The Grand Advantage, However, Over And Above All Else, Was The Entire Ease And Certainty With Which The Cooperation Of The One Man Essential To The Success Of The Undertaking Could Be Secured, Without Need Of The Privity Of Any Other, Viz.

The Master of the MAY-FLOWER, Captain Thomas Jones.

Let us see upon what the assumption of this ready and certain accord on the part of Captain Jones rests. Rev. Dr. Neill, whose thorough study of the records of the Virginia Companies, and of the East India Company Calendars and collateral data, entitles him to speak with authority, recites that, "In 1617, Capt. Thomas Jones (sometimes spelled Joanes) had been sent to the East Indies in command of the ship LION by the Earl of Warwick (then Sir Robt. Rich), under a letter of protection from the Duke of Savoy, a foreign prince, ostensibly 'to take pirates,' which [pretext] had grown, as Sir Thomas Roe (the English ambassador with the Great Mogul) states, 'to be a common pretence for becoming pirate.'" Caught by the famous Captain Martin Pring, in full pursuit of the junk of the Queen Mother of the Great Mogul, Jones was attacked, his ship fired in the fight, and burned, - with some of his crew, - and he was sent a prisoner to England in the ship BULL, arriving in the Thames, January 1, 1618/19. No action seems to have been taken against him for his offences, and presumably his employer, Sir Robert, the coming Earl, obtained his liberty on one pretext or another. On January 19, however, complaint was made against Captain Jones, "late of the LION," by the East India Company, "for hiring divers men to serve the King of Denmark in the East Indies." A few days after his arrest for "hiring away the Company's men, Lord Warwick got him off" on the claim that he had employed him "to go to Virginia with cattle." From the "Transactions" of the Second Virginia Company, of which - as we have seen - Sir Ferdinando Gorges was the leading spirit, it appears that on "February 2, 1619/20, a commission was allowed Captain Thomas Jones of the FALCON, a ship of 150 tons" [he having been lately released from arrest by the Earl of Warwick's intercession], and that "before the close of the month, he sailed with cattle for Virginia," as previously noted. Dr. Neill, than whom there can be no better authority, was himself satisfied, and unequivocally states, that "Thomas Jones, Captain of the MAY-FLOWER, was without doubt the old servant of Lord Warwick in the East Indies." Having done Sir Robert Rich's (the Earl of Warwick's) "dirty work" for years, and having on all occasions been saved from harm by his noble patron (even when piracy and similar practices had involved him in the meshes of the law), it would be but a trifling matter, at the request of such powerful friends as the Earl and Sir Ferdinando Gorges, to steal the Pilgrim Colony from the London Virginia Company, and hand it over bodily to the "Council for New England," - the successor of the Second (Plymouth) Virginia Company, - in which their interests were vested, Warwick having, significantly, transferred his membership from the London Company to the new "Council for New England," as it was commonly called.

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