lers and to equip them properly.
Soon fleets of considerable size were leaving the English ports for
America, their decks and cabins crowded with emigrants and their holds
laden with clothing, arms and farming implements.[150] During the months
from March 1620 to March 1621 ten ships sailed, carrying no less than
1051 persons.[151] In the year ending March, 1622, seventeen ships
reached Virginia, bringing over fifteen hundred new settlers.[152] And
this stream continued without abatement until 1624, when disasters in
Virginia, quarrels among the shareholders and the hostility of the King
brought discouragement to the Company. In all, there reached the colony
from November, 1619, to February, 1625, nearly five thousand men, women
and children.[153]

Although tobacco culture was the only enterprise of the colony which had
yielded a profit, it was not the design of Sandys and his friends that
that plant should monopolize the energies of the settlers. They hoped to
make Virginia an industrial community, capable of furnishing the mother
country with various manufactured articles, then imported from foreign
countries. Especially anxious were they to render England independent in
their supply of pig iron. Ore having been discovered a few miles above
Henrico on the James, a furnace was erected there and more than a
hundred skilled workmen brought over from England to put it into
operation. Before the works could be completed, however, they were
utterly demolished by the savages, the machinery thrown into the river,
all the workmen slaughtered,[154] and the only return the Company
obtained for an outlay of thousands of pounds was a shovel, a pair of
tongs and one bar of iron.[155] Efforts were made later to repair the
havoc wrought by the Indians and to reestablish the works, but they came
to nothing. Not until the time of Governor Spotswood were iron furnaces
operated in Virginia, and even then the industry met with a scant
measure of success.

The Company also made an earnest effort to promote the manufacture of
glass in Virginia. This industry was threatened with extinction in
England as a result of the great inroads that had been made upon the
timber available for fuel, and it was thought that Virginia, with its
inexhaustible forests, offered an excellent opportunity for its
rehabilitation. But here too they were disappointed. The sand of
Virginia proved unsuitable for the manufacture of glass. The skilled
Italian artisans