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In 1621 a Jew by the name of Elias Legarde arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, aboard the ship Abigail, having been brought over from France by Anthonie Bonall to assist in the wine-making industry begun by some of the early colonists of Virginia. In 1649 a Sephardic Jew named Solomon Franco arrived in Massachusetts from the Netherlands as an agent for Immanuel Perada, a Jewish merchant based in Holland. Franco had been sent to Boston to deliver supplies ordered by Edward Gibbons, a major general in the Massachusetts militia. When Franco attempted to collect payment from Gibbons for delivering the ordered goods, Gibbons refused saying that he had already paid Franco's employer, Immanuel Perada, for both the merchandise and the cost of shipping. The Massachusetts General Court ruled on May 6, 1649 that Franco was to be expelled from the colony, granting him "six shillings per week out of the Treasury for ten weeks, for sustenance, till he can get his passage to Holland."
Apart from their involvement in the Company of Merchant Adventurers, Jews owned controlling stock in the Dutch West India Company, which sent 200 Jews to colonize Brazil in 1642.
When their colony in Recife, Brazil, fell to the Portuguese, the Jews fled from the Portuguese Inquisition in Brazil and headed for the Dutch West India Company's colony of New Amsterdam in what is now New York, in 1655. The Dutch governor of New Amsterdam wrote to the board of Directors asking for permission to expel the Jews from the New Amsterdam colony because of their unscrupulous trade practices which were hurting gentile-owned businesses in the colony, and the directors of the Dutch West India Company told Stuyvesant that there was nothing they could do, that the Jews were to be allowed to stay there because the Dutch West India Company was controlled by Jewish stock-holders