Willem van de Velde the Younger, Dutch ships in a calm. Public domain.
The Massachusetts Bay Company carried its charter to America, and the stockholders who went became the government.
A family that made the crossing still needed a town to grant it land, because the voyage itself earned no acres.
A craftsman with a little stock could be admitted to a new town and receive a house lot if the members accepted him.
The stockholders who emigrated kept the charter, the votes, and the right to grant land, and investors who stayed in England lost control.
In 1629 the Massachusetts Bay Company received a royal charter that did not require its government to meet in England, and that August the Cambridge Agreement committed the emigrant stockholders to take the charter with them.
John Winthrop’s fleet sailed in 1630.
A trading company turned into a commonwealth, and decisions about land were made in the colony rather than in a London office.
Charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company (1629); Cambridge Agreement (1629)