Plymouth, Virginia Company of (1606–1620), one of two companies incorporated in the first Virginia charter in 1606. In 1605 a group of men representing the City of London and the outports of Bristol, Plymouth, and Exeter petitioned for a charter to plant colonies in America. Although the petitioners were men bound by the ties of relationship, friendship, or common interest, the rivalry between London and the outports was such that the leaders wished to proceed with the project under separate companies. The charter of 1606 therefore created two companies, the Virginia Company of London and the Virginia Company of Plymouth. The London Company had permission to establish a colony in southern Virginia between thirty-four and forty-one degrees north latitude (i.e., from present-day South Carolina to New York), to be called the First Colony of Virginia. The Plymouth Company would establish the Second Colony of Virginia, to be located farther north, between thirty-eight and forty-five degrees north latitude (i.e., from Chesapeake Bay to what is now northernmost Maine). The overlapping area was to be a neutral zone in which the settlements could not come within one hundred miles of each other.
The Plymouth Company, like the London Company, was to be under the jurisdiction of the royal council for Virginia, but it had its own resident council of thirteen to govern its projected plantation. To what extent the company could control the trade of its colony was not made clear in the charter. The leaders of the Plymouth Company were Sir John Popham and Sir Ferdinando Gorges.
The Plymouth Company sent its first expedition in the summer of 1606 to seek a desirable site for a plantation. The vessel was captured en route by the Spanish near Puerto Rico, where it had been driven by adverse winds, and the men were carried off as prisoners to Spain. Only a few made their way back to Plymouth.
A second vessel, dispatched in the autumn of 1606, reached the coast of Maine in safety. It returned with such glowing accounts that in May 1607 the company sent out two ships carrying settlers, the Gift of God and the Mary and John. They began a plantation near the mouth of the Sagadahoc (now Kennebec) River and built Fort St. George, but the colony did not prosper. Gorges ascribed its failure to lack of food and to "childish factions." The cold winter, the loss of the storehouse and many dwellings to fire, and the consequent shortage of supplies weakened the planters' interest. The death of some of the men whom Gorges had left in charge of the settlement—including the governor, George Popham, a nephew of Sir John—discouraged the company in England from pushing the enterprise further. However, some of the company's members continued their interest in the fisheries and sent out several expeditions to fish and trade with the Indians. Profits from these activities were sufficient to convince men like Gorges of the region's potential and thus to pave the way for reorganizing the project in 1620 under a new company, the Council for New England.
Bibliography
Greene, Jack P. Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.
