Crashaw, in the celebrated sermon which he delivered before Lord Delaware on the eve of that nobleman’s first departure for Jamestown, denounced as a slanderous falsehood the assertion that the persons who were sent out had been raked up out of the refuse of the English population. “They are like those who are left behind,” he said, “even of all sorts better and worse.”[1]
It is again observable that the next suggestion that members of the classes in England who were “chargeable, dangerous, and troublesome” to the State, should be transferred to the Colony, had its origin not with the Company, against whose repeated proclamations of sentiment it would have been in direct and notorious conflict, but with the Mayor of London in a letter to the Master and Wardens of the City Companies, written at the request of the Privy Council.[2] A few years later, it is not surprising to find that the King was anxious to deliver to the Company a number of youthful vagabonds who had proved incorrigible in spite of punishment, to be conveyed to Virginia, as the only means of cleansing England of their presence.[3]
During the whole of this immediate period, but one officer of the Company of his own motion advanced the proposition that English felons should be banished to Virginia in order to supply the plantations with laborers. Such a proposition was made by Dale to Salisbury in 1611. The act was characteristic of that distinguished officer. Great as were the services which he performed in establishing the Colony upon a broader and more stable footing than it had previously reached, he was essentially
