Plymouth Company
The Plymouth Company or Virginia Company of Plymouth was officially founded in England on April 10, 1606 with a royal charter from James I and was the second corporation , alongside the London Company, with the economic purpose of establishing English colonies in North America. The private company was based in Plymouth ; George Popham and Sir Ferdinando Gorges were responsible for setting up the Plymouth Company .
The area awarded to the company comprised the North American coast from the 38th parallel , the mouth of the Potomac River in what is now Virginia , to the 45th parallel , the mouth of the St. Croix River and the border between what is now Maine and New Brunswick . The area corresponds to today's New England region . However, the territory south of the 41st parallel was shared with the London Company , provided that the respective colony kept a distance of 160 kilometers (100 miles) from each other when building settlements.
The first attempt by the Plymouth Company to found a colony failed because of the Spanish who captured the English ship off Florida in August 1606 and captured the crew. After the coast had been explored beforehand, another group of around 120 colonists left England in 1607 and settled at the mouth of the Kennebec River in what is now the US state of Maine. The colonists built a fort, about 50 houses, a church, a storage facility, and a fifteen-meter pinasse , the Virginia of Sagahadoc . The colony, named after its founder, Popham Colony , was abandoned after only a year. Popham's sudden death and a harsh winter caused the colonists to return to England in August 1608, some on their self-built ship. In the aftermath, too, the company failed to establish permanent settlements on the east coast of North America.
In England, the Plymouth Company was no longer needed, which in 1609 led to the London Company receiving the entire area on the coast up to the 41st parallel for the sole use of the Virginia Colony . It was not until 1620 that the Plymouth Society was renewed and renamed the Council for New England (Plymouth Council for New England). The head of the new company was Sir Ferdinando Gorges. Unlike the Plymouth Company, the Plymouth Council was more successful and established the first settlement in the Plymouth Colony in the area of what is now the city of Plymouth in Massachusetts. The Plymouth Council existed for only 15 years and was dissolved in 1635. The Massachusetts Bay Company , originally called the New England Company , was founded as the successor to the Plymouth Council . A royal charter was issued to her by King Charles I in 1629 .
literature
- Alvin M. Josephy Jr. : 500 Nations. The Illustrated History of the Indians of North America. Frederking & Thaler GmbH, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-89405-356-9 .
- William C. Sturtevant (Ed.): Handbook of North American Indians . Volume 4: Wilcomb E. Washburn (Ed.): History of Indian-White Relations. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington DC 1988, ISBN 0-16-004583-5 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Plymouth Company in: Microsoft Encarta
- ↑ a b Popham Colony ( Memento of the original from December 18, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ History of the Plymouth Company
