Bermuda Affects the Virginia Company and Virginia: Background to and during the Tweens
We start our Bermuda discussion with its inclusion in the politics and negotiations that led to the the Third Charter. That charter was a reaction to and was triggered by its discovery by the Gates 1609-10 Expedition and its shipwreck.
The 1609-10. a near disaster, but survivors prospered and demonstrated the island could be a suitable candidate for English colonization. Somers was an intense promoter of the islands potential, as a colony in and of itself, and a sources of tradeable staples (fish and wild hogs) that could help Virginia sustain itself. What to call this island shed insight into how this subsidiary colony could survive while Virginia languished is apparent, as Scott [99] p. 260 suggests, Somers name (summers) broke the chain of Virginia’s death climate, and reopened settler/investor interest in emigrating/investing there. It offered a promising new start.
Somers wanted priority placed on Somers Island. He pressed hard for formal designation of a colony, and its own (subsidiary) joint stock corporation. He achieved both in the Charter of 1612, but in fact, he was not involved in that charter at all. After he returned with Gates to Jamestown, he shortly went back to the Somers Island on orders from De la Warr. His mission was to find and send to Jamestown badly needed supplies and food. While in Bermuda, he became ill, and died there in November (1610). [99] https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/somers-sir-george-1554-1610/
His writing and spirit motivated support in London for development of the Island, and funds were raised to send over a few settlers to create a planation and forts (July, 1612). I suspect Somers was an inspiration to develop Bermuda, but it was Smythe who smell opportunity during the pre and post charter period. Painted not as a zero-sum ,i.e. Somers Island vs. Virginia, Somers Island was to be a crutch to assist Virginia’s development—but it also presented an opportunity to serve as port and home base for adventures against the Spanish West Indies and American possessions.
Little time was wasted, and from the non-existent capital yet another ship was fitted out, but this time to Somers Island. Sixty persons went over to start Bermuda’s first plantation (mid-late 1612). But in so doing, the venture no doubt got the lawyers involved, and they pointed out the 1609 charter gave the Virginia Company jurisdiction of 100 miles from its coast—Somers was more than that. With a few winks of the eye, the Company went forward, but it knew this was yet another reason to push for the next charter. Meanwhile, the Company decided its close proximity to Spanish ships and islands, necessitated a defense, and that forts should be built.
The plantation in Virginia At this time was largely dependent on supplies sent from home [England], and it was reported that, in an emergency, both hogs and fish could be obtained quickly from the Bermuda. Moreover, the strategic importance of [Bermuda] began to be recognized as one, which, when fortified, would protect Virginia against the attacks of Spain which were believed to be imminent [99] Scott, Vol II, p. 259
Unsettled, undiscovered by even Native Americans, Bermuda was open to plantation-building and whatever initiatives seemed appropriate. Initial allotments of land were made to kickstart a settlement, and an early start in Somers Island plantation development yielded a number of positive stories that suggested whatever Virginia’s deficiencies, the Somers Island could be turned into a money-making venture.
The ill-fortune which dogged the plantation in Virginia did not pursue that in the Somers Islands. The younger enterprise had the benefit of the experience gained since 1607 and there was not the same temptation to divert the energies of the settlers from agriculture to the search for mines. In another respect also this company [Somers] was fortunate at the beginning of its history. Many of the difficulties that had already been experienced by the Virginia Colony were financial, through the shareholders refusing to pay the instalments until they saw some return from the plantation. Such a return was forthcoming from the Somers Islands within a year after the company had been formed, through the discovery of a great quantity of ambergris .. At this period ambergris was a valuable commodity, being used both in medicine and a perfume [99] Scott, p. 260-1
Ambergris, picked up from the beaches, and easily exported to England yielded immediate profit (despite some embezzlement by Somers officials) on a scale sufficient to “grow” Somers in this early period.. Pearls quickly added to the exports While Virginia had not built a respectable fort by this point, such an critical piece of infrastructure was started construction on Somers in 1613. Investors were quite willing to buy shares in the Somers corporation—at a time when they were not for the Virginia Company itself. Scott asserts that as much as L20,000 were expended on Somers Island by the end of 1614—and the population had grown to six hundred settlers—a multiple of those in Virginia, if one nets out those who died.
Virginia Company Governance of Bermuda
For me at least, the most confusing, and at points almost bewildering, problems with understanding the Virginia Company period is its overlapping inclusion of Bermuda as a sort of sub-colony within the Company. Discovered in the famous shipwreck of 1609-10, Bermuda became a separate focal point within the Virginia Company until 1612, and its policy-making was lodged in the Company leadership until the Company allowed its rights in Bermuda to be “bought out “ by a limited number (one hundred and twenty) of its shareholders who then formed their own corporation, which although separate from the Virginia Company, met in back to back shareholder meetings changing only the presiding officer. In 1615, with a clearer focus, a new company was formed, and it secured from the king its own charter commencing on June 29, 1615.
