This topic has been one of enduring interest to me ever since I first came across the documentary material relating to the foundation of the Virginia colony in 1607 and the spectacular quarrels that led to the breakdown and dissolution of the Virginia Company of London in 1624. The voluminous material available to me as a postgraduate in the works of Susan Kingsbury, Wesley Frank Craven and others has since then been supplemented by the publication of the Ferrar Papers held in Magdalene College, Cambridge's library and the discovery of a large number of smaller archive deposits in the United Kingdom. The protagonists in these quarrels - Sir Edwin Sandys, the Ferrar brothers and their supporters on one side and the 2nd Earl of Warwick, Sir Nathaniel Rich and their allies on the other - produced completely cóntradictory accounts of the issues at stake. But one feature of the historiography has been a highly puzzling feature to me, namely the belief amongst almost all colonial histor...