates to be "sole and absolute Governor,"
and sent him out in 1609, together with five hundred settlers in nine
ships. Two vessels were wrecked, and what with plague and fever less
than half the new colonists ever reached Virginia. The governor was
himself stranded on the Bermudas; and when he finally arrived after nine
months, sixty starving settlers were found scattered along the James
River. Men who had been reduced to eating their dead comrades or the
putrid flesh of buried Indians were scarcely good material for
regenerating a feeble plantation. Sir Thomas Gates, therefore, decided
to abandon the colony. But by a happy chance, as he was sailing with the
survivors down the river, he met Lord de la Warr come from England