Joint-stock company
A joint-stock company is a business entity in which shares of the company's stock can be bought and sold by shareholders. Each shareholder owns company stock in proportion, evidenced by their shares. Shareholders are able to transfer their shares to others without any effects to the continued existence of the company. In modern-day corporate law, the existence of a joint-stock company is synonymous with incorporation and limited liability. Therefore, joint-stock companies are known as corporations or limited companies; some jurisdictions still provide the possibility of registering joint-stock companies without limited liability. In the United Kingdom and other countries that have adopted its model of company law, they are known as unlimited companies. In the United States, they are known as joint-stock companies. Ownership refers to a large number of privileges; the company is managed on behalf of the shareholders by a board of directors, elected at an annual general meeting. The shareholders vote to accept or reject an annual report and audited set of accounts.
Individual shareholders can sometimes stand for directorships within the company if a vacancy occurs, but, uncommon. The shareholders are liable for any of the company debts that extend beyond the company's ability to pay up to the amount of them. Finding the earliest joint-stock company is a matter of definition; the earliest records of joint stock company can be found in China during the Song Dynasty. Around 1250 in France at Toulouse, 96 shares of the Société des Moulins du Bazacle, or Bazacle Milling Company were traded at a value that depended on the profitability of the mills the society owned, making it the first company of its kind in history; the Swedish company Stora has documented a stock transfer for an eighth of the company as early as 1288. In more recent history, the earliest joint-stock company recognized in England was the Company of Merchant Adventurers to New Lands, chartered in 1553 with 250 shareholders. Muscovy Company, which had a monopoly on trade between Moscow and London, was chartered soon after in 1555.
The much more famous and powerful English East India Company was granted an English Royal Charter by Elizabeth I on December 31, 1600, with the intention of favouring trade privileges in India. The Royal Charter gave the newly created Honourable East India Company a 15-year monopoly on all trade in the East Indies; the Company transformed from a commercial trading venture to one that ruled India and exploited its resources, as it acquired auxiliary governmental and military functions, until its dissolution. Soon afterwards, in 1602, the Dutch East India Company issued shares that were made tradable on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange; that invention enhanced the ability of joint-stock companies to attract capital from investors, as they could now dispose their shares. In 1612, it became the first'corporation' in intercontinental trade with'locked in' capital and limited liability. During the period of colonialism, Europeans the British, trading with the Near East for goods and calico for example, enjoyed spreading the risk of trade over multiple sea voyages.
The joint-stock company became a more viable financial structure than previous guilds or state-regulated companies. The first joint-stock companies to be implemented in the Americas were The London Company and The Plymouth Company. Transferable shares earned positive returns on equity, evidenced by investment in companies like the British East India Company, which used the financing model to manage trade in India. Joint-stock companies paid out divisions to their shareholders by dividing up the profits of the voyage in the proportion of shares held. Divisions were cash, but when working capital was low and detrimental to the survival of the company, divisions were either postponed or paid out in remaining cargo, which could be sold by shareholders for profit. However, in general, incorporation was possible by royal charter or private act, it was limited because of the government's jealous protection of the privileges and advantages thereby granted; as a result of the rapid expansion of capital-intensive enterprises in the course of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, many businesses came to be operated as unincorporated associations or extended partnerships, with large numbers of members.
Membership of such associations was for a short term so their nature was changing. Registration and incorporation of companies, without specific legislation, was introduced by the Joint Stock Companies Act 1844. Companies incorporated under this Act did not have limited liability, but it became common for companies to include a limited liability clause in their internal rules. In the case of Hallett v Dowdall, the English Court of the Exchequer held that such clauses bound people who have notice of them. Four years the Joint Stock Companies Act 1856 provided for limited liability for all joint-stock companies provided, among other things, that they included the word "limited" in their company name; the landmark case of Salomon v A Salomon & Co Ltd established that a company with legal liability, not being a partnership, had a distinct legal personality, separate from that of its individual shareholders. The existence of a corporation requires a special legal framework and body of law that grants the corporation legal personality, it ty
James VI and I
James VI and I was King of Scotland as James VI from 24 July 1567 and King of England and Ireland as James I from the union of the Scottish and English crowns on 24 March 1603 until his death in 1625. The kingdoms of Scotland and England were individual sovereign states, with their own parliaments and laws, though both were ruled by James in personal union. James was the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, a great-great-grandson of Henry VII, King of England and Lord of Ireland, positioning him to accede to all three thrones. James succeeded to the Scottish throne at the age of thirteen months, after his mother was compelled to abdicate in his favour. Four different regents governed during his minority, which ended in 1578, though he did not gain full control of his government until 1583. In 1603, he succeeded the last Tudor monarch of England and Ireland, Elizabeth I, who died childless, he continued to reign in all three kingdoms for 22 years, a period known after him as the Jacobean era, until his death in 1625 at the age of 58.
