ABSTRACT
It has been seen that Newport's first reports to the Virginia council in London were generally encouraging, and even tinged with excessive optimism regarding the prospects offered by Virginia's natural resources for making investment in the voyages a profitable venture. When he returned almost a year later, however, with more of what John Smith called 'gilded durt' (Document no. 63, p. 394, below), and with news of famine, death, unfriendly Indians, and boisterous disruption within the colony, the disillusionment in London must have been extreme. No surviving document (for the Company's records for that period are missing) attests this, but a letter about Edward Maria Wingfield's deposition, return with Newport, and prospective trial for malfeasance in office, hints that the conditions in Jamestown were far from a secret. To be sure, the letter-writer, Ralph Lord Eure, wrote that Wingfield was 'not yet tried' (VMHB, XXVI (1918), 315), but the elaborate defence Wingfield prepared for himself shows that he was ready for whatever might come (Document no. 34). One thing was certain: to survive, the colony needed a strong hand at the helm; stronger than any that had been or was still there.