Having found Bermuda the issue became what to do with it. The first years after the shipwreck suggested Bermuda could be everything Virginia was not. The climate seemed more healthy than Virginia’s swamps. It was virgin territory, no resident Native Americans, and the soil was fertile and opportunities from exploiting its marine resources and location provided staples and the prospect for greater self-sufficiency.
The location proved to be a major attraction as it was positioned to offer a base for intercepting Spanish trade in the West Indies, and raiding Spanish ports as well. With no need to establish a military policy system to maintain order, immigration. Somers Island proved to be a gamechanger—more precisely a do over. It opened up new ways to think of Virginia and the Virginia Company, and apparently revitalized Smythe’s energy to extend the base of its supporters. That logically opened up an expanded campaign to attract investment and develop popular interest in colonization and Virginia—the point of which was to bring the king on board for signing off on the new charter—and stepping up to the plate to make a deeper royal commitment to the colonization effort.
It had a powerful advocate well placed in the Virginia Company: Admiral George Somers was credited with its discovery—not hard because he was in command of the fleet in which the Sea Venture was a member. Somers was a former privateer who led noted invasions of the Spanish possessions in West Indies and South America. He was associated with the “Bristol privateer community” discussed earlier in this series. Somers was shipwrecked along with Gates—with whom he discussed vigorously what they should do.
Inclusion of the Somers Island into the Virginia Company jurisdiction was an element of the Third Charter, and it went into effect with a second agreement in July 1612. The key to understanding why a new cadre of investors took an active interest in Bermuda, leaving aside Virginia was the new investors had plans, ideas and their own ambitions for profit which they did not want constricted by the obvious plight of the Virginia Company, and the effects that plight had on its membership and decision-making.
That the Somers Island enjoyed a more successful colonization—in its opening decades—offers an insight of Virginia’s chief woes when compared to the young upstart Bermuda.
Smythe took an early lead on this, and led a renewed effort for another shareholder subscription and pressed the king for a new charter. He was joined in this effort by Sir Robert Rich, later the First (Third Baron) Earl of Warwick. Charles Andrews credits Rich to be the leader of the early Bermuda movement within the Company (to which he became a member in 1612). Initially, a subsidiary corporation was incorporated within the Virginia Company, with considerable overlapping members from the Company.
The signing of the 1612 charter, however, was the catalyst for a bewildering, and somewhat dysfunctional series of governance/leadership changes that produced a mixed bag of governance for Bermuda, and considerable instability within the Virginia Company—an instability that did not benefit Virginia in the long run.
Not all of the Somers opportunities were congruent with the permanent settlement mission of Virginia. and for a number of other reasons. Once the 1612 Charter was in place this subsidiary sold its rights to Bermuda (L2000) in November, 1612 to an independent, yet operating within the Virginia Company (meetings were held on the same day, place, and time, with appropriate presiding officers) joint stock corporation, the “Undertakers for the Plantation of the Somers Island”. Shareholders were capped at 400 and 117 subscribed.
Though literally the equal of and distinct from the parent [Virginia Company] company, the Bermuda Corporation was in practice closely interjoined with the other. Its [the Bermuda Company] membership was only one hundred and twenty, with an average attendance of seventy or eighty, but it occupied the same quarters and with few exceptions all its members were members also of the other body. The head of the one was called “treasurer” and the other “governor”, but at first the two offices were filled by the same person, Sir Thomas Smith [Smythe]. Each company had four general [shareholder] courts with similar powers and forms of procedure. These courts met at the same time and in the same place for the transaction of business
…. After 1619, when Sir Thomas Smith ceased to be ‘treasurer’ [of the Virginia Company], but continued to be ‘governor” [of the Bermuda Company], and the two companies [therefore] had different heads, the Bermuda Company was looked upon as the lesser and inferior corporation, and in all that concerned the common welfare did little more than follow the lead of the elder body [the Virginia Company], and adopt for itself the latter’s’ decisions. [99] Charles M. Andrews, the Colonial Period of American History, Vol. 1, p. 120
Smythe was still the primary official of the new company(with his deputy Alderman Robert Johnson), and to him befell what was the day-to-day administration and governance of the new subsidiary company in England. Smythe appointed his own residential governor, as he did in Virginia, and whatever supervision he rendered to the local official is problematical. Once one crossed over the Atlantic, the local governor was the driving force and Smythe seems to me almost invisible. I saw that in my research on Dale’s military’s policy system in Virginia and thus I conclude whatever else he was Smythe was not a micromanager, and he left a considerable amount of discretion in the hands of his appointed local governor. This observation might be noted by the reader because it assumes a greater importance in later sections of this module. The London shareholder board also was not hands-on in these years.
