SEVENTEENTH CENTURY TO 1660 15
Moteovet, colonisation, its motives and its methods,
must have worn a very different aspect to the actual
colonists in Virginia or New England, hard put
to it to live from day to day, from that which it
presented to would-be colonisers in England. In
England, however, the three motives, to provide for
the unemployed, to counter Spain and cripple the
resources which she drew from America, and finally
—in word more than in deed—to convert the heathen,
were intermittently more or less operative in the
seventeenth century down to the Restoration. Prior
to 1660 religion, though not conversion, companies,
and Cromwell were the main forces which shaped the
infancy and childhood of the Empire. Of the companies,
 the East India Company, incorporated by
Queen Elizabeth on December 31, 1600, was formed
solely for trade. The primary object of the Virginia
Company, incorporated by King James I on April 10,
1606, was colonisation, but with due regard to trade
as a necessary consequence of successful settlement.
Trade and planting were, in these early years of the
Empire, close allies, and to Sir Thomas Smith, the
London merchant, who was the first chairman of the
East India Company, a tract of 1609, extolling the
merits of Virginia, was dedicated as being one of
His Majesty’s Council for Virginia and treasurer for
the Colony.> 1?

There could, however, be no question of planting—
of English settlement in the thickly populated Eastern
tropics. still less on the West Coast of Africa. The

1 The tract is headed © Nova Britannia >; it is in Force’s Collection,
vol. 1.