Sir Walter Raleigh (1554?-1618) was born in Devon, England. After serving as a mercenary in France, Raleigh joined the court of Elizabeth I where he soon became a favorite of the Queen. He took over half of his brother’s Humphrey Gilbert’spatent to explore and colonize the east coast of America in 1584. He sent three expeditions to North America. The first, in 1584, was chiefly a reconnaissance mission. Two natives, Manteo and Wanchese were taken back to England along with promising reports of a new land. The second, in 1585, created a base camp for further exploration. This expedition included artist John White, Thomas Hariot and several others.  These colonists only lasted through the winter and spring before they accepted a ride in June 1586 with Sir Francis Drake who was passing by en-route home from the West Indies. Sir Richard Grenville arrived on Roanoke Island a few weeks later, only to find it deserted.  He left fifteen of his own men to maintain England’s claim to the new land. On the final expedition, in 1587,John White returned leading another expedition that was bound for the Chesapeake Bay.  With the intention of only stopping by to pick up the men left earlier by Grenville, the settlers were put ashore by a captain intent on returning to a privateering expedition.  No trace of the 15 men left by Grenville were ever found, and the colonists soon found themselves without supplies.  White agreed to return to England for supplies.  He returned to the New World in 1590 and these colonists had also disappeared. The fate of the colonists remains a mystery. The settlement is known today as "The Lost Colony."  Raleigh was beheaded on October 19, 1618 on a treason charge.
 

The Virginia Companies:

The profits of trading companies designed to exploit regions other than America were so good that a group of investors was soon formed to begin where Raleigh had left off.  King James I who had succeeded Elizabeth on the English throne was persuaded to issue a charter to some London and Plymouth merchants who had in mind the establishment of new outposts of trade in Virginia.  This charter was issued in 1606.  The terms of this charter the stockholder were subdivided into two companies. The London Company and the Plymouth Company.  Each company was promised a tract of land along the Virginia coast a hundred miles in width and extending a hundred miles into the interior.  The charter also stipulated that the land of the London Company should be located somewhere between the thirty-fourth and the forty-first parallels, while the land of the Plymouth Company should lie farther north, between the thirty-eighth and the forty-fifth parallels.  Also neither colony could establish a colony within one hundred miles of any colony established by the other.

The London merchants were the first to take advantage of this grant.  In December 1606, they sent out three shiploads of colonists, who the next spring founded Jamestownat a point thirty miles inland from the mouth of the James River.  A steady stream of colonists and supplies were sent to Virginia for the next seventeen years. 

The death rate among the early colonists was very high.  Of the one hundred and four adventurers who reached Virginia in the spring of 1607 only thirty-eight were alive that fall, and for many years one half to two thirds of any given lot of immigrants were doomed to death within a few months from the date of their arrival.  As late as 1616 over sixteen hundred emigrants had left England for Virginia, but the population of the colony was only about three hundred and fifty. 

In 1622 there was what we not call the Indian Massacres.  The Indians at this time killed many of the colonist.  In spite of the unfavorable odds the number of Virginians grew and by the time of the 1624 muster there were as many as twelve hundred people in the colony.
 

During these years the Virginia experiment was carried on as a strictly business enterprise.  The local managers, or Governors, acted as agents for the London Company and directed the work of the company servants, who constituted the great majority of the settlers.  These servants had often been paupers or convicts in England.  They came to Virginia under “indentures” or contracts which bound them to work for the company (or individual who paid their way to Virginia) from four to seven years in return for their passage across the Atlantic and the prospect of receiving 50 acres of land when their term of service came to an end.

Supplies were bought from England and provisions that the plantations produced were kept in common storehouses and were doled out to the settlers as needed.  Lumber, dyestuffs and sassafras were sent back to England  from the first.  Latter tobacco became the chief crop. 

Toward the end of the company rule the right to private ownership of land was conceded and liberal grants were make to indentured servants whose period of service had expired and to all freemen.  The harsh laws deemed necessary during he first years of the colony were abrogated and a representative assembly freely elected by the inhabitants to consist of two representatives from each plantation was authorized to share in the making of the laws.

