[0 THE WORK OF THE STOCK EXCHANGE 
seaboard, were financed through partnerships formed by a few 
wealthy London noblemen; but their repeated failures proved 
that a few men of wealth could not easily raise sufficient funds 
to insure the success of such colonizing enterprises. 
Accordingly, the British effort to settle this continent was 
taken up in the early seventeenth century by crude joint-stock 
companies, whose organization made it possible to attract 
more partners into these colonizing attempts and by so doing 
give them a larger financial backing. As a result, the first 
permanent European settlement in this country at Jamestown 
'n 1607, was established by the London Company. Financially 
speaking, the Pilgrim fathers were holders of labor-shares in a 
subsidiary of the Plymouth Company, chartered in 1620. The 
expenses of the initial venture which resulted in our present 
New England states were borne by the stockholders of this 
corporation. One share was allotted to each of the Pilgrims 
and additional shares were sold to them for £10 apiece, so that 
even in the beginning some of its stock was held in America. 
Not all New Yorkers remember that it was from an employee 
of another ancient corporation, the Dutch East India Com- 
pany, that the majestic Hudson River derived its name. In- 
deed, the venerable Hudson’s Bay Company (or, to use its 
quaint legal title, “The Governor and Company of Adventurers 
of England trading into Hudson's Bay’’), which was organized 
in 1670 and named after the same intrepid explorer, still exists 
after having played a huge part in the economic development of 
modern Canada. 
Early British Companies.—During the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries, however, the control of these early cor- 
poration settlements in what is now the United States was soon 
taken over by the settlers themselves. These early British com- 
panies differed in important respects from the modern corpora- 
tions of which they were the forerunners. Their shares were, 
of course, intensely speculative and, since stock markets were