lived. Its letters
patent were for North Virginia. Two ships, the Mary and John and the
Gift of God, sailed with over a hundred settlers. These men, reaching
the coast of what is now Maine, built a fort and a church on the banks
of the Kennebec. Then followed the usual miseries typical of colonial
venture--sickness, starvation, and a freezing winter. With the return of
summer the enterprise was abandoned. The foundation of New England was
delayed awhile, her Pilgrims yet in England, though meditating that
first remove to Holland, her Mayflower only a ship of London port,
staunch, but with no fame above another.

The London Company, soon to become the Virginia Company, therefore
engages our attention. The charter recites that Sir Thomas Gates and
Sir George Somers, Knights, Richard Hakluyt, clerk, Prebendary of
Westminster, Edward-Maria Wingfield, and other knights, gentlemen,
merchants, and adventurers, wish "to make habitation, plantation, and
to deduce a colony of sundry of our people into that part of America
commonly called Virginia." It covenants with them and gives them for
a heritage all America between the thirty-fourth and the forty-first
parallels of latitude.

The thirty-fourth parallel passes through the middle of what is now
South Carolina; the forty-first grazes New York, crosses the northern
tip of New Jersey, divides Pennsylvania, and so westward across to that
Pacific or South Sea that the age thought so near to the Atlantic. All
England might have been placed many times over in what was given to
those knights, gentlemen, merchants, and others.

The King's charter created a great Council of Virginia, sitting in
London, governing from overhead. In the new land itself there should
exist a second and lesser council. The two councils had authority within
the range of Virginian matters, but the Crown retained the power of
veto. The Council in Virginia might coin money for trade with the
Indians, expel invaders, import settlers, punish ill-doers, levy and
collect taxes--should have, in short, dignity and power enough for any
colony. Likewise, acting for the whole, it might give and take orders
"to dig, mine and search for all manner of mines of gold, silver and
copper... to have and enjoy... yielding to us, our heirs and successors,
the fifth part only of all the same gold and silver, and the fifteenth
part of all the same copper."

Now are we ready--it being Christmas-tide of the year 1606--to go to
Vir