Advice for Investors in Virginia, Bermuda, and Newfoundland, 1611

IN I933 Memorial College, St. John's Newfoundland, acquired from the London booksellers Messrs. Francis Edwards a single-sheet newsletter, handwritten though not addressed, which is now in the Library of Memorial University, St. John's. It is dated June 29, i6ii, and provides a useful conspectus of what news was considered worth sending from London to the country at that date. It has a particular interest in that it is largely concerned with the new plantations begun since i6o6 which were attracting investors and settlers to Virginia, Newfoundland, Ulster, and Bermuda. There is, besides, both internal and external evidence that this Newsletter was deliberately slanted so as to attract financial support and settlers for the new colonies. Newsletters as well as diaries' help us to extend the somewhat exiguous official documentation of the early years of colonial settlement. News material was found in considerable quantities in the letters of such men as John Chamberlain who, for a generation, towards the end of the sixteenth century and in the early part of the seventeenth century, gathered and disseminated information about current happenings in London and elsewhere in a professional manner if not for financial reward. Besides the gossipy letters which were exchanged between friends there were more professional newsletters exchanged between unofficial as well as official agents and their home government. European archives of the early modern period contain very many newsletters from such agentswe should call them intelligence reports-which supplement the formal dispatches of diplomatic envoys. Sometimes, as in the case of the Fugger correspondents, the agents were posted primarily to report on business conditions, though they included, incidentally, much that was of political or social interest. At the same time there were, in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, more direct precursors of the newspaper press.2 Many of the topical tracts published in the period filled the place