After the Union of the Crowns, he based himself in England from 1603, only returning to Scotland once in 1617, styled himself "King of Great Britain and Ireland". He was a major advocate of a single parliament for Scotland. In his reign, the Plantation of Ulster and British colonisation of the Americas began. At 57 years and 246 days, James's reign in Scotland was longer than those of any of his predecessors, he achieved most of his aims in Scotland but faced great difficulties in England, including the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 and repeated conflicts with the English Parliament. Under James, the "Golden Age" of Elizabethan literature and drama continued, with writers such as William Shakespeare, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Sir Francis Bacon contributing to a flourishing literary culture. James himself was a talented scholar, the author of works such as Daemonologie, The True Law of Free Monarchies, Basilikon Doron, he sponsored the translation of the Bible into English that would be named after him: the Authorised King James Version.
Sir Anthony Weldon claimed that James had been termed "the wisest fool in Christendom", an epithet associated with his character since. Since the latter half of the 20th century, historians have tended to revise James's reputation and treat him as a serious and thoughtful monarch, he was committed to a peace policy, tried to avoid involvement in religious wars the Thirty Years' War that devastated much of Central Europe. He tried but failed to prevent the rise of hawkish elements in the English Parliament who wanted war with Spain. James was the only son of Mary, Queen of Scots, her second husband, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. Both Mary and Darnley were great-grandchildren of Henry VII of England through Margaret Tudor, the older sister of Henry VIII. Mary's rule over Scotland was insecure, she and her husband, being Roman Catholics, faced a rebellion by Protestant noblemen. During Mary's and Darnley's difficult marriage, Darnley secretly allied himself with the rebels and conspired in the murder of the Queen's private secretary, David Rizzio, just three months before James's birth.
James was born on 19 June 1566 at Edinburgh Castle, as the eldest son and heir apparent of the monarch automatically became Duke of Rothesay and Prince and Great Steward of Scotland. He was baptised "Charles James" or "James Charles" on 17 December 1566 in a Catholic ceremony held at Stirling Castle, his godparents were Charles IX of France, Elizabeth I of England, Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy. Mary refused to let the Archbishop of St Andrews, whom she referred to as "a pocky priest", spit in the child's mouth, as was the custom; the subsequent entertainment, devised by Frenchman Bastian Pagez, featured men dressed as satyrs and sporting tails, to which the English guests took offence, thinking the satyrs "done against them". James's father, was murdered on 10 February 1567 at Kirk o' Field, Edinburgh in revenge for the killing of Rizzio. James inherited his father's titles of Duke of Earl of Ross. Mary was unpopular, her marriage on 15 May 1567 to James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, suspected of murdering Darnley, heightened widespread bad feeling towards her.
In June 1567, Protestant rebels imprisoned her in Loch Leven Castle. She was forced to abdicate on 24 July 1567 in favour of the infant James and to appoint her illegitimate half-brother, James Stewart, Earl of Moray, as regent; the care of James was entrusted to the Earl and Countess of Mar, "to be conserved and upbrought" in the security of Stirling Castle. James was anointed King of Scots at the age of thirteen months at the Church of the Holy Rude, Stirling, by Adam Bothwell, Bishop of Orkney, on 29 July 1567; the sermon at the coronation was preached by John Knox. In accordance with the religious beliefs of most of the Scottish ruling class, James was brought up as a member of the Protestant Church of Scotland, the Kirk; the Privy Council selected George Buchanan, Peter Young, Adam Erskine, David Erskine as James's preceptors or tutors. As the young king's senior tutor, Buchanan subjected James to regular beatings but instilled in him a lifelong passion for literature and learning. Buchanan sought to turn James into a God-fearing, Protestant king who accepted the limitations of monarchy, as outlined in his treatise De Jure Regni apud Scotos.
