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Mostrando las entradas de marzo 8, 2009

1608

A little exporting was immediately begun. So early as May 20, 1608, Jamestown sent to England a ship laden with iron ore, sassafras, cedar posts, and walnut boards. Another followed on June 2d, with a cargo all of cedar wood. This year or the next, small quantities of pitch, tar, and glass were sent. From 1619 tobacco was so common as to be the currency. About 1650 it was largely exported, a million and a half pounds, on the average, yearly. The figure had risen to twelve million pounds by 1670. At the middle of the century, corn, wheat, rice, hemp, flax, and fifteen varieties of fruit, as well as excellent wine were produced. A wind-mill was set up about 1620, the first in America. It stood at Falling Creek on the James River. The pioneer iron works on the continent were in this colony, hailing from about the date last named. Community of property prevailed at Jamestown in all the earliest years, as it did at Plymouth. After the event noted by John Rolfe: "about the last of Augus

1606, 1607

1606. We have now arrived at the seventeenth century. In 1606 King James I. issued the first English colonial charter. It created a first and a second Virginia Company, the one having its centre in London, and coming to be known as the London Company; the other made up of Bristol, Exeter, and Plymouth men, and gradually taking the title of the Plymouth Company. This latter company, the second, or Plymouth Company, authorized to plant between 38 degrees and 45 degrees north, effected a settlement in 1607 at the mouth of the Kennebec River. Little came of it but suffering, the colonists, after a severe winter, returning to England. 1607. A colony of one hundred and five planters sent out by the first or London Company, proceeded, also in 1607, to Chesapeake Bay, entering James River, to which they indeed gave this name, and planted upon its banks Jamestown, the first permanent English colony on the continent.This London Company consisted of a council in England, appointed by the king,

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