Page:The Rise of American Civilization (Volume 1).djvu/50

 into life were old and seasoned navigators, such as John Smith and Ferdinando Gorges, who had seen America with their own eyes, and industrious students of maritime enterprise, such as Richard Hakluyt, who had been affiliated with Raleigh in his ill-starred experiments. Associated with them were merchants, traders, landed gentlemen, and other persons who knew little or nothing about America and regarded the undertaking as primarily a profit-making venture.

Though the investors insisted on works of piety among the Indians, they wanted a quick return on their capital; their colony was hardly a year old when they demanded a piece of gold and threatened to forsake the settlers as "banished men" if cargoes of goods worth two thousand pounds were not immediately forthcoming. Neither the stockholders nor the majority of the first emigrants had any very definite idea of the labor, land, and administrative systems required for successful colonization.

As a matter of fact the air of England was still charged with vain imaginings awakened by Spanish luck. "Why, man," ran the lines of a play written in 1605 to laud the glories of America, "all their dripping pans are pure golde, and all the chaines with which they chaine up their streets are massive gold; all the prisoners they take are fettered in golde; and for rubies and diamonds, they goes forth in holy dayes and gather 'hem by the sea-shore, to hang on their children's coates and stick in their children's caps, as commonly as our children wear saffron-gilt brooches and groates with holes in 'hem."

With such wild tales afloat to stir the cupidity of the avaricious, it was naturally the soldier of fortune who first grasped at the opportunity of migrating to Virginia. The directors of the Company tried to secure industrious and God-fearing settlers, but, in the first group of one hundred and five emigrants, there were only a few mechanics and twelve laborers; about one-half were set down as "gentlemen" and four as carpenters—bound to a houseless wilder-