The active membership of the Virginia and Bermuda companies was so nearly the same that the two courts [shareholder board of directors] sat virtually as one body, and more than one historian has experienced difficulty in disentangling their records. Indeed it is necessary only to notice the names by which Bermuda’s parishes are known-Sandys, Southampton, Warwick, Paget, Pembroke, Devonshire, Smith, Hamilton-to appreciate that the founders of that colony were for the most part the same men who have been honored for their leadership in the settlement of Virginia. [99] Wesley Frank Craven, Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, p. 117
A Governor with twenty-four assistants (councilors), one of which was to be chosen as deputy governor constituted its governance. Thomas Smythe assumed CEO office and his deputy was William Canning, a slave trader. In 1615, however, incidents and complaints made it known that the administration of its first deputy governor, Richard Moore had gotten off to a rather bad start, Moore’s administration, and the colony, degenerated through his neglect and lack of diligence, becoming a resort, complete with financial maladministration. [99] Robert Scott, Vol. 1, pp. 262-3
Moore was abruptly terminated. His termination was followed by even more disorganization, caused it seems from the failure of its local council, and the choice of settlers seems to have been poor. Commentators suggest Bermuda was in a “perpetual Christmas”, with crop production and stores management negligent. Charles Andrews describes Moore as a good carpenter, but poor governor” who became jealous or “peevish” in regards to Company oversight and direction; Andrews also describes the subsequent governance by the council as “misrule of the six”. At this point Thomas Smythe “determined to put an end to “this state of affairs, and convinced that the ‘originall [beginning] of these gamboleinge times proceeded from the miserable insufficiencye of the commanders there” selected as the new governor Captain Daniel Tucker, brother of the head customs searcher at Gravesend, and a resident of five years as cape-merchant in Virginia’ [99] Charles Andrews, Vol. 1, pp. 217-8
How Bermuda’s Land Distribution Entered into the Virginia Company’s Politics:
Small and rudimentary as it was, the Bermuda plantation gradually established itself and copying Virginia, introduced tobacco, and began construction on its fort to defend against the Spanish. In December 1613 the first annual quarterly council was held. A decision made in 1614 to start a land survey as a prerequisite for a “division of land” among the shareholders. Affairs seemed to be proceeding in good form, and accordingly another key decision, to apply to the king for a charter which separated the Bermuda colony from Virginia—but not from the Virginia Company—was also made. Approval was obtained and on June 29th, 1615 a new incorporation, “the Governor and Company of the City of London for the Plantation of the Somers Island” replaced the previous corporation, and its jurisdiction was set in accordance with the terms of the 1615 charter.
Not until February 16, 1616 was the new deputy governor, Daniel Tucker, then a ship captain and planter in residence in Virginia arrived in Bermuda in May, and successfully continued the construction of the fort, and opened up direct trade with the West Indies. A stock issuance to finance whale-fishing was conducted, with mediocre results.. the “land division (survey) that was intended to be Tucker’s signature project in accordance with his instructions from Smythe. In 1617, the corporation decided to issue land grants to its 400 investors, twenty-five acres per share, with remaining land to be dedicated to public use and which profits should support the colony’s expenditures:
First of all the 400 shares and 10,000 acres to be divided were arranged in multiples of 50 shares and 1,250 acres which were known as tribes. Each of these was named after one of the original adventurers of position who held ten shares. These were the Countess of Bedford, Sir Thomas Smythe (the governor), Lord Cavendish, afterwards Earl of Devonshire), Lord Pagett Earl of Pembroke, Sir Robert Mansefield, the Earl of Southampton, Sir Edwin Sandys, [and to Robert Rich who succeeded to the Earl of Warwick] [99] Scott, p. 263-4
The detail is provided because it is a “who’s who” in colonization circles, and several will play a critical role in the forthcoming modules. It seems as a variation of Virginia’s Dale’s Gift, which seems mostly to have been locally determined into 1616. Not so with Bermuda as London’s fingerprints are al over it. Each tribe compared to a “hundred” and each were expected to send settlers to found plantations. Tobacco was by the mid-teens the crop of Bermuda. Bermuda, it seems was also heading off in the direction of a tobacco monoculture.
A succinct summary of post-third charter Bermuda governance is provided by D. Alan Williams:
The London Company [our Virginia Company] promptly sold Bermuda to a subsidiary association of company investors, who in turn founded the Somers Island (Bermuda) Company, under a separate royal charter in 1615. One could hardly tell the difference between the Virginia and the Somers Companies. Smythe was the treasurer of one and governor of the other. Both held their meetings in his London townhouse. The pleasant climate, the absence of Indians on the isles, and quick farming profits made Bermuda a flourishing colony. Eventually, the Somers Island Company came to an unprofitable end. With only 11,000 acres of land, the Bermuda Islands could not sustain a commercially viable agricultural economy. Unfortunately, before this became apparent, the scramble for Bermuda profits created conflicts among the Virginia investors that proved fatal to the London [Virginia] Company. Ironically, while England focused its attention on Bermuda, the colonists in Virginia stumbled onto their economic salvation—they became tobacco farmers. [99] D. Alan Williams, “Introduction”, in Grizzard Jr. and D. Boyd Smith, “Jamestown Colony: a Political, Social, and Cultural History (ABC CLIO, 2007), p. xl.
