Armada made colonialism in North America feasible. With the mortal
threat to England ended, a new venture could be mounted. What the gov-
ernment would not do and what an individual could not do might be
accomplished by a coalition of wealthy and determined men. Ralegh
turned over his patent to a group of merchants who in 1606 organized the
Virginia Company of London.
The Virginia Company had its roots in associations that Muslims and
Jews began to create centuries before to facilitate Mediterranean commerce,
banking, and insurance. Their ways of spreading risk were adopted later by
Italian entrepreneurs whose joint-stock companies made possible the com-
mercial revolution that “reawakened” Europe. Reaching England in the six-
teenth century, the Muslim-Jewish-Italian experience gave birth to what
became the powerful arm of English imperialism in Asia: the East India
Company. The charter of that company, in turn, was the model for the
London Company of Virginia. And it was not only the model: the key fig-
ure in both companies was the greatest English merchant of the time, Sir
Thomas Smyth. Smyth would pick up where Ralegh had faltered.
Almost immediately, merchants in the port towns in western England,
who had been the pioneers in the Atlantic trade and who felt left out of the
new project, agitated to get a piece of North America for themselves. Their
activities produced a sequence of ventures of which the Plymouth Com-
pany, also chartered in 1606, was the first. Attempting to set up a trading
station at the mouth of the Kennebec River in 1607, it aimed to do in “New
England”—as Captain John Smith would later name the place—what the
London Company was starting to do in Virginia.
Like many ventures in our own times, the London Company began
with a tax break: it would pay no customs until it became profitable; fur-
ther, it was constituted as virtually an autonomous kingdom under the
English crown. Immediately, the directors organized a campaign to mobi-
lize public support by revolutionary advertising; even the great poet John
Donne, then dean of St. Paul’s cathedral, was hired to trumpet the
prospects. Advertising paid off: in 1612, the company organized a “great
fleet” loaded with 600 new settlers, supplies, and a small herd of cattle,
pigs, and poultry. To help it raise money, the company was given permis-
sion to run a national lottery. The lottery was the only endeavor in which
Early Days in the Colonies 105