SUCCESSFUL ESTABLISHMENT of a colony was an enormously difficult and expensive enterprise. Most of the Providence Island investors, veterans of the Virginia, Somers Islands (Bermuda), and New England Companies, knew this and knew many of the pitfalls by 1630. In creating their own enterprise, they attempted to overcome the problems they had encountered with earlier ventures. New England had seen the Sagadahoc colony, planted by the western merchants' Virginia Company in 1607, fail in less than a year, and the 1620 Plymouth colony still struggled mightily to pay off its backers a decade after its founding. Sir Walter Ralegh's Virginia colony, Roanoke, settled in 1585 and resettled in 1587, disappeared because of national preoccupation with the challenge posed by the Spanish Armada and Ralegh's subsequent neglect. It became the famous Lost Colony. Jamestown, England's first permanent settlement, was founded by the Virginia Company of London in 1607 and had struggled on the edge of disaster for its first decade and a half. The Virginia Company had suffered the disgrace of charter revocation in 1624. By 1630, the now-royal colony prospered but through growing tobacco, a disgraceful product in many English eyes. Bermuda, an offshoot of the Virginia colony, was firmly established by 1630, but many feared that its fertility was exhausted. In any case, it also produced tobacco, and attempts to diversify economically had met with little success.

None of these English plantations offered an acceptable model of proper empire building. Two puritan corporations formed colonies on radically new lines in 1630, one in Massachusetts Bay and the other on Providence Island.