weaken the determination of the English people to turn
to their advantage the natural products of the empire which they claimed beyond the Atlantic. The letters patent of Raleigh expired with his attainder. Not long before that event, however, several voyages were made to America, which quickened the popular interest in England in its colonization. Gosnold in 1602, Pring in 1603, and Weymouth in 1605, were important forerunners of the emigrants of 1606.
All the ventures preceding the formation of the London Company went to show that the task of colonization was beyond the resources of a single individual or small associations of merchants looking to their private advantage. A short while before the charter of the two Virginia Companies was granted, there was issued a paper entitled “Reasons for raising a Fund for the Support of a Colony at Virginia,”[1] which sought to prove the indispensableness in all enterprises for the foundation of settlements abroad, of that prince’s purse which Hakluyt had declared was necessary “to an action if it was to be fulfilled without lingering.” A brief statement of the substance of this paper throws much light upon the practical motives in which the memorable undertaking of 1606 had its origin.
- ↑ “Reasons for raising a Fund for the Support of a Colony in Virginia,” Lansdowne MSS. 160, British Museum. This paper is given at length in Brown’s Genesis of the United States, and in the Rev. E. D. Neill’s Virginia Vetusta. There is no reason to doubt that it was drawn previous to the grant of the charter of April, 1606. See Mr. Brown’s remarks on this point, p. 36.
and more touching by the vague reports among the Indians of Virginia that came to the ears of the founders of Jamestown. The profound impression created in England by the loss of these colonists, who, to the popular imagination, appeared to have vanished like ghostly shades in the solemn silence of the primæval woods, is shown by the great anxiety of the London Company to discover some trace of them, which, on more than one occasion, found expression in energetic action.
