The exploits of men such as Raleigh and Gilbert, Martin Frobisher, Michael Lok, John Davis, Thomas Cavendish, Sir Francis Drake, and Sir John Hawkins had already made England conscious of the potentialities of the New World and of the need to seek a part of it. Others followed these earlier leaders. In 1602 Raleigh sent yet another ship under Samuel Mace to seek the lost settlers of Roanoke, and in the same year a vessel went out under Bartholomew Gosnold who attempted a settlement on Elizabeth’s Island in present Massachusetts. Gosnold and another in this party, Gabriel Archer, were to become prominent later in the Jamestown settlement. In 1603, Martin Pring made a voyage along the northern part of Virginia. In 1605, came the expedition under George Weymouth to the Kennebec River on the New England coast. He spent some weeks here and returned to England carrying with him several Indian natives from that region. On April 10, 1606, the first Virginia charter received the great seal of England. This document recognized two groups and two spheres of influence that would fall between the thirty-fourth and forty-fifth parallels of north latitude along the American coast. One was interested in North Virginia and was granted to Thomas Hanham, Raleigh Gilbert, William Parker, George Popham, and others of and for Plymouth and other English places. This group was first in the field with exploration, dispatching a ship in August 1606 under Henry Challons. In May 1607, they sent a colony to the mouth of the Kennebec in Maine, but, in the spring of 1608, after a severe winter, the settlement was given up. The second group, organized under the charter of 1606, was that interested in south Virginia. This patent went to Sir Thomas Gates, Sir George Somers, Richard Hakluyt, Edward Maria Wingfield, and others of and for the city of London. The treasurer of the group was Sir Thomas Smith, one of the most capable businessmen of the day. Richard Hakluyt, the foremost authority on travel, foreign regions, and colonization in general, assembled helpful data and had a large part in the preparation of instructions and orders for those to be sent out as colonists. It was this group and their associates that organized, financed, and directed the expedition that reached Jamestown on May 13, 1607, and saw to it that supplies came through and reinforcements were procured in the lean years of the settlement.