knew there was a family likeness among dangerous happenings, so also he
found one among remedies, and he had a bag full of stories of strange
happenings and how they should be met.

They were going the old, long West Indies sea road. There was time enough
for talking, wondering, considering the past, fantastically building up the
future. Meeting in the ships' cabins over ale tankards, pacing up and down
the small high-raised poop-decks, leaning idle over the side, watching
the swirling dark-blue waters or the stars of night, lying idle upon the
deck, propped by the mast while the trade-winds blew and up beyond sail and
rigging curved the sky--they had time enough indeed to plan for marvels! If
they could have seen ahead, what pictures of things to come they might have
beheld rising, falling, melting one into another!

Certain of the men upon the Susan Constant, the Goodspeed, and the
Discovery stand out clearly, etched against the sky.

Christopher Newport might be forty years old. He had been of Raleigh's
captains and was chosen, a very young man, to bring to England from the
Indies the captured great carrack, Madre de Dios, laden with fabulous
treasure. In all, Newport was destined to make five voyages to Virginia,
carrying supply and aid. After that, he would pass into the service of the
East India Company, know India, Java, and the Persian Gulf; would be
praised by that great company for sagacity, energy, and good care of his
men. Ten years' time from this first Virginia voyage, and he would die upon
his ship, the Hope, before Bantam in Java.

Bartholomew Gosnold, the captain of the Goodspeed, had sailed with thirty
others, five years before, from Dartmouth in a bark named the Concord. He
had not made the usual long sweep southward into tropic waters, there to