BAYNE: [THE SETTLEMENT OF VIRGINIA III 
1606, Sir John Popham, Chief Justice of England, was the leader 
of a project of sending private individuals to people Virginia. 
The watchful Spaniard, reporting these occurrences to his royal 
master, said that Sir John was a very great Puritan and exceed- 
‘ingly desirous, when his attention was called to violation of treaties, 
“to say that he did it in order to drive out from here thieves and 
traitors, to be drowned in the sea!” But Sir John said something 
quite different in the petition which he and his associates were 
instrumental in presenting to the king for a charter for his new 
venture. The purpose was, not to “ drown thieves and traitors in 
the sea,” but in the devout, loyal, and ample phrases of the time: 
“to make habitation, plantation, and to deduce a colony of sundry 
his (majesty’s) people into that part of America commonly called 
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Virginia’; “ whereas God might be aboundantly made knowen; 
His name enlarged and honoured; a notable nation made fortu- 
nate; and ourselves famous ’’; “that a plantation should be settled 
in Virginia for the glorie of God in the propagation of the Gospell 
of Christ, the conversion of the savages, to the honour of his 
majesty, by the enlargeinge of his territories and future enrichinge 
.of his kingdome, for which respects many noble and well minded 
persons were induced to adventure great sums of money to the 
advancement of soe pious and noble a work.” 
_ Sir Fernando Gorges, a member of the first council for Virginia, 
in his “ Briefe Narration of the Originall Undertakings of the 
Advancement of Plantations into the parts of America,” states 
that when peace was concluded between England and Spain, a 
ereat number of English soldiers and seamen were discharged 
from service, and these being destitute of employment, rather than 
hire themselves as mercenaries to foreign princes, chose, in the 
language of the author, “to put in practice the reviving resolution 
of those free spirits, that rather chose to spend themselves in 
seeking a new world, than servilely to be hired but as slaughterers 
in the quarrels of strangers.” 
Beside this many agricultural laborers had been gradually thrown 
out of employment by the change from the general tillage of the 
