Government was "forced to a strict way of destroying the bad and halfe the goode."[4-14] The author of _A New Description of Virginia_, published in 1649, claims that one man could plant from 1,600 to 2,000 pounds a year.[4-15] As the pamphlet presents a somewhat optimistic picture of affairs in general in the colony, this estimate must be taken with some reserve. More trustworthy is the statement of Secretary Thomas Ludwell in 1667 that 1,200 pounds was "the medium of men's yearly crops."[4-16] At all events, it is evident that the planter, even when entirely dependent upon his own exertions, could produce a goodly crop. It is now necessary to ascertain what he got for it. In the second and third decades of the Seventeenth century the price of tobacco was very high. The first cargo, consisting of 20,000 pounds consigned in the George, sold for no less than £5,250, or 5s. 3d. a pound.[4-17] No wonder the leaders of the London Company were pleased, believing that in the Indian weed they had discovered a veritable gold mine! No wonder the settlers deserted their pallisades and their villages to seek out the richest soil and the spots best suited for tobacco culture! The man who could produce 200 pounds of the plant, after all freight charges had been met, could clear some £30 or £35, a very tidy sum indeed for those days. It was the discovery that Virginia could produce tobacco of excellent quality that accounts for the heavy migration in the years from 1618 to 1623. In fact, so rich were the returns that certain persons came to the colony, not with the intention of making it their permanent residence, but of enriching themselves "by a cropp of Tobacco," and then returning to England to enjoy the proceeds.[4-18] But this state of affairs was of necessity temporary. Very soon the increasing size of the annual crop began to tell upon the price, and in 1623 Sir Nathaniel Rich declared that he had bought large quantities of tobacco at two shillings a pound.[4-19] This gentleman felt that it would be just to the planters were they to receive two shillings and four pence for the best varieties, and sixteen pence for the "second sort." In the same year Governor Wyatt and his Council, in a letter to the Virginia Company, placed the valuation of tobacco at eighteen pence a pound.[4-20] Three years later, however, the Governor wrote the Privy Council advising the establishment in Virginia of a "magazine" or entrepot, where the merchants should be compelled to take the tobacco at three shillings a pound.[4-21] This proposal did not seem reasonable to the King, and when Sir George Yeardley came over as Governor for the second time he was instructed to see to it that "the merchant be not constrained to take tobacco at 3. P. Pound in exchange for his wares," and to permit him to "make his own bargain."[4-22]