f planting a
new colony. Many, doubtless, were men of ruined fortune, who sought to
find in the New World a rapid road to wealth. When it became known in
England that gold mines were not to be found in Virginia and that
wealth could be had only by the sweat of the brow, these spendthrift
gentlemen ceased coming to the colony.

It is true, however, that the proportion of those officially termed
"gentlemen" that sailed with the early expeditions to Jamestown is
surprisingly large. Of the settlers of 1607, out of one hundred and
five men, thirty-five were called gentlemen.[2] The First Supply,
which arrived in 1608, contained thirty-three gentlemen out of one
hundred and twenty persons.[3] Captain John Smith declared these men
were worthless in character, more fitted "to spoyle a commonwealth
than to begin or maintain one," and that those that came with them as
"laborers" were really footmen in attendance upon their masters. In
the Second Supply came twenty-eight gentlemen in a total company of
seventy.[4] The conduct of those of the Third Supply shows them to
have been similar in character to their predecessors. Smith calls them
a "lewd company," among them "many unruly gallants packed thither by
their friends to escape il destinies."[5] These men, however, made
practically no imprint upon the character of the population of the
colony; for by far the larger part of them perished miserably within a
few months after their arrival. Of the five hundred persons alive in
Virginia in October, 1609, all but sixty had died by May of the
following year.[6]

As years went by, this influx of dissipated gentlemen began to wane.
It could not be concealed in England that the early settlers had
perished of starvation, disease and the tomahawk, and those that had
been led to believe that Virginia was an Eldorado, turned with a
shudder from the true picture of suffering and death told them by
those that returned from the colony. Moreover, the London Company soon
learned that no profit was to be expected from a colony settled by
dissipated gentlemen, and began to send over persons more suited for
the rough tasks of clearing woods, building huts and planting corn.
Their immigrant vessels were now filled with laborers, artisans,
tradesmen, apprentices and indentured servants. It is doubtless true
that occasionally gentlemen continued to arrive in Virginia even
during the last years of the Company's rule, yet their number must
have been ver