In 1729, when the surrender of the Carolina charter to the Crown was pending, there had been published in London the first edition of Joshua Gee's The Trade and Navigation of Great Britain Considered, one of the most widely read of the commercial tracts of the century.38 [Note 38 Later editions appeared in rapid sequence, 1730, 1731, 1738, 1750, 1760, 1767. The quotations are from… the first edition.] A merchant in the West India trade, in 1718 Gee had been one of the promoters, with Coram, of the project for settling soldiers in Nova Scotia and on the Maine border to raise hemp and produce naval stores. 39 [Note 39 Acts of the Privy Council, Colonial, 1680-1720] But by 1729 his interest had turned from the northern towards the southern frontier. Repeatedly he insisted upon the value of the southern colonies, of Virginia, and especially of Carolina, 'the most improveable, in my Appprehension, of any of our Colonies; yet because it is the Property of particular Persons, supplies us with little more than one Commodity of Rice (tho' it is capable of many other valuable ones) and is liable to be overrun by the French, Spaniards, and Indians, for want of a sufficient Protection.' Pointing to the line of French forts from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf, Gee proposed that the English build posts of their own along the Appalachians, to secure 'the Mines contained in them, to protect the Indian and Skin Trade, and to preserve the Navigation' of the rivers of Maryland, Virginia, and Carolina. This suggestion somewhat vaguely recalled the Barnwell proposals for frontier forts which had been endorsed by the Board of Trade in 1720. Elsewhere Gee clearly anticipated the settlement schemes of Johnson and Oglethorpe. In view of the impending surrender of Carolina, he demonstrated that the southern piedmont was a country 'large enough to canton out into distinct Lots [i.e., townships?] all the Inhabitants we shall be capable of sending ... , which would also be a Security to our Frontiers against the Incroachments of the French who lie on the other Side those Mountains.' But from this point of view the most significant passages in his pamphlet were contained in chapter xxvii. There he set forth proposals for transporting and colonizing the poor which were almost verbally reproduced in Oglethorpe's first recorded exposition of his charitable colony plan. Indeed, one might suppose that Oglethorpe, when he met Percival in February, 1730, had just come from a reading of Gee. Recalling that the French had lately sent over great numbers of vagrants to the settlements on the Mississippi, Gee urged that the methods used by the English for transporting convicts be employed as well 'for all Persons . . . that cannot find Methods of Subsistence at home.' These should be settled on tracts of one hundred acres or more on the exposed southern borders, their quit-rents to be paid after several years from the produce of their lands, that is, in hemp and flax. Such colonists, marrying young, would multiply rapidly, 'by which Means those vast Tracts of Land now waste will be planted, and secured from the Danger we apprehend of the French over-running them.' Both Gee and Oglethorpe expected that silk culture would also develop. Though Gee hardly suggested a new colony, under separate government, in other respects the resemblances between Oglethorpe's ideas and his own were so close as to raise the presumption of derivation, or a common origin. Oglethorpe, it is likely, envisaged his first modest scheme in terms of Gee's published suggestions.