ABSTRACT
The Amazon projectors immediately ran foul of Robert Harcourt’s patent. The charter of the ‘Governor and Companie of Noblemen and Gentlemen of the Cittie of London: Adventurers in and about the River of the Amazons’ was issued on the 10th September 1619. Although Sir Thomas Roe returned from India in 1619, none of the surviving sources for the Amazon Company list him as an undertaker in it. Roe appears, at least, to have acted as an intermediary between the Amazon Company and the Irish settlers, arranging for the passage of a second group of them out to the river, and for the transport of tobacco from Purcell’s plantation on the return voyage. North was set free on the 18th/28th July 1621, on the condition that he made no further attempt to make contact with his Amazon plantation.
