a corporation.

In 1600 had come into being the East India Company, prototype of many
companies to follow. Now, six years later, there arose under one royal
charter two companies, generally known as the London and the Plymouth. The
first colony planted by the latter was short-lived. Its letters patent were
for North Virginia. Two ships, the Mary and John and the Gift of God,
sailed with over a hundred settlers. These men, reaching the coast of what
is now Maine, built a fort and a church on the banks of the Kennebec. Then
followed the usual miseries typical of colonial venture--sickness,
starvation, and a freezing winter. With the return of summer the enterprise
was abandoned. The foundation of New England was delayed awhile, her
Pilgrims yet in England, though meditating that first remove to Holland,
her Mayflower only a ship of London port, staunch, but with no fame above
another.

The London Company, soon to become the Virginia Company, therefore engages
our attention. The charter recites that Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George
Somers, Knights, Richard Hakluyt, clerk, Prebendary of Westminster,
Edward-Maria Wingfield, and other knights, gentlemen, merchants, and
adventurers, wish "to make habitation, plantation, and to deduce a colony
of sundry of our people into that part of America commonly called
Virginia." It covenants with them and gives them for a heritage all America
between the thirty-fourth and the fortyfirst parallels of latitude.

The thirty-fourth parallel passes through the middle of what is now South
Carolina; the forty-first grazes New York, crosses the northern tip of New
Jersey, divides Pennsylvania, and so westward across to that Pacific or
South Sea that the age thought so near to the Atlantic. All England might
have been placed many times over in what was given to those knights,