Just to make sure that if Lord Baltimore later obtained his grant he did not molest Claiborne, the partners in the trading adventure obtained a commission under His Majesty’s signet of Scotland authorizing trade in all territory “neere or about these partes of America for which there is not allready a patent granted to others for the sole trade.” It was drawn up by Sir William Alexander, the Secretary for Scotland, who was entertained by Cloberry with bait in the form of a proposition for interchange of trade between Virginia and Nova Scotia. Sir William, making desperate efforts at the time to extract a profit from his grant in America, saw in the Claiborne venture a source of corn for his plantation at Port Royal. In any event, the commission was confirmed by the King himself at Greenwich, and when the Secretary of Virginia sailed back across the ocean in May of 1631 to establish his plantation and launch his trading adventure he went with the royal blessing. In his ship, the _Africa_, cargoed with colonists and supplies, Claiborne touched first at Kecoughtan and Accomac to attract additional volunteers, and then late in August he planted his colony on Kent Island, some hundred and twenty-five miles up the bay. Kent Island, which lies against the Eastern Shore opposite present-day Annapolis, was ideally situated for his purposes. He built a palisaded fort and stocked his plantation with cattle, swine and poultry. With the arrival of more farmers and traders from the lower settlements it was not long before the colony had a church, a windmill, warehouses, and a shipyard busily constructing shallops, wherries and pinnaces for the Indian trade. Despite a devastating fire that once destroyed all the buildings, death from marauding savages, and sickness, as well as many other hardships, the plantation flourished. In the spring its fields were green with tobacco and corn, and its wharves were busy with trading boats and bundles of furs. During the summer the season’s pelts were stretched and leathered on rows of wooden hide racks inside the palisades before being packed in great hogsheads for shipment to England. Then in the autumn, after the harvesting, the sweet scent of tobacco wafted into the fort from the drying sheds where the leaves hung curing on poles. In the spring of 1632 Captain Nicholas Martiau, an ancestor of George Washington, represented Kent Hundred in the House of Burgesses at Jamestown, and the first English settlement within the present bounds of the State of Maryland was recognized as a political unit of Virginia, established within the assigned territorial limits of that royal colony.