Undaunted by the jibes of ‘players’ and whatever scorn for colonization their productions might have generated amongst their audiences, the London merchant Sir John Zouch, who maintained long involvement in Virginia, bankrolled a second voyage in 1605 to reconnoitre the North American coast for likely locations for a colony. Following the recommendation of that expedition's leader of Chesapeake Bay as a site, and armed with as much support as any Jacobean colonizer might have hoped for from their government and their other knowledge of America, Hakluyt, Sir Thomas Gates, Edward Maria Wingfield and the other Virginia patentees assembled a company of 105 settlers and dispatched them to the proposed site a week prior to Christmas 1606 (although they did not clear the Downs until 5 January 1607). The colonists duly arrived at their destination in April via the West Indies, having experienced just one instance of doubt, in reasonably good order as ‘God the guider of all good actions, forcing them by an extream storme to hul all night, did drive them by his providence to their desired port, beyond all their expectations’.

While Hakluyt may have articulated a reasonably clear vision of the virtues of having English colonies in America, he offered no suggestions either how such an empire might be obtained (aside from bringing Christianity to the Indians) or how it might be governed. The blunt reality of these endeavours, albeit one that has largely, and oddly, escaped the accounts of historians, is that the proper establishment of new overseas colonies meant a military adventure. First of all, they required the successful control, as aliens in the demographic minority, of the substantially larger indigenous population.