d
carpenters fashioning substantial houses; fishermen bringing in the
plentiful yield of the day and dressers preparing the fish for foreign
shipment; joiners, smiths, gardeners, bakers, gun-founders,
ploughwrights, brewers, sawyers, fowlers, each plying his trade in the
New Brittania.

But how different was the reality. Virginia became, not an industrial,
but a distinctly agricultural community. For more than a century it
could boast not a single town worthy of the name.[2-14] It was but a
series of plantations, not large in extent, but stretching out for miles
along the banks of the rivers and creeks, all devoted to the raising of
tobacco. The population of the colony was but the aggregate of the
population of the plantation--the owner, the wage earners, the
indentured servant, a few slaves. Virginia in the Seventeenth century,
despite the design of its founders, developed a life of its own, a life
not only unlike that of England, but unique and distinct.

Immigration, like everything else in the colony, was shaped by the needs
of tobacco. For its successful production the plant does not require
skilled labor or intensive cultivation. The barbarous natives of Africa,
who later in the century were imported in such large numbers, eventually
proved quite adequate to the task. But it does require the service of
many hands. For decades after Rolfe's discovery had opened a new vista
of prosperity for Virginia, fertile land was so cheap that a person even
of moderate means might readily purchase an extensive plantation,[2-15]
but it would be of little service to him unless he could find hands for
clearing away the forests, breaking the soil, tending and curing the
plants.

Of the three requirements of production--natural resources, capital and
labor--the fertile soil furnished the first in abundance, the second
could readily be secured, but the last remained for a full century the
one great problem of the planters. From the days of Sir George Yeardley
to those of Nicholson and Andros there was a persistent and eager demand
for workers. Of this there can be no better evidence than the remarkably
high wages which prevailed in the colony, especially in the years prior
to the Restoration. In fact, it is probable that the laborer received
for his services four or five times the amount he could earn in
England. Even during the time of the London Company we find George
Sandys writing to a friend in London to procure indentured s