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Chapter One

In the beginning was the corporation. "Bodies corporate" chartered by the British Crown, first settled America, hoping to make the New World pay in a plenitude of goods conjured from rumor improved by imagination. For the 700-odd Elizabethan "adventurers," including Sir Francis Bacon, who bought stock in the Virginia Company of London, with the capital to cover the transportation and other costs of colonization, America was a bad investment. Over the dozen years of its existence, the Company expended over £100,000 not only without profit but with no return of the principal. Some of the earliest colonists were "venturers," investors who followed their money to America, but most were servants and employees indentured (for an average of fifty-six months) either to individual settlers or to the company; and all were taking more than business risks. On May 31, 1607, a journal of the first summer in the first American settlement, at Jamestown, records, one Eustace Clovell had barely cleared the log walls of the Jamestown fort when Indians "lurking in the long grasse" outside quilled him with six arrows. In the Great M ... read full excerpt from COLOSSUS ebook