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Sir Thomas Smith’s Misgovernment of the Virginia Company by Nicholas Ferrar. A manuscript from the Devonshire papers at Chatsworth House. Edited with an introduction by D. R. Ransome.

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Ferrar’s text is a crucial document in the history of the Virginia Company and its colony. It reveals the intense animosity which destroyed the Company and is a vivid, powerful and one-sided denunciation of the maladministration that had brought the Company down. It is also something more – a vital document of the first English colony to be permanently established in the New World. The document is printed here in full facsimile, together with a diplomatic transcription and introduction by David Ransome, a distinguished historian of early America.

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