Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 1.djvu/114

 wind,&#8221; that would delight their senses as they drew near to the strand, an allusion probably suggested to him by the glowing descriptions brought back to England by the adventurers who took part in the expeditions to Roanoke many years before, or it may have come to him from the traditions of the earliest explorations in the Spanish Main. Clayton, an English traveller who visited Virginia about eighty years after the foundation of Jamestown, was disposed to attribute the statement of the sailors to that extreme love of the marvellous, which has always distinguished those following a seafaring life, but as he justified his incredulity by his failure to detect the odor himself in the single instance of his own voyage to the Colony, his conclusions cannot be properly set against the general experience of a host of mariners through so many generations.