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‘had as lief go to the gallows as to the Irish wars’; Ireland and war were nearly synonymous terms.
    All this applied, with the added terrors of the stormy Atlantic, distance and the unknown, to North America. Only the strongest motives could override a distaste for colonization based on a certain knowledge of some extremely unpleasant facts. How sensible that distaste was, how reliable that knowledge, was demonstrated when at last a permanent settlement was achieved in Virginia. The first inhabitants died easily and in large numbers; and 300 of the survivors returned to England in the first nine years of the little colony’s existence.
    The quest of the seventeenth-century capitalist was therefore the same as that of today’s historian. What, both asked, could induce the labouring classes of England to abandon their homes for the dangers of the Virginia voyage?
    The answer cannot, today, be taken direct from the men and women best capable of giving it. To us, the poorer social classes are dumb. They had few means to tell their thoughts to posterity, since they were largely illiterate and since the presses were mostly used for the purposes of their betters, which did not include making surveys of mass opinion. However, among those purposes was a wish to induce large numbers of the better sort of lowly Englishmen to sail for the West. Successful plantations could be built only out of human material superior to that which could be swept together from the prisons, brothels and slums of London and compelled to go to America. The result was a vast literature of propaganda and persuasion directed not so much at the man looking for an investment as at the man looking for a chance in life. From that literature can be learned what their contemporaries thought would move the working men. And on such matters contemporaries are likely to be broadly right. It is only a matter of using the evidence with caution. Who could not learn a lot about the motivation of England today from such a study of English advertising?
    Hakluyt was the greatest author of promotion literature, but he hadcountless imitators. One theme dominates overwhelmingly in their appeals to the people: land-hunger. ‘In Virginia land free and labour scarce; in England land scarce and labour plenty’ was the slogan that summed it up. In a pre-industrial age land was bound to be the most precious commodity, while the labour of his body was often all that a man had to sell. Virginia could, therefore, easily be presented as a land of unique opportunity. To the very poor, a country where an illimitable forest provided an inexhaustible supply of free fuel and free housing materials was patently a land ‘more like the Garden of Eden: which the Lord planted, than any part else of all Earth’. And, as has been noted, the very poor were very numerous in Tudor and Stuart England. So to them was sung:
    To such as to Virginia
    Do purpose to repair;
    And when that they shall hither come,
    Each man shall have his share,
    Day wages for the labourer,
    And for his more content,
    A house and garden plot shall have
    Besides ‘tis further meant
    That every man shall have a post
    And not thereof denied
    Of general profit, as if that he
    Twelve pounds, ten shillings paid.
    The better-off could best be tempted by larger, if similar, inducements:
    With what content shall the particular person employ himself there when he shall find that for a £12 10s. adventure he shall be made lord of 200 acres of land, to him and his heirs forever. And for the charge of transportation of himself, his family and tenants he shall be allotted for every person he carries 100 acres more. And what labourer soever shall transport himself thither at his own charge to have the like proportion of land upon the aforesaid conditions and be sure of employment to his good content for his present maintenance. 5
    Not only was there plenty of the arable land that had grown so expensive, because so scarce, in England.