Tasman continued doing good service for the
Dutch East India Company until his death, about 1659, at Batavia.
SETTLEMENT OF VIRGINIA
CHARTER UNDER WHICH AMERICA WAS COLONIZED
A.D. 1607
R. R. HOWISON
As the first of the original English colonies in North America,
Virginia enjoys a primacy in our history which, however other
sectional claims may be contested, is beyond dispute. The name
Virginia, which in 1584 Sir Walter Raleigh gave to his settlement on
the Carolina coast, at first covered an indefinite extent of the
great central territory of the continent.
After the failure and disappearance of Raleigh's colony, no further
attempts were made to settle the region until 1606, when new interest
in American colonization had been aroused in England. The credit for
awakening this interest is given to Bartholomew Gosnold, an English
navigator who, in 1602, sailed directly west and in May reached Cape
Cod. Then, coasting along New England, he found and named Martha's
Vineyard, and in July returned to England.
English adventurers were so much impressed with his enthusiastic
reports and his arguments in favor of new endeavors to occupy western
lands, that they began to urge a fresh undertaking.
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