would be highly promotive of a larger cultivation of these commodities. As a still stronger inducement, the planter who excelled in their production was to be allowed the privilege of being the first to make a choice among the apprentices and indented servants to be forwarded by the Company. A committee of merchants were to be appointed, who, from their particular knowledge of the value of the commodities to be fostered, could establish a schedule of rates at which these commodities could be sold in the English markets with profit by the planters of Virginia; this schedule was, however, hardly expected to include maize or wheat, as the reason for encouraging their production was to provide an abundance of grain for the Colony itself.
At the beginning of 1619, the commodities shipped from Virginia were confined to tobacco and sassafras. It was denied at the time that this was to be attributed to the planters. It was said that as the mass of products had to be deposited in the magazine for exchange, it lay in the power of the presiding director, who happened to be a trader, to exclude all but those which he wished to pass, by declining to fix any price upon them. This, it was urged, had been done by Alderman Johnson, who was the principal purchaser from the Company of the sassafras and tobacco imported into England, and who was, therefore, interested in the enlargement of the production of these articles, a result only to be accomplished by the suppression of all efforts to vary the commodities of the Colony. It was to remove this condition that the Company proposed to adopt a general schedule.[1] The prefer-
- ↑ Abstracts of Proceedings of the Virginia Company of London, vol. I, p. 92. Sir Edwin Sandys suggested that “a committee of merchants, skilful in these particular commodities, might be appointed to set such indifferent good rates and prices upon them now at first as might not only make the Company here savers thereby, but give the plantation also better encouragement to raise and improve the same abundantly by their industry and labor.”