In 1568, Mary escaped from her i
Plymouth Council for New England
The Plymouth Council for New England was the name of a 17th-century English joint stock company, granted a royal charter to found colonial settlements along the coast of North America. Some of the persons involved had received a charter in 1606 as the Plymouth Company and had founded the short-lived Popham Colony within the territory of northern Virginia; the company had fallen into disuse following the abandonment of the 1607 colony. In the new 1620 charter granted by James I, the company was given rights of settlement in the area now designated as New England, the land part of the Virginia Colony north of the 40th parallel, extending to the 48th parallel. In 1622 the Plymouth Council issued a land grant to John Mason which evolved into the Province of New Hampshire. 1620 Charter of New England from the Avalon Project 1635 Surrender of the New England Charter from the Avalon Project
England
England is a country, part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to Scotland to the north-northwest; the Irish Sea lies west of England and the Celtic Sea lies to the southwest. England is separated from continental Europe by the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south; the country covers five-eighths of the island of Great Britain, which lies in the North Atlantic, includes over 100 smaller islands, such as the Isles of Scilly and the Isle of Wight. The area now called England was first inhabited by modern humans during the Upper Palaeolithic period, but takes its name from the Angles, a Germanic tribe deriving its name from the Anglia peninsula, who settled during the 5th and 6th centuries. England became a unified state in the 10th century, since the Age of Discovery, which began during the 15th century, has had a significant cultural and legal impact on the wider world; the English language, the Anglican Church, English law – the basis for the common law legal systems of many other countries around the world – developed in England, the country's parliamentary system of government has been adopted by other nations.
The Industrial Revolution began in 18th-century England, transforming its society into the world's first industrialised nation. England's terrain is chiefly low hills and plains in central and southern England. However, there is upland and mountainous terrain in the west; the capital is London, which has the largest metropolitan area in both the United Kingdom and the European Union. England's population of over 55 million comprises 84% of the population of the United Kingdom concentrated around London, the South East, conurbations in the Midlands, the North West, the North East, Yorkshire, which each developed as major industrial regions during the 19th century; the Kingdom of England – which after 1535 included Wales – ceased being a separate sovereign state on 1 May 1707, when the Acts of Union put into effect the terms agreed in the Treaty of Union the previous year, resulting in a political union with the Kingdom of Scotland to create the Kingdom of Great Britain. In 1801, Great Britain was united with the Kingdom of Ireland to become the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
In 1922 the Irish Free State seceded from the United Kingdom, leading to the latter being renamed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The name "England" is derived from the Old English name Englaland, which means "land of the Angles"; the Angles were one of the Germanic tribes that settled in Great Britain during the Early Middle Ages. The Angles came from the Anglia peninsula in the Bay of Kiel area of the Baltic Sea; the earliest recorded use of the term, as "Engla londe", is in the late-ninth-century translation into Old English of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People. The term was used in a different sense to the modern one, meaning "the land inhabited by the English", it included English people in what is now south-east Scotland but was part of the English kingdom of Northumbria; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded that the Domesday Book of 1086 covered the whole of England, meaning the English kingdom, but a few years the Chronicle stated that King Malcolm III went "out of Scotlande into Lothian in Englaland", thus using it in the more ancient sense.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, its modern spelling was first used in 1538. The earliest attested reference to the Angles occurs in the 1st-century work by Tacitus, Germania, in which the Latin word Anglii is used; the etymology of the tribal name itself is disputed by scholars. How and why a term derived from the name of a tribe, less significant than others, such as the Saxons, came to be used for the entire country and its people is not known, but it seems this is related to the custom of calling the Germanic people in Britain Angli Saxones or English Saxons to distinguish them from continental Saxons of Old Saxony between the Weser and Eider rivers in Northern Germany. In Scottish Gaelic, another language which developed on the island of Great Britain, the Saxon tribe gave their name to the word for England. An alternative name for England is Albion; the name Albion referred to the entire island of Great Britain. The nominally earliest record of the name appears in the Aristotelian Corpus the 4th-century BC De Mundo: "Beyond the Pillars of Hercules is the ocean that flows round the earth.
