Two years later another prospector was sent out by a more important company.  The Earl of Southampton and Sir Ferdinando Gorges were the chief promoters of this enterprise.  Gorges, as ’Lord Proprietary of the Province of Maine,’ is a well-known character in the subsequent history of New England.  Lord Southampton, as Shakespeare’s only patron and greatest personal friend, is forever famous through the world.  The chief prospector chosen by the company was George Weymouth, who landed on the coast of Maine, explored a little of the surrounding country, kidnapped five Indians, and returned to England with a glowing account of what he had seen.

The cumulative effect of the three expeditions of Gosnold, Pring, and Weymouth was a revival of interest in colonization.  Prominent men soon got together and formed two companies which were formally chartered by King James on the 10th of April, 1606.  The ‘first’ or ‘southern colony,’ which came to be known as the London Company because most of its members lived there, was authorized to make its ’first plantation at any place upon the coast of Virginia or America between the four-and-thirty and one-and-forty degrees of latitude.’  The northern or ‘second colony,’ afterwards called the Plymouth Company, was authorized to settle any place between 38 deg. and 45 deg. north, thus overlapping both the first company to the south and the French to the north.

In the summer of the same year, 1606, Henry Challons took two ships of the Plymouth Company round by the West Indies, where he was caught in a fog by the Spaniards.  Later in the season Pring went out and explored ‘North Virginia.’  In May, 1607, a hundred and twenty men, under George Popham, started to colonize this ‘North Virginia.’  In August they landed in Maine at the mouth of the Kennebec, where they built a fort, some houses, and a pinnace.  Finding themselves short of provisions, two-thirds of their number returned to England late in the same year.  The remaining third passed a terrible winter.  Popham died, and Raleigh Gilbert succeeded him as governor.  When spring came all the survivors of the colony sailed home in the pinnace they had built and the enterprise was abandoned.  The reports of the colonists, after their winter in Maine, were to the effect that the second or northern colony was ’not habitable for Englishmen.’

In the meantime the permanent foundation of the first or southern colony, the real Virginia, was well under way.  The same number of intending emigrants went out, a hundred and twenty.  On the 26th of April, 1607, ’about four a-clocke in the morning, wee descried the Land of Virginia:  the same day wee entered into the Bay of Chesupioc’ [Chesapeake].  Thus begins the tale of Captain John Smith, of the founding of Jamestown, and of a permanent Virginia, the first of the future United States.

Now that we have seen one spot in vast America really become the promise of the ‘Inglishe nation’ which Raleigh had longed for, we must return once more to Raleigh himself as, mocked by his tantalizing vision, he looked out on a changing world from his secular Mount Pisgah in the prison Tower of London.