The central figure in that struggle was to be William Claiborne, an ambitious and fiery young man who had been sent out to Virginia by the company in 1621 as the colony’s surveyor. He served against the Indians and rose rapidly to become a member of the governor’s council. In 1626, after the English king took over the management of the colony from the company, Captain Claiborne at twenty-five years of age became Secretary of Virginia, the first to hold that office by royal appointment. This flattering preferment happened during the midst of the young councillor’s activities to launch himself in the fur trade as a means of supplementing his income. For a base of operations in the tidewater he had just acquired a strategically located plantation at the mouth of the James River. This was at Kecoughtan in Elizabeth City--now Hampton, Virginia, the oldest continuous English habitation on the American continent--a prime seventeenth century warehousing site. In the favored position of a member of the council Claiborne was joining such enterprising venturers as Raleigh Croshaw, Abraham Peirsey, John Chew and Samuel Mathews in profiting from the Chesapeake fur trade. These merchants furnished guides, interpreters, maps, supplies and trucking stuff not only to seasoned traders already on the bay but to those naively adventurous souls who came out from England with their warrants to barter with the savages. It was a lucrative business, particularly for one who also had influence to peddle in the matter of commissions, licenses and taxes. However, Captain Claiborne’s ambitions soared much higher with his appointment as Secretary of His Majesty’s Colony of Virginia. In this capacity he was second only to the governor in the colony’s hierarchy of prestige and power, and he was in a position to dispense direct patronage. His trade horizon broadened measurably. With the acquisition of additional lands on the Eastern Shore, a perquisite of the Secretary’s office, he began doing business on that side of the bay with promising traders like Daniel Cugley and Charles Harmar, as well as with Thomas Savage, who then lived on land given him there by his genial friend, Debedeavon, the Laughing King of the Accomacs. And these rugged frontiersmen together with their friends supported the ambitious young secretary in plans he broached to set up a great new plantation somewhere in the northernmost reaches of the bay, a Virginia Hundred which would serve as a base for far-flung trading operations on the backside of Virginia--to challenge both the Dutch and the French in the hinterland.