The Jamestown Experiment Read Online Free PDF Page B

they may be…men as well as women, who wish to go out in this voyage.” Blacksmiths, bakers, carpenters, weavers, shipwrights—all were invited to consider the opportunity to start over in Virginia and establish a thriving trade. To sweeten the pot a bit, readers were reminded that the company would provide “houses to live in, vegetable gardens and orchards, and also food and clothing” at no expense. Not only that, but every settler would “have a share of all the products and the profits that may result from their labor.” In Virginia, the Reverend William Symonds promised, English laborers would find “a land more like the garden of Eden, which the Lord planted, than any part else of all the earth.” It seemed almost too good to be true, and it was. There was not a word about the difficulties the colonists had encountered since May 1607, the fruitless searches for gold and the Northwest Passage, or the lack of any significant commodities to export home. 223
    The same message was finely crafted for the “better sorts,” who held commoners in contempt, assuring them that the colony would be a dumping ground of sorts for the teeming masses. In Nova Britannia, Robert Johnson reminded the nobles and gentlemen, although he did not need to, “Our land [is] abounding with swarms of idle persons, which having no means of labor to relieve their misery, do likewise swarm in lewd and naughty practices.” He warned his readers of the dangers they posed because of the resentments caused by “oppression, diverse kinds of wrongs, mutinies, sedition, commotion and rebellion, scarcity, dearth, poverty, and sundry sorts of calamities.” The answer was evident: send the “idle persons to Virginia where greater opportunities “will make them rich.” 224
    Ministers preached widely of the divine mandate that was callingthem to support the efforts of the company. The Reverend William Symonds compared the providential mission of the settlers to that of Abraham and the ancient Jews in the book of Genesis. England was a chosen nation called to “go and carry the Gospel to a nation that never heard of Christ.” The Reverend Daniel Price spoke from the pulpit at St. Paul’s Cross, arguing that the Indians “know no God but the Devil.” It was the responsibility of English settlers to go forth and “obtain the saving of their souls.” The version of Christian salvation that the English would instruct the natives in was militantly Protestant and steeped in not a little anti-Catholicism. The imperial, economic, and religious objectives all dovetailed perfectly in the English hatred of their mortal enemy: Catholic Spain. 225
    The national mission of England called on Englishmen to rally around the unity of that mission for the glory of England and the Crown. Anyone who doubted the future success of the colony was construed a traitor. Reverend Price declared, “Every opposition against it [Virginia] is an opposition against God, the King, the Church, and the Commonwealth.” Dissenting opinions and honest appraisals of life in the colony were not to be tolerated, since they undermined the national glory. 226
    Of course, the Virginia Company did not depend merely upon pamphlets and sermons to get its message to a broad audience. It also relied upon the personal appeal to the friends and connections of its eminent members. For example, Thomas Smythe met with the heads of some of London’s guilds. The Virginia Company followed up, asking council member Humphrey Weld, the lord mayor of London, to sell shares to “the best disposed and most able of the companies.” Fishmongers, grocers, clothworkers, tailors, and more than fifty other guilds invested in Virginia. 227
    The Earl of Southampton was Shakespeare’s patron and hadconnections with James’s court, the Globe Theatre, and St. Paul’s. He attracted a group of nobles that wrote to the English ambassador in the Netherlands to push subscriptions and military recruitment there.