For a time the affairs of the colony aroused much interest in England, and many prominent men bought stock in the venture.  In order to increase the power of the company and to enlarge its territory, the original charter of 1606 was twice revised, once in 1609 and again in 1611.  The new land grant was especially generous, for it gave the company a frontage along the coast of two hundred miles north and two hundred miles south of Old Point Comfort, while inland the company’s rights were to extend “west and northwest” from sea to sea. King James regretted the liberal powers of government he had permitted the company to exercise, and he especially disliked the concessions so popular rule that it had made.  He obtained in 1624 from a subservient court an annulment of the charter.  All governmental rights now devolved upon the King, and Virginia became a royal colony.  The Virginians lost the help they had been accustomed to receive from the London Company, but they were permitted to retain their land titles, and after some hesitation on the part of the King, their representative assembly.  The stockholders in the company lost was total.

The success of the tobacco culture was what enabled the Virginia colony to survive.  When the Jamestown settlement was made, the use of tobacco was already known in Europe, but the tobacco Europeans firs learned to like came from the Spanish colonies in America.  Virginia tobacco was regarded as inferior and undesirable until about 1616, when a new method of curing it was discovered.  From this time on the Jamestown colonists had a product that would yield them a profit and the colony soon began to prosper.  Land was easy to obtain under the “headright” system, by which each immigrant and each person who paid for an immigrant’s passage received fifty acres.  The more prosperous planters came to own many headrights, and even in the seventeenth century there was a tendency toward large plantations.

As the prosperity of the colony increased its population increased.  Many new comers came in response to an insistent demand for more labor.  Tobacco planters who could afford to do so imported indentured servants, some had criminal records, but most were merely poor or unfortunate.  English children of the lower classes were sometimes kidnapped and sold into servitude and frequently political prisoners were sold under indenture.  The indentured servants in due time became free, obtained plots of land along the western fringe of settlement and shared with others whatever prosperity the New World had to offer.

Negroes were bought into the colony starting in 1619, either as servants or as slaves.  Unlike the white indentured servants, the Negroes could not be easily assimilated into the free population and their status passed quickly from servitude to slavery.

During the middle decades of the seventeenth century war broke out in England between the adherents of the King, or “Cavaliers” and the supporters of Parliament, or “Roundheads.”  In 1649 the “Roundheads” triumphed and executed King Charles I.  Many of the Kings supporters sought safety in Virginia.  By 1652 the population of the colony was estimated at twenty thousand.

The civil War in England was not without tits repercussions in Virginia. Sir William Berkeley, governor of Virginia from 1642 to 1677, was a strong supporter of the King, and after 1660, when Charles II was restored to the English throne, he set rigid limits on popular rule.  Berkeley'’ favoritism for the eastern planters, and his indifference for the welfare of the common people, particularly those who lived some distance from the seaboard, aroused much criticism and his failure to deal firmly with an Indian disturbance along the frontier let to open revolt.  The leader of this movement was Nathaniel Bacon, who in 1676 put himself at the head of an expedition which adequately chastised the Indians.  Berkeley was outraged at this act of insubordination, but he feared to punish Bacon, instead he called for long over due legislative elections.  Bacon was chosen as the representative of an interior constituency, and became the leading spirit in the new assembly. The assembly voted to send Bacon on another expedition against the Indians.  While his opponent was away on this mission, the governor raised an army against him, so that on his return Bacon found himself obliged to lay siege to the city of Jamestown.  The siege was successful, Berkeley fled across the Chesapeake, and Jamestown was burned.  At the moment of victory Bacon fell sick and died.  Deprived of their leader, the rebels were no match for the irate governor, who took bloody vengeance and according to Charles II, “hanged more men in that naked country than I have done for the murder of my father.” As a result of these excesses Berkeley in 1677 was recalled to England in disgrace and conditions in Virginia gradually became normal.