That meant the investor shareholders in the Somers Island Company were individually more hands on than those of the Virginia Company, and with little surprise their priorities were mixed, and their local relations in the island a societal maze. There was no equivalent to Thomas Dale and his military policy system in Bermuda. So while “the older colony [Virginia] wasted well-nigh away, the younger [Bermuda] attracted a total of six hundred settlers by 1615, and in its continued growth would hold a marked superiority in numbers for three years thereafter”, In short, Bermuda developed into a rival of sorts to Virginia.
The reason for the disparity seemingly was the hands on investor management of its London-based shareholders. In 1615 Bermuda started to implement a survey on which the “public lands” of the Somers Company would be allocated and distributed to the individual shareholders on the Somers Company court (board of directors). In proportion to their shares owned land would be allocated to “tribes”, each associated with a major shareholder. In the course of conducting the survey, which for all sorts of reasons, was not completed until the spring of 1617 [for reference, this is when Argall assumed Virginia’s governorship], the individual shareholders continued their development of their respective holdings in Bermuda—in anticipation of a soon to be title of land. Their initiatives in these years were not exclusively tobacco-related, but all sorts of economic diverse activities and projects, reflecting the early writing and strategy of Hakluyt, were attempted. Over time, most would fail, and tobacco would become dominant—but not in these years.
Therefore, in early 1617, governor of Bermuda allocated the company’s public land to each of the eligible tribes. Then as we shall see the troubles really began—and it was those battles that would deeply affect the London-based boards of shareholders, which would in its turn inter-related with battles in Virginia (against Argall) that would lead to the the Virginia Company coup of 1619. The issue at hand was the distribution of company land to the principal investors, each of which had been designated as a “tribe” and allocated land (not very dissimilar from the association-investor land distribution ongoing in Virginia, save from the latter’s use of independent joint stock corporations) on the basis of the number of shares each owned. The process was direction by the governor of Bermuda, Captain Daniel Tucker, on the basis of a land survey carried out over the previous two years. Tucker, a successor to the first Bermuda governor, Richard Tucker, had been imported from Virginia in May 1616. A former sea captain, shareholder, and settler of Virginia in 1608 and served as cape merchant during the horrific starving times of Jamestown.
A stern man, and administrator, he found the pace of Bermuda a bit slow and did not get along with its residents. Within days of his arrival he hung one of them for speaking ill of him. Tucker, remembering the starving times, insisted that Bermudans plant staples for their consumption—rather than the previous preferences of the settlers. Tucker, entrusted with the ongoing land distribution process, on his own volition appropriated several hundred left over, but well positioned acres for himself. He immediately built a mansion for himself on it.
Tucker’s administration struggled to clean up the muddle, ineptitude, and laxity of the former governor (he hanged at least one settler). His management style, as well as its intent to secure efficient production and local order, was similar to that of Jamestown’s John Smith, and was in many ways similar to that employed by the Dale military administration [99] Charles Andrews, Vol. 1, p. 220]. Likely, the style of this policy system, implemented by a governor of some temper and insistence, affected the implementation of the land division once it was completed in 1617. The Bermuda Company, however, was composed of a selective minority of the Virginia Company shareholders, and these shareholders had formed their own company and secured their own charter from the king. While the company’s affairs in the 1617 period were entrusted to a governor associated with Smythe, the shareholders, if nothing else expected fairness in the land distribution, and no doubt, the company’s largest shareholder, the Rich family, considered itself first among equals in being awarded its fair share in the process.
Tucker’s seizure of this land offended the Rich family, a tribe, whose allotted land was alleged to be of inferior quality and location and so perceived Tucker’s arbitrary seizure to be an appropriation of land which should have gone to them. The Rich family’s local agent in Bermuda contested Tuckers’ seizure and for his resistance Tucker put him in jail. Tucker had been appointed by Thomas Smythe, and when the Rich’s furiously condemned Tucker’s treatment of the Rich agent, Smythe defended Tucker—thus presumably being the first thorn in the relationship of the two powerful merchant adventurers. When Tucker left Bermuda to return to England to defend himself before the Somers Company shareholder meeting in early 1618, a battle ensured to replace Tucker and send over a new governor. Smythe defended Tucker, Sandys inserted his brother George as a candidate, a privateer investor Nathaniel Butler
Tucker was accused of “slow-walking” the implementation, carving out land for his personal benefit, and less than equal allocation of quality land among the beneficiaries. In the course of this implementation, Tucker was accused of inflicting “indignities” on agent Robert Rich. Among other matters, the quality of the Rich allocated land was judged to be deficient (Scott seems to agree), and the matter elevated into a confrontation in which Tucker imprisoned the Rich family agent. Charles Andrews described the matter as follows:
Tucker’s methods of government were not conducive to a long continuance of peaceful conditions [in regards to both land distribution and deferral to the governor’s administration]. Tucker was an able and experienced man but he had a violent temper and made short shrift of those who were obstinate and lazy. His course of action aroused so much discontent and led to many jealousies that he finally determined to return to England [in late 1617]. There he was charged before the company with vainglory and presumption, with oppression and cruelty, and with using his position and the company’s property to his own profit. [99] Charles Andrews, Vol. 1, p. 221
We shall return shortly to the battles-issues in Bermuda, and tie them in with the departure of Smythe as the Virginia Company Treasurer, but first, we must wrap up the discussion of this section, by observing that it the pattern by which the Virginia Company (and its subsidiary the Somers Island Company) distributed its public lands after 1615 was primarily responsible for a different path of political development in the two colonies. That distribution was
Bermuda Developed Differently than Virginia in the Tweens
Governance of Bermuda in these years then was problematic, but economic and population growth was remarkable compared to Virginia. The years between 1612 and 1615-16 witnessed some remarkable economic growth and, compared to Virginia, faster population growth the politics was uneven, to a large extent due to the personality of the Smythe-appointed governor. Even beyond this the disposition of the Bermuda settlers to authority and direction was a difficult matter, while the local governor seems diligent in his projects and priorities, forts, land distribution, exports to England, and the planting of tobacco, the relations with his settlers, who by 1615 were entirely sent over by the owners of each plantation and the investment of which to a degree was a precursor to the association of investor-owners, only more informal, i.e. there was no association joint stock corporation.
