To employ a term that was destined to become common at a later period of American history, the Virginia Company had become nothing more than a land company. Its one asset was the land that had been bought with the sacrifices of the first ten years, and after 1616 all of its plans depended upon the hope that it might use its power to give title to that land as an inducement for investment in the colony. In its advertisement in 1616 adventurers, both old and new, were invited to take up shares for occupancy by themselves or for development by tenants sent for the purpose. Perhaps because the first response to this appeal was disappointing, the company provided an additional inducement in 1617 by promising 50 acres per head for every person sent to the colony, the payment being due to the one who bore the cost. This was the Virginia headright, as it came to be called, which was destined to remain the chief feature of the colony's land policy through many years after the demise of the company itself. Intended at first to encourage the adventurers in England to send the labor that was necessary for the development of the land, it served thereafter as a land subsidy of the immigration on which the colony lived and grew. By 1618 the fortunes of Virginia were taking a turn for the better. The adventurers, or some of them at least, found encouragement in continued shipments of tobacco. These shipments were small and the quality of the tobacco could not be compared with the Spanish leaf of West Indian production which was finding a growing market in London despite King James's known disapproval of the habit on which the market grew. But the quality of Virginia tobacco, for which Sir Thomas Smith seems to have found a first market in the East Indies, no doubt could be improved as the planters learned the art of its cultivation and the adventurers found for them a better weed. No doubt, too, this success with tobacco, whatever the imperfections of the current product, could be viewed as a harbinger of other successful attempts to produce commodities the Spaniard had for so long and so profitably grown in his West Indian plantations.