The Jamestown Colony.%--Thus empowered, the two companies made all haste to gather funds, collect stores and settlers, and fit out ships.

The London Company was the first to get ready, and on the 19th of December, 1606, 143 colonists set sail in three ships for America with their charter, and a list of the council sealed up in a strong box.

The Plymouth Company soon followed, and before the year 1607 was far advanced, two settlements were planted in our country: the one at Jamestown, in Virginia, the other near the mouth of the Kennebec, in Maine.

The latter, however, was abandoned the following year (see Chapter IV).
The three ships which carried the Virginia colony reached the coast in the spring of 1607, and entering Chesapeake Bay sailed up a river which the colonists called the James, in honor of the King.

When about thirty miles from its mouth, a landing was made on a little peninsula, where a settlement was begun and named Jamestown.[1] It was the month of May, and as the weather was warm, the colonists did not build houses, but, inside of some rude fortifications, put up shelters of sails and branches to serve till huts could be built.