In it are two large islands called Britannia. But modern scholarly consensus ascribes De Mundo not to Aristotle but to Pseudo-Aristotle, i.e. it was written in the Graeco-Roman period or afterwards. The word Albion or insula Albionum has two possible origins, it either derives from a cognate of the Latin albus meaning white, a reference to the white cliffs of Dover or from the phrase the "island of the Albiones" in the now lost Massaliote Periplus, attested through Avienus' Ora Maritima to which the former served as a source. Albion is now applied to England in a more poetic capacity. Another romantic name for England is Loegria, related to the Welsh word for England and made popular by its use in Arthurian legend; the earliest known evidence of human presence in the area now known as England was that of Homo antecessor, dating to approximate
Popham Colony
The Popham Colony—also known as the Sagadahoc Colony—was a short-lived English colonial settlement in North America, founded in 1607 and located in the present-day town of Phippsburg, near the mouth of the Kennebec River by the proprietary Virginia Company of Plymouth. It was founded a few months after its more successful rival, the colony at Jamestown, established on May 4, 1607, by the Virginia Company of London in present-day James City County, Virginia; the Popham Colony was the first colony in the region that would become known as New England, coming five years after a short encampment on Cuttyhunk. The colony was abandoned after only one year more due to family changes in the leadership ranks than lack of success in the New World; the loss of life of the colonists in 1607 and'08 at Popham was far lower than that experienced at Jamestown. The first ship built by the English in the New World was completed during the year of the Popham Colony and was sailed back across the Atlantic Ocean to England.
The pinnace, named Virginia of Sagadahoc, was quite seaworthy, crossed the Atlantic again in 1609 as part of Sir Christopher Newport's nine vessel Third Supply mission to Jamestown. The tiny Virginia survived a massive three-day storm en route, thought to have been a hurricane and which wrecked the mission's large new flagship Sea Venture on Bermuda; the exact site of the Popham Colony was lost until its rediscovery in 1994. Much of this historical location is now part of Maine's Popham Beach State Park, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Popham was a project of the Plymouth Company, one of the two competing parts of the proprietary Virginia Company that King James chartered in 1606 to raise private funds from investors in order to settle Virginia. At the time, the name "Virginia" applied to the entire northeast coast of North America from Spanish Florida to New France in modern-day Canada; that area was not occupied by the Spanish. The Plymouth Company was granted a royal charter and the rights to the coast between 38° and 45° N.
The colonists were to plant first within their respective non-overlapping areas. The first Plymouth Company ship, sailed in August 1606 but the Spanish intercepted and captured it near Florida in November; the next attempt was more successful. About 120 colonists left Plymouth on May 1607, in two ships, they intended to trade precious metals, spices and show that the local forests could be used to build English ships. Colony leader George Popham sailed aboard the Gift of God with Raleigh Gilbert as second-in-command; the captain of the latter ship was Robert Davies. Master of the ship was James Davies who kept a diary, one of the main contemporary sources of the information about the Popham Colony; the diary is kept in Lambeth Museum in London. James Davies was made captain of the ship built by the colonists, which made at least two voyages across the Atlantic. Robert and James were most from a family of mariners from Devon, England. George Popham was the nephew of one of the financial backers of the colony, Sir John Popham, the Lord Chief Justice of England, while Gilbert was the son of Sir Humphrey Gilbert and half nephew of Sir Walter Raleigh.
Other financiers included the military governor of Plymouth. Much of the information about the events in the colony comes from his memoirs. Settlers included the Reverend Richard Seymour, grandson of Sir Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset and brother to Jane Seymour. Nine council members and six other gentlemen accompanied the expedition, while the rest were soldiers, artisans and traders; the Gift of God arrived at the mouth of the Kennebec River on August 13, 1607. The Mary and John arrived three days later; the colonists began construction of large star-shaped Fort St. George. Fort St. George, named for the patron saint of England, was built on the headland of an area named Sabino, ten miles/15 kilometres south of what is now Bath, Maine, in the town of Phippsburg. On October 8, 1607, colonist John Hunt drew a map of the colony. Hunt was listed in the colony register as "draughtsman", his map showed a star-shaped fort with ditches and ramparts, 18 buildings including the admiral's house, a chapel, a storehouse, a cooperage, a guardhouse.