The pattern of Bermuda land distributed after 1615 was not being replicated in Virginia. Rather as we seen with Dale’s Gift, land grants were made to company officials primarily or those very closely associated with the company’s activities in Virginia (I have Ralph Hamer, a sea captain in mind as an example, as well as those described earlier to the cape merchant). Attached to the land grant and the immigration of settlers on that land, a headright to additional acreage was linked. As noted this pattern of land grants through company officials combined their political advantages with their new-found Dales’ Gift economic meant a decided “First Advantage” over all other settlers, a First Advantage that would persist for decades. It is worth note that most of the Virginia beneficiaries were shareholder administrators tied to Thomas Smythe and his merchant adventurer faction. The opposite was developing in Bermuda. In Bermuda, the new governor Tucker, also a protégé of Smythe, encountered—and created—a more troublesome process in the distribution of the company’s land.
Privateering, Exploitable Vacuums, and the Evolution of Merchant Adventurers During the Tweens
This may seem an odd place to bring up privateering, but chronology seems to compel it. The very early tweens, 1613 at the least in England, seems to have presented an opportunity, an opportunity that persisted to some degree for decades, for the attempt to exercise personal ambitions and proclivities in matters foreign. They always existed even in Elizabethan times, Essex’s expedition against Ireland, and Raleigh was full of them, but by the early tweens the sheer number of those interested in matters foreign had dramatically increased as had the experience of those so inclined.
1613 is stated above for its convenience to the death of Robert Cecil, the force, in my opinion at least, put whatever coherence and plan to the early James reign that it had. His death created a vacuum in court policy-making for certain, but less observed was the opening it created in English foreign affairs, which if nothing else possessed a rather weak, if developing, royal navy, and whose most experienced commanders and seamen and the bulk of England’s merchant marine were located more in the outer ports than London. If not Ireland, certainly the English free-zones in Holland offered bases beyond the control of the English king.
For those with resources, and these were not lacking in the aristocracy, the seas and foreign lands meant adventure and opportunity. With new-found autonomy in a Cecil-free James court, several became very prominent in foreign trade, adventure and privateering—with their own definitions of colony and colonization; they became more open and aggressive in their actions. As members of the royal court, with access into state policy-making enhanced by a more chaotic if opportunistic style of court policy-making, the tweens provided an opportunity for inroads into the Virginia Company and its two colonies, Virginia and Bermuda.
It is the latter that we see more clearly into the pursuit of opportunities abroad, and the disruption it caused. It was only in 1618-9 that Argall carried this into Virginia Company internal affairs, and that, I suggest, disrupted its intra-company politics well into 1620 and later. These influences and disruptions have not been well understood, or appreciated, at least in terms how they affected Virginia’s economic and political development path.
In short, I argue at this point the Virginia Company began to feel the impact of factionalism within the merchant adventurer grouping, and that would by the mid-tweens have manifested itself in divergent goals, if not paths, in the pursuit of trade, colonization, and the backdoor participation in war with other powers—Spain and Portugal being the most obvious, but even Admiral Thomas Dale, former governor of Virginia, left his post in 1616 and headed for southeast Asia. Thomas Smythe faced within his formerly near monolithic London-based merchant adventurer support base within the Company, a new, somewhat younger group of merchant adventurers that were not a chip off the old block.
