subjects.

It is remarkable, that from about 1614, for some seven years, James the
First had governed England without a parliament; and the Virginia
Company was during this period a rallying point for the friends of civil
and religious freedom, and the colony enjoyed the privilege, denied to
the mother country, of holding a legislative assembly.

Yeardley finding a scarcity of corn, undertook to promote the
cultivation of it, and this year was blessed with abundant crops of
grain. But an extraordinary mortality carried off not less than three
hundred of the people. Three thousand acres of land were allotted to the
governor, and twelve thousand to the company. The Margaret, of Bristol,
arrived with some settlers, and "also many devout gifts." The Trial
brought a cargo of corn and cattle. The expenditure of the Virginia
Company at this period, on account of the colony, was estimated at
between four and five thousand pounds a year.

A body of English Puritans, persecuted on account of their
nonconformity, had, in 1608, sought an asylum in Holland. In 1617 they
conceived the design of removing to America, and in 1619 they obtained
from the Virginia Company, by the influence of Sir Edward Sandys, the
treasurer, "a large patent," authorizing them to settle in Virginia.
They embarked in the latter part of the year 1620, in the Mayflower,
intending to settle somewhere near the Hudson River, which lay within
the Virginia Company's territory. The Pilgrims were, however, conducted
to the bleak and barren coast of Massachusetts, where they landed on the
twenty-second day of December, (new style,) 1620, on the rock of
Plymouth. Thus, thirteen years after the settlement of Jamestown, was
laid the foundation of the New England States. The place of their
landing was beyond the limits of the Virginia Company.

In the month of August, 1619, a Dutch man-of-war visited Jamestown and
sold the settlers twenty negroes, the first introduced into Virginia.
Some time before this, Captain Argall sent out, at the expense of the
Earl of Warwick, on a "filibustering" cruise to the West Indies, a ship
called the Treasurer, manned "with the ablest men in the colony," under
an old commission from the Duke of Savoy against the Spanish dominions
in the western hemisphere. She returned to Virginia after some ten
months, with her booty, which consisted of captured negroes, who were
not left in Virginia, because Captain Argall had gone back to England,