Fort St. George contained nine guns; as a result of espionage, Hunt's map was sold to the Spanish ambassador to Pedro de Zuniga. The map passed to King Philip III of Spain, in 1608. In 1888 it was discovered in the Spanish national archives, it might be a copy of the now-lost original map and is unique as the only plan of the original layout of an early English settlement in the Americas known to survive. Fort St. George is now an archaeological site. Popham and Gilbert sent survey expeditions up the river and contacted the Abenaki, an Indian tribe belonging to the Algonquian peoples of northeastern North America. In a letter to the King, Popham wrote that the natives had told them that the area was full of exploitable resources. However, the colony failed to establish cooperation with the tribe. Late summer arrival meant. Half of the colonists returned to England in December 1607 aboard the Gift of God. Others faced a cold winter. Fire destroyed its provisions. Exc
OCLC
OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Incorporated d/b/a OCLC is an American nonprofit cooperative organization "dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world's information and reducing information costs". It was founded in 1967 as the Ohio College Library Center. OCLC and its member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat, the largest online public access catalog in the world. OCLC is funded by the fees that libraries have to pay for its services. OCLC maintains the Dewey Decimal Classification system. OCLC began in 1967, as the Ohio College Library Center, through a collaboration of university presidents, vice presidents, library directors who wanted to create a cooperative computerized network for libraries in the state of Ohio; the group first met on July 5, 1967 on the campus of the Ohio State University to sign the articles of incorporation for the nonprofit organization, hired Frederick G. Kilgour, a former Yale University medical school librarian, to design the shared cataloging system.
Kilgour wished to merge the latest information storage and retrieval system of the time, the computer, with the oldest, the library. The plan was to merge the catalogs of Ohio libraries electronically through a computer network and database to streamline operations, control costs, increase efficiency in library management, bringing libraries together to cooperatively keep track of the world's information in order to best serve researchers and scholars; the first library to do online cataloging through OCLC was the Alden Library at Ohio University on August 26, 1971. This was the first online cataloging by any library worldwide. Membership in OCLC is based on use of services and contribution of data. Between 1967 and 1977, OCLC membership was limited to institutions in Ohio, but in 1978, a new governance structure was established that allowed institutions from other states to join. In 2002, the governance structure was again modified to accommodate participation from outside the United States.
As OCLC expanded services in the United States outside Ohio, it relied on establishing strategic partnerships with "networks", organizations that provided training and marketing services. By 2008, there were 15 independent United States regional service providers. OCLC networks played a key role in OCLC governance, with networks electing delegates to serve on the OCLC Members Council. During 2008, OCLC commissioned two studies to look at distribution channels. In early 2009, OCLC negotiated new contracts with the former networks and opened a centralized support center. OCLC provides bibliographic and full-text information to anyone. OCLC and its member libraries cooperatively produce and maintain WorldCat—the OCLC Online Union Catalog, the largest online public access catalog in the world. WorldCat has holding records from private libraries worldwide; the Open WorldCat program, launched in late 2003, exposed a subset of WorldCat records to Web users via popular Internet search and bookselling sites.
In October 2005, the OCLC technical staff began a wiki project, WikiD, allowing readers to add commentary and structured-field information associated with any WorldCat record. WikiD was phased out; the Online Computer Library Center acquired the trademark and copyrights associated with the Dewey Decimal Classification System when it bought Forest Press in 1988. A browser for books with their Dewey Decimal Classifications was available until July 2013; until August 2009, when it was sold to Backstage Library Works, OCLC owned a preservation microfilm and digitization operation called the OCLC Preservation Service Center, with its principal office in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The reference management service QuestionPoint provides libraries with tools to communicate with users; this around-the-clock reference service is provided by a cooperative of participating global libraries. Starting in 1971, OCLC produced catalog cards for members alongside its shared online catalog. OCLC commercially sells software, such as CONTENTdm for managing digital collections.
It offers the bibliographic discovery system WorldCat Discovery, which allows for library patrons to use a single search interface to access an institution's catalog, database subscriptions and more. OCLC has been conducting research for the library community for more than 30 years. In accordance with its mission, OCLC makes its research outcomes known through various publications; these publications, including journal articles, reports and presentations, are available through the organization's website. OCLC Publications – Research articles from various journals including Code4Lib Journal, OCLC Research, Reference & User Services Quarterly, College & Research Libraries News, Art Libraries Journal, National Education Association Newsletter; the most recent publications are displayed first, all archived resources, starting in 1970, are available. Membership Reports – A number of significant reports on topics ranging from virtual reference in libraries to perceptions about library funding. Newsletters – Current and archived newsletters for the library and archive community.
