The newcomers were a worthless set picked up in the streets of London or taken from the jails, and utterly unfit to become the founders of a state in the wilderness of the New World.

Out of such material Smith in time might have made something, but he was forced by a wound to return to England, and the colony went rapidly to ruin.

Sickness and famine did their work so quickly that after six months there were but sixty of the 500 men alive.

Then two small ships, under Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers, arrived at Jamestown with more settlers; but all decided to flee, and had actually sailed a few miles down the James, when, June 8, 1610, they met Lord Delaware with three ships full of men and supplies coming up the river.

Delaware came out as governor under a new charter granted in 1609.[1] [Footnote 1: Read "The Jamestown Experiments," in Eggleston's _Beginners of a Nation,_ pp.