Preparations for the First Voyage

The London Company eagerly prepared for their proposed scheme of settlement.

Continuing English Settle Virginia,
our selection from A History of Virginia by Robert Reid Howison published in 1846. The selection is presented in six easy 5 minute installments. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in English Settle Virginia.

Time: 1607
Place: London

The adventurers of the first colony were to choose from their number one or more companies, each to consist of at least three persons, to reside in or near London, and these were to superintend the general course of trade between the mother-country and her distant daughter, and direct it into such channels as would be most advantageous to both.

No person was to be admitted to reside in the colonies but such as would take oath of obedience to the King, in the ample form provided for by a statute passed early in the reign of James, and any rash offenders who should attempt to withdraw from allegiance to his majesty was to be imprisoned until reformation, or else sent to England, there to receive “condign punishment.”

The president and councils, or the major part of them, were empowered, from time to time, to make, ordain, and constitute laws, ordinances, and officers for the better government of the colony, provided that none of these laws affected life or limb in the settlers. Their enactments were also required to be, in substance, consonant to the jurisprudence of England, and the King or the council in the mother-country was invested with absolute power at any time to rescind and make void the acts of the provincial councils.

As the colonists should increase in population and influence the King reserves to himself the right to legislate for them; but condescends to restrict his law-making energies to such action as might be “consonant to the law of England or the equity thereof.”

And to show his tender feelings toward the aborigines, whose lands he was so deliberately appropriating to the use of his subjects, his majesty requires that they shall be treated with all kindness and charity and that all proper means should be used to bring them to “the knowledge of God and the obedience of the King, his heirs and successors, under such severe pains and punishments as should be inflicted by the respective presidents and councils of the several colonies.”

On these kindly ordinances the philosophic reader will not fail to observe the impress of the man. The stern penalty of death visited the crimes of rebellion and conspiracy, which aimed a blow at sovereign power, and even the popular tumult, which kings have so much cause to dread, was stilled by the same bloody monitor; yet arson and burglary were left to the discretion of the councils. Adultery was punished with death — a penalty never inflicted even in England, except during a time of puritanical zeal, which offered God a service without knowledge. In the eye of divine purity the offender, by this crime, may be the vilest of the vile, but if the Redeemer of the world refused to denounce the punishment of death against one taken in the act, it devolved not on this Scottish Draco to render it a capital crime. The whole legislative power is vested in the council, without any reference to the interests or the rights of the people whom they were to govern, and the King retains absolute control over the present and future laws of the colony, thus rendering their great distance from his face the best protection they could have against his tyranny. The trial by jury was required for capital felonies and manslaughter; but all inferior offences and every civil interest, however overwhelming in importance to the colonist, were to be summarily decided upon by the provincial councils. In the same space it would have been difficult to compress more absurd concession and of ruinous restraint. The clause requiring all things to be held in common was destructive of the most powerful stimulus that urges man to labor; the semblance of mercy which forbade war upon the savages often held the hand of the settler when raised in self-defense; and the church establishment, forced by the arm of the law upon reckless adventurers, made religion a hated bondage and the tithe-gatherer more odious than the author of evil.

But notwithstanding the defects and deformities of a charter which, in modern times, would have been indignantly rejected as an invasion of the rights of man, the London Company eagerly prepared for their proposed scheme of settlement. Sir Thomas Smith was elected treasurer — a gentleman who had amassed great wealth by merchandise, who was one of the assignees under Raleigh’s patent, and was soon afterward made governor of the East India Company. Much has been said against him; but he was a man of public spirit and expanded views and urged forward the enterprise with his influence and his contributions. The means of the company were at first very limited; three ships only were prepared, the largest of which was of not more than one hundred tons burden, and Christopher Newport was selected for the command. He was a navigator of some renown, principally derived from a voyage of destruction against the Spaniards in 1592; but he was a vain and affected character, little calculated for decisive and manly action. Instructions were prepared, but the King, with his accustomed profundity of folly, directed that they should be sealed in a box, and not opened until the voyagers arrived upon the coasts of Virginia. In the vessels there embarked, beyond the regular crews, one hundred five persons, to form the settlement. And it does not seem extravagant to assert that Virginia has felt, through all her subsequent history, the influence of these first settlers in giving a peculiar bias to her population.

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