regard to the amount of their shares, this cost to be made good not by the actual payment of money, but by a grant of land under the liberal terms allowed by the corporation to its members. Thus if an adventurer purchased one share, which entitled him to one hundred acres on the first division, and when he had seated them to an additional hundred acres on the second division, if after securing the patent to the first one hundred acres he dispatched twenty persons to Virginia, and these persons were drowned at sea or died of pestilence on shipboard, it was claimed by some that the transportation of the twenty entitled the shareholder, if an old adventurer, not only to one thousand acres upon the first division and one thousand acres more upon the second, but also to an area of land sufficient to recoup him for the loss resulting from the destruction of the twenty emigrants, this area to be measured by the ratio governing the allotment under the law relating to the head right. To have acknowledged the justice of such a claim would have led to the partial defeat of the object which the Company had most at heart, that object being to make the increase of population in Virginia maintain an equal progress with the acquisition of private ownership in the soil. The claim was brushed aside in terms of the strongest disapprobation, as likely to confer upon individuals a large proportion of the lands in Virginia without any advantage to the general community.[1]
The acquisition of ownership in fifty acres through the head right was not even in the time of the Company confined to the shareholder. Any one who had emigrated
- ↑ The original proposition was made by Sir John Wolstenholme in behalf of the adventurers of Martin’s Hundred. Abstracts of Proceedings of the Virginia Company of London, vol. I, p. 13. The Gift, a vessel belonging to the adventurers of this Hundred, had in the course of a very stormy voyage in 1619 lost fourteen of the persons on board, who had been sent out to Virginia. Ibid., vol. I, pp. 10, 11.
