The Virginia Company

There were three Royal charters issued to the Virginia Company of London, organized for profit by >merchants, manufacturers, statesmen and artists who bound themselves in a joint stock enterprise. The company provided an agency for assembling adventure capital and supplying able management. The attraction was an opportunity for industrious persons to participate in the growing wealth and expanding power of the English middle class. Shareholders met in quarterly courts to discuss the business of the Company and participate in its management. These courts were the counterpart to our present corporate stockholders' meetings.

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Adventurers Sent by the Virginia Company of London

In the beginning there were two companies of the Virginia adventurers. One was headquartered in London and the other in the western outpost of Plymouth.  At that time Englishmen used the name Virginia to designate the full sweep of the North American coast that lay above Spanish Florida. In the original charter the adventurers were granted rights of exploration, trade as well as settlement on the coast of Virginia within limits that reacher 34 degrees of latitude in the south to 45 degrees in the north, which is to say, from the mouth of the Cape Fear River in Lower North Carolina to a point midway through the modern state of Maine. The Plymouth grantees had a primary interest in the northern area that Captain John Smith would later name New England and they established a colony at Sagadahoc in August of 1607, only a few weeks after the settlement of Jamestown. However, these colonists barely survived the winter and abandoned the spot during the Spring of 1608.  Source: The Virginia Company of London by Wesley Frank Craven.

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