Having protested his interference as unwarranted, the quarter court in May 1620 adjourned without electing a treasurer. Instead, the adventurers appointed a special committee to call on the king for the purpose of acquainting him with the true facts regarding "the managing of their business this last year" and to ask for a free election. Sandys himself appealed to the royal favorite, the young Duke of Buckingham, but with no effect on the king's decision. When the adventurers reassembled late in June, they elected the Earl of Southampton as treasurer. Thus, in a sense both parties to the dispute emerged victorious. Sandys was no longer treasurer, but the adventurers had refused to elect a merchant and Southampton would preside thereafter in behalf of Sandys. There can be no doubt that Sandys continued to be the leader of the company. Moreover, in 1621 he extended his power by gaining control of the Somers Island Company through the election of Southampton to its governorship.
A question that naturally arises is that of how, or why, Sir Edwin was able to survive this challenge to his leadership. The news from Virginia was by no means encouraging. Given the long record of disappointment there, and the many men who previously had died there, the fact that several hundred of the most recent settlers had succumbed might have been expected to unsettle any administration. Perhaps it was the king's interference, serving as it did to rally the adventurers in defence of the company's liberty. Perhaps Sir Thomas was guilty of too naked a display of his power, with the result that the lesser adventurers, who already had been taught to view the great merchants of the company with suspicion, rallied to the support of Sandys. Perhaps it was because the Earl of Warwick and Sir Thomas had not learned yet the need for effective teamwork; both men disliked Sandys, but they had their own quarrels and they would not form a real coalition against him for another two years. All these possibilities must be given consideration, but there would seem to be still another reason, possibly the most important of all.
Sir Edwin Sandys was a man of remarkable gifts, and nowhere are these gifts better demonstrated than in his ability to stimulate the highest hopes for Virginia. Before him only Richard Hakluyt, a patriot now dead four years, had managed better to depict the promise America held for Englishmen. Sandys wrote no major work on the subject, and even the company's promotional pamphlets, which he undoubtedly shaped in some large part, lacked the fire that Hakluyt, or even Alderman Johnson, could impart to that branch of literature. It must be said also that Sandys added no new idea to those which for a generation past had guided Englishmen in their American ventures. His program included not a single objective that the Virginia Company had not theretofore tried to realize; the chief contrast with former programs was the absence of any emphasis on the prospect that a route to the South Seas might be found, an objective the adventurers had dropped for all practical purposes a good many years before Sandys became their treasurer. But Sandys had confidence, a systematic and orderly mind, and a persuasive way of talking in the quarter court or in conference with the individual adventurer who contemplated some new risk of capital. As a result, he managed to convey the impression that plans had now been so well thought through that Hakluyt's objectives in America had at last become attainable.
Leaving aside the search for a passage to China, which may never have been so important to Hakluyt as it was to the people whose interest in America he sought to enlist, Sandys undertook to carry through, all at once, the program Hakluyt had outlined for Queen Elizabeth as early as 1584 in his famous "Discourse on Western Planting." It was a program that looked to the development in America of products that would free England of dependence upon trades with other parts of the world which were in any way disadvantageous to England, and that would guarantee to any Englishmen who developed such products a sure profit on their investment. It was a program that had taken its shape first from the prospect, in Raleigh's day, of an early war with Spain, and perhaps it should be noted that when Sandys came to office in 1619 the Thirty Years War had only recently had its beginning with the king's own son-in-law a central figure. The war has gone down in our history books as the last of the great religious wars, and many were the Englishmen who thought that England should be, or would be soon involved.
In Virginia, Sandys promised to produce iron. It is strange that the attempt to develop an iron industry in Virginia, on which the company spent all told something like £5,000, should have made less impression on modern historians than has an early and brief search for gold that was incidental to other explorations. The iron industry in England was suffering from the depletion of the island's wood supply, which was still depended upon for smelting, and Virginia promised an unlimited supply. Other industries that he hoped to develop in the colony are suggested by a list of tradesmen the company invited to adventure to Virginia in 1620: among them, sawyers, joiners, shipwrights, millwrights, coopers, weavers, tanners, potters, fishermen, fishhookmakers, netmakers, leather dressers, limeburners, and dressers of hemp and flax. Even more important because so much depended upon persuading the individual adventurers to invest their own money in the development of their land, were plans for the production of sugar, wine, indigo, silk, cotton, olive oil, rice, etc. In the development of these products Sandys intended the public lands—those cultivated under the direct supervision of the company and by its own tenants—to serve more or less in the capacity of experimental farms. For their planting he sought seeds and plants from various parts of the world. On the college land he had some 10,000 grapevines set out, and sent for their care foreign experts imported from the continent. To make sure that private estates would not be devoted wholly to tobacco, as yet the colony's only proven staple, he wrote into land patents a stipulation that other staples would be given a trial.
To find the money for investment in the public lands was no easy task. No common joint-stock fund could be raised in 1619, if only because the company's plans depended chiefly upon the hope of inducing the adventurers to invest in their own lands. It cannot be said how successful were the renewed attempts to collect from delinquent subscribers, but perhaps some help came from that source. Sandys depended also, as had Smith before him, on the Virginia lottery, perhaps more than upon any other source, for the lottery was terminated early in 1621 by order of the privy council on grounds that included the complaint of parliament that the lottery had become a public nuisance. A very substantial help to Sir Edwin was the bishops' fund for an Indian college and additional funds raised for the support of an Indian school in the colony. The total ran to better than £2,000. It had been decided in 1618, well before Sandys' election, that the money from the bishops' fund would be invested in an estate to be known as the College Land, and the precedent thus set was followed in disposing of funds subsequently made available to the company for an Indian school. In practical terms, these decisions meant that all mission funds were used to send out tenants on the promise that a half-share of the wine and other such commodities as they might produce would in time provide a permanent endowment for the school and the college. The decision reflects both the extraordinary poverty of the company and the extraordinary confidence with which its leaders approached their new ventures in Virginia.