Arthur Percival Newton alerts us to how Smythe-style merchant adventurers were perceived by such as the Earls of Warwick as “privileged merchants of the Merchant Adventurers [faction], the East India [Company and other traditional trading companies such as], the Turkey, and other companies who believed in carrying on Elizabethan traditions, and [although they] had been interested in privateering in their earlier years [were no longer involved]. Newton further calls attention to Edwin Sandys who “since his chairmanship of the [House of] Commons committee on the free trade bills of 1604, definitely committed himself to hostility to the privileged companies. He finally injects into both factions the more aggressive entry of aristocrats into foreign affairs in this period and warns us their entry carried with it activities and actions that were derivatives of “Personal rivalries and family feuds [that] were to a considerable extent responsible for the ranging of the aristocratic members of the [Virginia] Company on opposite sides and for their bitterness one against the other. [99] Arthur Percival Newton, the Colonizing Activities of the English Puritans (Yale University Press, Oxford University Press, 1914, pp.20-1
Edmund Morgan picks up on the distinction between Smyth and the Earls of Warwick. The scale of operations in foreign trade of the traditional merchant adventurers by the time of the tweens was notable. Smythe’s merchant adventurers had already made their money and their initiatives reflected their wealth. Smythe was among the most wealthy of all Englishmen. His house on Philpot Street, the headquarters of the Virginia Company, was so large it was alleged to have provided temporary accommodation to the French ambassador and his 120 person entourage. His home estate in Kent was no small matter either. As Morgan posits for these established merchants “Virginia was only one of many ongoing enterprises. These men who had dominated the Company counsels hitherto, could afford to regard Virginia as a long-term investment in which one need not look for immediate success” and these merchant adventurers “were willing to wait for Smythe, who had been highly successful in other ventures, to bring this one to fruition”. [99] Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (W. W. Norton & Company, 1975), p. 92
Such maritime inclined opportunists, possessing the resources and opportunity for investors, gave vent to their ambitions and dreams and engaged in activities that made the seas of colonization and trade more rough and wind blown than ever the mere Atlantic had done to this point. The drift to the Thirty Years War sharpened national ambitions as well, and James’s 1604 peace treaty with Spain that had finally ended that generation’s long war, but left behind a measure of economic, religious and political disruption that triggered a willingness to enter into the vacuum of English power abroad. With mixed motives, infused into each other in the application of foreign affairs activities and pursuit of opportunities and profits, they offered an ever flexible series of strange bedfellows for alliances, and an avalanche of resentments in the aftermath of the coup of 1619. The relatively tranquil seas of the Virginia Company’s early internal politics was lost forever in the mid-tweens of the 1600’s.
Rival merchant adventurers, especially Sir William Courteen, created an alternative with which merchant adventurers could invest in the Atlantic and East Indies employing hybrid trade factory finance and trading practices. Courteen, who traded out of the Dutch cities located in the “English free trading zone” established under treaty with Holland, offered more lucrative opportunities, albeit with their risks, whose time lines at least were more predictable than the Virginia Company—and whose reputation was less soiled.
Courteen in the years after 1616 established trade along “the wild coasts of Guiana” which in these subsequent years produced great volumes of tobacco, and the securing of a patent (from our friend Pembroke to be discussed below) to trade in Barbados as well. Whether he was more committed to colonization and foreign trade capitalism, I would not venture an answer, but I would put forward a notion that however hated colonialization may be today, its definition at the time of the Virginia colony founding had not been agreed upon by those who practiced it.
Courteen was destined over the next generation to acquire the standing which Thomas Smythe held back in 1607, but the merchant adventure grouping bore little resemblance to that in his days of yore. In essence, we must not forget the merchant adventurers of English trade were themselves evolving, while the Virginia Company itself was trying to pivot to a more sustainable permanent settlement strategy. Readers should take away a more pronounced sense of how “experimental” the time in which Virginia first became a colony. By the time the Massachusetts Bay Colony (1628) was founded, the torch of foreign trade had been passed to a younger generation, and for that matter, a new and younger king of England. By the way, a newer revamped Virginia Company was the author of that charter, and its administrator. Times were “a changing” even back then.
All of his was inspiration to the wilder elements of the Virginia Company shareholder base that found the Somers Island more attractive than Virginia—not especially to grow tobacco but as trading port and military base for adventures in West Indies, South America and Caribbean. [99] See L. H. Roper, Advancing Empire: English Interests and Overseas Expansion, 1613-1688 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 29 All of this complicated the preferred merchant adventurer East India trade model which rested primarily of our trading factory business plan, that rested on individual trading voyages and cooperation with the native elites to use “trading hubs” for goods for the “return trip”.
The Dutch were heavily involved in these activities, and that meant English shipping frequently moved to Holland, or to Ireland and some “relaxed” English outer ports. Less we not forget James released Raleigh from the Tower in 1617 and allowed him to conduct an expedition into Guiana. The king was more intense about such trade when he was in the midst of negotiation with the Spanish king on the marriage of his successor to his daughter. There was an ebb and flow to that and by 1618 he was back in negotiation for his son’s marriage to the daughter of the Spanish king—and Europe was to commence the Thirty Years War by the end of that year.
Privateering had been dominant in England during the multi-decade Tudor war with Spain. Many post Jamestown merchant adventurers sprung from the legacy of England’s past experiences—Company investors who came from the outer ports (the Plymouth subsidiary, for example) hailed from Raleigh’s wing, and were therefore quite distinct in their business plan from that carried out by the Smythe London-based now old school merchant adventurers who traded with the European continent and the Levant. The Rich family, therefore, had much more in common with the former than the latter.
