A word used in jamestown to describe men who had money and power

By 1675, Virginia had become Great Britain's most lucrative American colony, exporting more than ten million pounds of tobacco to England annually. Import duties collected on this tobacco earned the crown £100,000 a year-a figure that would rise, by 1700, to roughly £400,000. Not even England's valuable sugar colonies in the West Indies yielded such high revenues.

While these revenues hardly compared to the staggering mineral wealth extracted by Spain from the New World a century earlier, in many ways tobacco was England's gold. Foreign pirates lurked off the American coast hoping to waylay English vessels carrying the valuable weed, and British ships of war were deployed just to ensure its safe passage to England.