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 com- 
panies, 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.