Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 1.djvu/98

 the country along the eastern shores of North America, but even this counterpart is not altogether exact. Wherever the African explorer has gone, he has generally found wide divisions of country that teem with population, and which have been changed in a measure by the rude implements of a primitive agriculture. Groups of huts and fields of grain have rapidly succeeded each other in a large part of his journey. Strangely interesting as are the streams and forests, and the animals of the lands which he has discovered, still more worthy of attention have been the countless tribes of savage men who dominate every scene and overshadow all other objects in importance. That portion of the Atlantic coast where the first English Colony was established was also inhabited, but the population was scant and dispersed as compared with the countries visited by Stanley, Livingstone, and Speke. The valley of the Congo is a chain of towns and villages; the valley of the Powhatan was but thinly inhabited, the difference being due to the fact that the one people subsist almost entirely by agriculture, and the other subsisted principally by the chase. It is true that the Indians had cleared away the heavy growth of woods here and there for the cultivation of maize and vegetables, but the open spaces, which were contracted in area as compared with the great body of the country, were confined to the banks of the streams; the surface at large remained in the condition that had distinguished it from the time of the subsidence of the ocean. There could not have been a more fitting designation than that which Elizabeth gave to it, for it was essentially a virgin land, a land as a whole untouched and unused.