In that the Plymouth-Bristol subsidiary barely had a pulse in the early to mid tweens, privateering-inclined traders took shares in the Virginia Company, and then focused their interest on a new Somers Company Corporation which after 1615 had its own charter. The leader of this grouping of merchant investors was a wealthy aristocrat who was to become First Earl of Warwick. He was Somers Island Corporations single largest shareholder. Without any particular plan or conspiracy, the Virginia Company now had a “fifth column” in its midst; one whose traditions and colonization strategy was at serious odds with the permanent settlement strategy that Sandys and Smythe were to work out during the 1616-18 debate within the Virginia Company shareholders.
As early as 1914, the British scholar Arthur Percival Newton called attention to how the privateering-base strategy affected the Virginia Company, and how it overflowed from the creation of a third subsidiary company: the Bermuda colony’s Somers Island Company after 1615.
The two branches of the Virginia Company received their patents from the king in 1606, and the London Company [one of the subsidiaries], among whose members were most of the merchants in whom we are interested [i.e. the merchant adventurers, but not those merchants associated with the traditional cloth and textile trade], and notably Sir Thomas Smythe and the Riches at once took steps to fit out a pioneer expedition ….
The London Company succeeded by 1609 in enlisting in their work the sympathies of almost every rank of society. Englishmen saw in the new colony the only means open to them of continuing the efforts to curb the overweening power of Spain that had been abandoned by King James and his advisors [in his 1604 Treaty ending the war with Spain], but this widespread interest soon failed before the prosaic difficulties of the undertaking, and before long the management fell into the hands of a small number of well-to-do London merchants[the Smythe wing], many of whom had long been interested in privateering enterprises [Accordingly] the Spanish ministers regarded the Virginia colony as a perfidious device of the English government for continuing English piratical enterprise in defiance of the recently concluded treaty
Lying directly in the path of ships northward bound through the Florida channel, the Bermuda Island had an evil reputation through the sixteenth century. … Their importance [to the London Company] was so little appreciated, however, that the active members of [the 1612 Virginia Company] bought out the Virginia Company’s rights [to Bermuda] and formed a fresh company of only one hundred and twenty adventurers to undertake the plantation. The new company entered on its operations with vigor and secured a fresh charter one June 19, 1615. [99] Arthur Percival Newton, the Colonizing Activities of the English Puritans: the Last Phase of the Elizabethan Struggle with Spain (Yale University Press and Oxford University Press, 1914, pp. 19-20. By this method, those investors who preferred their own approach to the Virginia Company development plan were then set up in Virginia, still under the larger Virginia Company auspices, to develop their own approach—which they did.
The first noted instance of privateering and its impact on the Virginia Company’s internal politics occurred in 1617. The episode did not directly affect the Virginia Company in that the privateering happened in the Red Sea, and involved ships owned and operated by Smythe’s East India Company. Indirectly the incident sparked a controversy within the merchant adventurer faction and directly between Smythe and the Richs.
The privateer incident in the Red Sea occurred when two English ships encountered and chased a large Indian ship “belonging to no less a person than the Queen Mother of the Great Mogul ”and captured it. The Indian ship carried cargo worth about L100,000, an incredible sum, that was certain to cause a major uproar with the Mogul. The two privateer ships were owned and part of the privateering fleet of Sir Robert Rich, soon to be the First Earl of Warwick, a longstanding shareholder of the Virginia Company, and the largest shareholder in the Somers Island Company.
Suffice it to say, India and the Mogul were the central pillars on which Smythe and the East India Company were building a trading and political relationship on which an English trading factory colony strategy was to be forged. To that end an overture had been entrusted to Sir Thomas Roe to arrive at such a relationship, and that overture was midstream in its negotiation at the time of the incident. As such the attack on the Indian ship by an English vessel constituted an almost existential rupture on the East India Company’s fortune and its future in East India. There was no way the Mogul and his advisors nor his mother, would understand the distinction between Smythe and the East India Company, and the attack by another English ship.
By good fortune (to the East India Company and the Indian ship), the East India’s trading fleet en route encountered the English privateer ships and seized them. The East India Company kept the ships and the cargo, repaired its relations with the Mogul, and started a law suit between Rich and the East India Company (led by Smythe) that was not resolved until 1628. According to Craven, “much feeling on both sides accompanied [Warwick’s] attempt to secure from the [East India] Company compensation for his loss”. [99] Wesley Frank Craven, the Dissolution of the Virginia Company, p. 83
Shifts in Company Shareholder Composition and Motivations
So fundamental were the requirements imposed on the company to finance a long-term permanent settlement, whose offsetting revenues and profits lay years into the future, that a solution required not only a deferral of profits, but adjusting the entire approach to trade and investment of the merchant adventurer shareholders—the majority of the Company’s earliest investors—and holders of much of her outstanding debt. These folk were Smythe’s core constituency. This pessimism seems to have affected Smythe’s merchant adventurers allies, and the guilds were hard-pressed by the king to invest in his Irish colonial effort, leaving little if anything to Virginia.
