Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 2.djvu/40

38 the country which afterwards formed the provinces of Maryland, Virginia, and North and South Carolina; the second called the Company of Plymouth Adventurers, to whom was assigned all the territory to the north of this as far as to the 45th degree of latitude, including the modern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and the New England States. The London Company that same year sent out a hundred settles in two ships, who founded, about three miles from the mouth of the Powhatan (now called James River), the present town, still known by its original name, of James Town, in Virginia. In 1610 this company obtained a second charter, incorporating them anew by the name of the Treasurer and Company of Adventurers and Planters of the City of London for the First Colony of Virginia, and empowering them to grant lands to the adventurers and planters, to appoint a resident council, to place and displace officers, &c.—in short, granting them all the powers of self-government. In 1612 a settlement was formed on the Bermuda, or Somers Isles, by a company of persons, to whom the king granted a charter after they had purchased the islands from the Virginian Company, who claimed the dominion of them in consequence of their having been discovered, as was supposed, by two of their captains, Sir George Somers and Sir Thomas Gates, who were shipwrecked on one of them in the course of a voyage to Virginia in 1609, and lived there for nine months, though they had been really visited a hundred years before by Bermuda, a Spanish navigator. In 1616, Sir Walter Raleigh, released from his long confinement in the Tower, received from James his commission to undertake the voyage to Guiana, in South America, which the gallant adventurer entered upon in the spring of the following year, and the fatal issue of which is well known. Raleigh, setting sail on the 28th of March, 1617, in command of a fleet of fourteen vessels, did not reach the coast of Guiana till the 13th of November; he returned to England in June 1618, after having lost his eldest son in fighting with the Spaniards, and having been foiled in all his attempts; was immediately on his landing arrested