brought to the great Council of the Company a story of necessity and
distress at Jamestown, and the Council lays much of the blame for that upon
"the misgovernment of the Commanders, by dissention and ambition among
themselves," and upon the idleness of the general run, "active in nothing
but adhearing to factions and parts." The Council, sitting afar from a
savage land, is probably much too severe. But the "factions and parts"
cannot easily be denied.

Before Argall's return, the Company had commissioned as Governor of
Virginia Sir Thomas Gates, and had gathered a fleet of seven ships and two
pinnaces with Sir George Somers as Admiral, in the ship called the Sea
Adventure, and Christopher Newport as Vice-Admiral. All weighed anchor from
Falmouth early in June and sailed by the newly tried course, south to the
Canaries and then across. These seven ships carried five hundred colonists,
men, women, and children.

On St. James's day there rose and broke a fearsome storm. Two days and
nights it raged, and it scattered that fleet of seven. Gates, Somers, and
Newport with others of "rancke and quality" were upon the Sea Adventure.
How fared this ship with one attendant pinnace we shall come to see
presently. But the other ships, driven to and fro, at last found a
favorable wind, and in August they sighted Virginia. On the eleventh of
that month they came, storm-beaten and without Governor or Admiral or Sea
Adventure, into "our Bay" and at last to "the King's River and Town." Here
there swarmed from these ships nigh three hundred persons, meeting and met
by the hundred dwelling at Jamestown. This was the third supply, but it
lacked the hundred or so upon the Sea Adventure and the pinnace, and it
lacked a head. "Being put ashore without their Governor or any order from
him (all the Commissioners and principal persons being aboard him) no man
would acknowledge a superior."