Presentations – Presentations from both guest speakers and OCLC research from conferences and other events. The presentations are organized into five categories: Conference presentations, Dewey presentations, Distinguished Seminar Series, Guest presentations, Research staff
Virginia Company
The Virginia Company refers collectively to two joint-stock companies chartered under James I on 10 April 1606 with the goal of establishing settlements on the coast of America. The two companies are referred to as the "Virginia Company of London" and the "Virginia Company of Plymouth", they operated with identical charters but with differing territories; the charters established an area of overlapping territory in America as a buffer zone, the two companies were not permitted to establish colonies within 100 miles of each other. The Plymouth Company never fulfilled its charter, but its territory was claimed by England and became New England; as corporations, the companies were empowered by the Crown to govern themselves, they conferred that right to their colonies. The Virginia Company failed in 1624, but the right to self-government was not taken away and the principle was established that a royal colony should be self-governing; this formed the genesis of democracy in America. The original charter by King James in 1606 did not mention a Plymouth Company.
The Charter of 1609 stipulates two distinct companies, stating: …that they shoulde devide themselves into twoe collonies, the one consistinge of divers Knights, gentlemen and others of our cittie of London, called the First Collonie. The eastern seaboard of America was named Virginia from Maine to the Carolinas; as corporations, the companies were empowered by the Crown to govern themselves. The Virginia Company failed in 1624, but the right to self-government was not taken from the colony, the principle was thus established that a royal colony should be self-governing, forming the genesis of democracy in America. By the terms of the charter, the London Company was permitted to establish a colony of 100 miles square between the 34th and 45th parallels between Cape Fear and Long Island Sound, it owned a large portion of Atlantic Ocean and inland Canada. On 14 May 1607, the London Company established the Jamestown Settlement about 40 miles inland along the James River, a major tributary of the Chesapeake Bay in present-day Virginia.
In 1620, George Calvert asked King James I for a charter for English Catholics to add the territory of the Plymouth Company. In 1609, a much larger Third Supply mission was organized. A new purpose-built ship named the Sea Venture was rushed into service without the customary sea trials, she became flagship of a fleet of nine ships, with most of the leaders and supplies aboard. Notable persons aboard the Sea Venture included fleet Admiral George Somers, Vice-Admiral Christopher Newport, the new governor for the Virginia Colony Sir Thomas Gates, future author William Strachey, businessman John Rolfe with his pregnant wife; the Third Supply convoy encountered a hurricane which lasted three days and separated the ships from one another. The Sea Venture was leaking through its new caulking, Admiral Somers had it driven aground on a reef to avoid sinking, saving 150 men and women and several dogs, but destroying their ship; the uninhabited archipelago was named "The Somers Isles" after Admiral Somers, though it was known as Bermuda.
The survivors built two smaller vessels from salvaged parts of the Sea Venture which they named Deliverance and Patience. Ten months they continued on to Jamestown, arriving at Jamestown on 23 May 1610 but leaving several men behind on the archipelago to establish possession of it. At Jamestown, they found that over 85% of the 500 colonists had perished during what became known as the "Starving Time"; the Sea Venture passengers had anticipated finding a thriving colony at Jamestown and had brought little food or supplies with them. The colonists at Jamestown were saved only by the timely arrival three weeks of a supply mission headed by Thomas West, 3rd Baron De La Warr, better known as "Lord Delaware". In 1612, The London Company's Royal Charter was extended to include the Somers Isles as part of the Virginia Colony. However, the isles passed to the London Company of the Somers Isles in 1615, formed by the same shareholders as the London Company. To the disappointment of its investors, the Virginia Company of London failed to discover gold or silver in Virginia.
However, the company did establish trade of various types. The biggest trade breakthrough came when colonist John Rolfe introduced several sweeter strains of tobacco from the Caribbean, rather than the harsh-tasting kind native to Virginia. Rolfe's new tobacco strains led to a strong export for the London Company and other early English colonies, helped balance a trade deficit with Spain; the Jamestown Massacre which devastated that colony in 1622 brought on unfavorable attention from King James I who had chartered the Company. There was a period of debate in Britain between Company officers who wished to guard the original charter, those who wanted the Company to be disbanded. In 1624, the King made Virginia a royal colony; the Plymouth Company was permitted to establish settlements between the 38th and 45th parallels between the upper reaches of the Chesapeake Bay and the current U. S.-Canada border. On 13 August 1607, the Plymouth Company established the Popham Colony along the Kennebec River in present-day Maine.
However, it was abandoned after about a year and the Plymouth Company became inactive
