The First Advertisement for America: An Unknown Broadside Promoting the Jamestown Colony (1612)

This paper discusses a broadside of 1612 advertising the English settlement of Jamestown and promoting a lottery to support it. Filed away in the Spanish archives in Simancas and heretofore known only from the title submitted to the Company of Stationers, it has not been seen since the year of its publication; no copy survives in the British Isles. This paper discusses what the broadside tells us about condition in Virginia at this date, and what kind of colonists the company wished to attract. It further addresses how the newly discovered broadside of 1612 compared with earlier and later English lottery broadsides (those of 1587 and 1615). I discuss such subjects as the role of lotteries to finance the Virginia Company as well as changing social and economic patterns both in the company and in the audiences to which these advertising campaigns were addressed.