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signalled a new approach to England’s hoped-for conquest and share in the New World. Hitherto, all England’s colonial ventures in America had been individualistic forays, each one ultimately dependent on the vision, finances and staying power of one man. By the early 1600s, this was starting to be recognised as a fatal weakness. An anonymous broadside circulating at the time reflected on twenty years of failure: ‘Private purses are cold comfort to adventurers, and have ever been found fatal to all enterprises hitherto undertaken by the English, by reason of delays, jealousies, and unwillingness to back that project which succeeded not at the first attempt.’1
    The broadside argued for ‘a stock’, a joint stock company that could take a long view and ride the kind of setbacks that had been the ruin of so many previous ventures. Joint stock companies were relatively new entities in which individuals owned shares they could sell without reference to their fellow stockholders. These companies were opening the far corners of the globe to English trade, so why not a joint stock company to fund the next big English push to colonise America?
    Interest in America had been largely dormant since 1590, when the financial drain persuaded Walter Raleigh to give up his Roanoke adventure. Twelve years went by and then a new round of exploration began. It was led by Bartholomew Gosnold, a friend of Richard Hakluyt and Raleigh. Accompanied by Bartholomew Gilbert, one of Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s six sons, Gosnold landed in New England in 1602 and stayed for several months, trading and exploring.
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    They returned with sensational reports that rhapsodised over the natural riches of the New World:
    The soil is fat and lusty . . . Cherry trees like ours, but the stalks bear the blossom or fruit which are like a cluster of Grapes . . . all sorts of fowls, whose young ones we took and ate at our pleasure . . . Grounds nuts as big as eggs.2
    Gosnold summed up their reaction as they caught the first sight of all this plenty: ‘We stood a while as ravished.’
    The following year, a merchant from Bristol, Martin Pring, landed in Virginia looking for the sassafras tree, the root of which was then used to treat the ‘French pox’ and is today, in a marvellous piece of serendipity, used in the perfumery trade. Two years after Pring, George Waymouth came looking for a settlement site in what is now Maine. Pring and Waymouth were down-to-earth seamen with none of Gosnold’s descriptive flair. But they did enough to stoke the fires of enthusiasm for America still more.
    ‘The land is full of God’s Good blessings,’ said Pring.3 Waymouth made the same point more graphically, returning with intriguing samples of plant and animal life and five captured Native Americans all London wanted to see.
    Despite the fact that Gosnold and the other mariners had found not a scrap of evidence for the existence of gold mines, these expeditions sparked new speculation about gold waiting to be discovered in America. The fantastical stories of ‘golden cities’
    brought back three decades earlier by that wandering seaman David Ingram had not been forgotten and American gold became the talk of the taverns and counting houses. The Spanish dream of El Dorado , the golden man, had led to the discovery of fantastic treasures in South America. The English, it was argued, would find theirs in the northern continent.
    A taste of the fantastic hopes that developed can be had from Ben Jonson’s satire on gold fever, Eastward Ho! , staged at the same time as Shakespeare was putting on Macbeth . Jonson imagines the lost Roanoke colonists marrying into the local population and living in a society literally covered in gold. ‘Why, man,’ exclaims a character, 35
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    ‘all their dripping-pans are pure gold, and all the chains with which they chain up their streets are massy gold; all the prisoners they take are fettered in gold; and for