Between them they were given authority to occupy territory in America from the 34th to the 45th degree of latitude; but the two grants overlapped in the middle, with the intention of giving the greater domain to the company which secured it by the earliest actual occupation. The London Company, holding the southward grant, despatched to Virginia a company of 105 emigrants, who established at Jamestown, on the northerly bank of James River (May 13, 1607), the first permanent English settlement in America, and founded there the colony and the subsequent State of Virginia. The colony survived many hardships and trials, owing its existence largely to the energy and courage of the famous Captain John Smith, who was one of its chief men from the beginning. Its prosperity was secured after a few years by the systematic cultivation of tobacco, for which the demand in England grew fast. In 1619, negro slavery was introduced; and by that time the white inhabitants of Virginia had increased to nearly 4,000 in number, divided between eleven settlements. See VIRGINIA. {3166} Meantime, the Plymouth Company had done nothing effectively in the northward region assigned to it. Bartholomew Gosnold, in 1602, had examined the coast from Maine to Cape Cod, and built a lonely house on the island of Cuttyhunk; Martin Pring, in 1603, had loaded two ships with sassafras in Massachusetts Bay; a colony named in honor of the chief justice of England, Sir John Popham, had shivered through the winter of 1607-8 near the mouth of Kennebec River and then gone home; Captain John Smith, in 1614, had made a voyage to the country, in the interest of London merchants, and had named it New England; but no lasting English settlement had been made anywhere within the bounds of King James' grant to the Plymouth Company, at the waning of the year 1620, when Virginia was well grown. It was then by chance, rather than by design, that the small ship Mayflower landed a little company of religious exiles on the Massachusetts coast, at Plymouth (December 21, 1620), instead of bearing them farther south. Driven from England into Holland by persecutions, twelve years before, this congregation of Independents, or Separatists, now sought liberty of conscience in the New World. They came with a patent from the London, or South Virginia Company, and expected to plant their settlement within that company's territorial bounds. But circumstances which seemed adverse at the time bent their course to the New England shore, and they accepted it for a home, not doubting that the proprietors of the land, who desired colonists, would permit them to stay. The next year they received a patent from the Council for New England, which had succeeded to the rights of the Plymouth Company. Of the hardships which these Pilgrim Fathers endured