By the spring of 1621, when the bulk of the college funds had been expended and the lottery was terminated, Sir Edwin's financial resources had become even more skimpy and uncertain. Some projects, such as that for the settlement of Italian glass-workers who were to manufacture pottery and beads for use in the Indian trade, could be financed by subscriptions to a special joint-stock, but this device offered no help in meeting general expenses. As a result, Sandys continued to take certain shortcuts, or perhaps the blame should rest rather on Deputy John Ferrar. In any case, the colonists complained that shipping came out so overloaded with passengers as to invite the epidemic disease with which they usually suffered on landing, and which made of newcomers a useless burden on the colony for some time after their arrival. The deathrate among the colonists continued to be high. The time and energy required to house them, or to feed them, unavoidably forced delay with projects on which Sandys had pinned his chief hopes. He was especially disappointed over the slow progress of agricultural experimentation. Accordingly, when Yeardley's three year term was ended in 1621 and Sir Francis Wyatt was sent as his replacement, Sir Edwin also sent his brother, George Sandys, as appointee to a new office of treasurer. He was given special charge of all projects looking to the development of new staple commodities and was intrusted with the collection of rents, of which the company claimed £1,000 were presently due. These rents, which were to be collected largely from half-share tenants who had migrated within the preceding three years, undoubtedly now constituted the company's main hope for an immediate revenue. Except in a very few instances, no quitrents would be payable until 1625, and so general had been the disappointment experienced so far with special projects that further time would have to be allowed before any return from them could be expected. In short, the company had exhausted its very limited resources in getting Wyatt and George Sandys out to Virginia, and had nothing left but hopes for the future and the anticipation of a small immediate revenue from the rents of its own tenants, most of which had already been assigned to such special charges as the support of public officers in the colony. In London, virtually the only asset left to the company was the will and determination of Sir Edwin Sandys.
In these circumstances, Sandys necessarily devoted his main energies after 1621 to the problem of tobacco, the only marketable staple the colony had as yet produced. It was an old problem, but one now filled with new difficulties. In earlier days, when it had been hoped that tobacco might be one of a variety of staples produced in the colony, the Virginia Company, like the Bermuda Company, had lent encouragement to efforts looking to its production. But hardly had early experiments proved successful before the adventurers faced the risk that tobacco would take over the colony entirely. There is nothing surprising in this development, for a tobacco plant, unlike a grapevine or an olive tree, matures within a few months of its planting, and the tobacco habit at this time was a thing of comparably rapid growth in many parts of the world. To settlers who had been staked by adventurers ever insistent upon a prompt return of their capital, or who wondered how best to procure the means to make payment for the supplies brought in the next magazine ship, the obvious answer was to plant the land to tobacco. After doing this, if time and energy remained, they might try some of Sir Edwin Sandys' ideas—maybe set out a few grapevines or mulberries, as they had been instructed to do. There was good reason for the growing fear among the leading adventurers in London that tobacco might put a blight on all other projects.
More than that, the increasing shipments of tobacco, especially in view of the still relatively poor quality of the Virginia leaf, gave the colony a bad name just when its good name was so important to the promotional efforts of the company. The tobacco habit did not yet have the respectable associations it would later acquire in the eighteenth century. Instead, it was associated with tippling or bawdy houses, where in truth a pipe was most easily had by the contemporary resident of London. Moral considerations were reinforced by an additional concern for the public interest. So much of the weed consumed came from Spain that thoughtful men were inclined to consider how much England paid out, to the profit of the Spaniard, for a commodity which added nothing to the well being of the country. Had it not been for the influence of Virginia and Bermuda adventurers in the House of Commons, Parliament in 1621 might well have prohibited all importation of tobacco into England. And in all England there was no more vigorous opponent of tobacco than the king himself. Indeed, the king had even written a book on the subject.
The attitude of King James had a most important bearing on another angle of the problem. Under its charter, the company had been allowed a seven year exemption from import duties on cargoes brought from Virginia. When this exemption expired in 1619, the government immediately imposed a duty that was fixed early in 1620 at 1s. per pound of tobacco. Though this was only half the duty paid by Spanish tobacco, it was nonetheless a heavy burden to be imposed upon leaf that was declared never to have sold at more than 5s. a pound and that brought an average of only 2s. for the better grade in 1620.[A] The adventurers' attempted escape by shipping their tobacco to Holland won them a sharp reprimand from the privy council, and an order to bring all of Virginia's tobacco to England for payment of his majesty's customs. As negotiations with the king's ministers for some relief continued, it was proposed in 1622 that the Virginia and Bermuda adventurers might take over the tobacco monopoly, which was a grant of the sole right to import tobacco of any sort into the kingdom in return for a fixed contribution to the royal revenues. The holder of such a monopoly—a very common device at the time—was entitled to collect the customs and to hope that what he collected, plus the advantage of a monopolistic control of the market, might enable him to clear a profit on the transaction. Here, in other words, was a proposal that might provide the needed relief, even some income for the company's hard pressed treasury. The Virginia Company by 1622 was in no position to ignore such an opportunity and fortunately, the Sandys faction was now in control of the Somers Island Company. A joint committee of the two companies, headed by Sir Edwin himself, entered into negotiations for what was known as the tobacco contract.