William Robert Scott reports that “for the years from 1613 to 1616, the most part of the adventurers abandoned the enterprise [the Virginia Company], leaving it to a small remnant of ‘undaunted spirits” to support it. These under the leadership of Smythe continued to hold meetings every week and to send such supplies as they could obtain to the plantation. This withdrawal of the adventurers meant that the undertaking could not be financed by any considerable further issue of shares.[99] Robert Wilson Scott, the Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish and Irish Joint Stock Companies to 1720, Vol. II (Alpha Editions, 2019, Cambridge University Press, 1910, p. 254.
Edmund Morgan surmised that these merchant adventurers who remained and stayed involved in the Company as “big merchants, for whom Virginia was only one of many ongoing enterprises”. These were the type of investor, Morgan believes were more prone to look at Virginia as a long-term investment “in which one need not look for immediate success. They were disappointed with the results thus far achieved and with the settlers new addiction to tobacco, but they were willing to wait for Smith, who had been highly successful in other ventures to bring this one to fruition” [99] Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (W.W. Norton & Company, 1985), p. 92
There are various ways we can explain the exodus and fracture of the sizeable Virginia Company merchant adventurer faction. One that we have followed thus far is to concentrate on the literal debate that waged in the shareholder meetings, supplemented by concurrent events and dynamics prominent at that moment. The drivers behind this exodus was a variety of factors including competition from Ireland, the failure of James and the insurrection of parliament in the 1614 parliamentary session, the increasing popularity of investing in the Somers Corporation, the reaction of shareholders to the 1616 financial restructure of the Company’s business accompanied by the Company’s inability to play for its required dividend with cash, substituting land grants and headrights instead plus investor-hundreds joint stock associations, and finally, placing blame on Smythe for bad judgement and administration.
If we look at it from Virginia’s reality, however, London’s office politics gives way to a fundamental transformation in how settlement was to occur in Virginia. Departing from its former land and profits belonging to a Company monopoly, the post 1616 Company policy was to promote investment not through selling Company stock shares, but by aggregating shareholders into forming a type of joint stock company, an association, composed of groups of shareholders who entered into contract with the Company to start their own plantation nexus, manage it themselves, and, of course, limit their risk of long-term expenditures through action by their own board of directors, thereby bypassing the Virginia Company.
Here was the pivot in the Company’s business plan and the radical adjustment of its permanent settlement strategy. I might toss into this pivot, the attractiveness of annual tobacco export as the cash export crop that new investors could count on to raise revenues to offset their expenses and hopefully over a period of time lead to some profit. Inadvertently, then, the spread of tobacco, the propensity to evolve tobacco into a monoculture, was a significant factor in the Company’s 1616 pivot. Considering this we can see how the Rolfe-Pocahontas trade mission played into this rather significant shift in the Virginia Company.
Marketing investment by association, a “company within a company” joint stock association—which, not a factor before 1616, gathered a degree of momentum in the following years to 1622. This, however, is an explanation that draws on Virginia’s future, not its present when decisions were being made. The new Company business model explains much, but requires hindsight not available to then-contemporary shareholders.
There is, I believe, a larger dynamic that had been in process previous to 1616. This dynamic encompassed many, if not all of the elements of the “office politics tumult” as well as the reality created by the Company’s business plan pivot, which was not to be launched until 1619. We can see this larger dynamic only if we admit the Virginia Company was only one of very many initiatives and actions ongoing in English colonial trade and colonization during that period.
The great variety of approaches in foreign trade capitalism and the varying definitions of the role and nature of a colony within each of these approaches betrays a reality that was crushing the Virginia Company: England’s foreign trade adventurers, including those in parliament that were attempting to crash into the king’s former preserve in foreign affairs, had not yet worked on a working shared consensus, a rudimentary paradigm on which approach they would follow.
The Company had just worked out one, and was preparing to launch it, but core problem was that even on its board there were several other approaches still in play at the moment. The shareholder democracy expressed in the Company’s regulated joint stock corporation, did little to enforce an internal consensus within the Company; it did nothing to stop shareholders with a different business plan or definition of a colony from, at minimum, continuing to argue its point of view, or simply put implementing its approach in Virginia or Bermuda. The latter is what happened in 1617-1618. Indeed the instructions that constituted the new company approach were not written before November 1618, delivered to a new governor in January 1619, and not introduced into Virginia until the late spring and summer of 1619—an interval in which a coup created new leadership of the Virginia Company.
If I were to explain this flux of policy, and how it would frustrate the Company, we would have to better understand the larger context of England’s merchant adventurer-foreign trade-colonization, and the variety of approaches citing several key individuals on the Company board. These players acted upon their individual approaches while the Greate Charter was being formulated, and continued acting on them in the interval previous to its launch. Moreover, they continued their evolving approach, after it became clear in 1622 and 1623 that the Sandys-inspired pivot had failed, and its failure crashed the Company on the rocks of bankruptcy, internal mutiny, and the loss of its public support by the king.
Ron W. Coan 