Several hundred recruits were sent in 1609, and many more in the following years; but from the successive governors at Jamestown came continued reports of disease, famine and prostration, and pleas ever for more men and supplies.

The company, bravely keeping up its race with the death rate, met all demands as best it could.
To establish a firmer control, Sir Thomas Dale was sent out in 1611 as high marshal along with Sir Thomas Gates as governor.

Both of these were men of military training, and they carried with them a set of stringent regulations quite in keeping with their personal proclivities.

These rulers properly regarded their functions as more industrial than political.

They for the first time distributed the colonists into a series of settlements up and down the river for farming and live-stock tending; they spurred the willing workers by assigning them three-acre private gardens; and they mercilessly coerced the laggard.