In March, 1620, a committee of the company adopted the recommendation of Sir George Yeardley, governor of Virginia, that Marmaduke Rayner be employed to explore the surrounding region in a logical manner "which would produce good benefit to the Plantation." The company would pay all expenses, and in the summer Rayner made the voyage for which he had been employed, exploring "to the Southward to Roanoke." In July, 1621, an account of this and two other voyages to the north by others were read to the officers of the company in London. It is unfortunate that no copy of Rayner's report survives.

News of these discoveries apparently reached England in the autumn of 1620, soon after Rayner returned. In November the Somers Island [Bermuda] Company informed the officers of the Virginia Company that they had discovered that their land in Bermuda was less extensive than they had thought when they received their grant. In order to "maintain a mutual dependence and traffic hereafter," they sought from the Virginia Company "a good portion of land in Virginia, on that side of the coast as lies nearest unto them, either at Ronoque southerly, or else whereat shall be most convenient for them, not being yet inhabitated." The Virginia Company, perhaps seeing an opportunity to populate their country, offered 100 acres to each shareholder in the Somers Island Company as well as fifty more acres for each person they sent to Virginia. The company did not grant them a specific tract at "Ronoque southerly," but instead offered land wherever they chose adjacent to but not "prejudicial to any other plantation there already."

In order to distinguish between the new colony of Virginia centered in Jamestown and Raleigh's Virginia, the name Roanoke was frequently used for the older area. John Smith's map of 1624 called the region "Ould Virginia," while at a later time the terms South Virginia and the Southern Plantation were applied.