The bitterest factional strife in the history of the London adventurers soon followed. It is a complicated story, too complicated and too long to be told fully here. Briefly, both the terms agreed upon by Sandys and his proposals for the management of the contract, proposals which left Sandys and his cohorts in full control, touched too closely the vital interests of some of his bitterest enemies. In Bermuda, as in Virginia, the hope of an early profit from the production of sugar, silk, wine, indigo, and other such commodities had proved vain, and like Virginia, Bermuda lived by the tobacco it grew. The Earl of Warwick and members of his family had made especially heavy investments in their Bermuda properties, and Sir Nathaniel Rich became the floor leader, as it were, of an attempt to defeat the contract. Sir Thomas Smith and his friends joined in the effort. Especially objectionable in the view of the opposition were plans for placing the management of the contract in the hands of salaried officials, with Sir Edwin as director at a salary of L500. At one Virginia court, meeting early in December, the debate got so out of hand that it required several additional sessions to straighten out the minutes in order that appropriate penalties might be imposed upon Mr. Samuel Wrote, a member of the Virginia council whose unrestrained charges of graft violated the company's rules and offended the court's sense of its own dignity. In the end the opposition elected to make the final test in a Bermuda court, whose consent was necessary to close the contract and where Sandys' opponents included the more substantial investors in that colony. The test came in February 1623, and Sandys won. But it could be demonstrated that had the vote been by share rather than by head, as was the rule in both companies, he would have been defeated. Sandys' opponents in the Bermuda Company all along had complained of a plan to distribute the charges of the contract equally between the two companies, arguing that the Virginia tobacco had a greater value and should therefore carry a proportionately larger charge. And now they were in a position to argue that the Virginia Company, in whose courts for some time they had steadfastly refused even to vote on the salary question, sought to exploit the younger plantation, as was evidenced by the opposition of the adventurers to whom Bermuda's tobacco chiefly belonged. With this argument, Sandys' opponents promptly carried the whole question before the privy council.