CHAPTER II. THE ADVENTURERS

What was this Virginia to which they were bound? In the sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries the name stood for a huge stretch of littoral,
running southward from lands of long winters and fur-bearing animals to
lands of the canebrake, the fig, the magnolia, the chameleon, and the
mockingbird. The world had been circumnavigated; Drake had passed up the
western coast--and yet cartographers, the learned, and those who took the
word from the learned, strangely visualized the North American mainland as
narrow indeed. Apparently, they conceived it as a kind of extended Central
America. The huge rivers puzzled them. There existed a notion that these
might be estuaries, curling and curving through the land from sea to sea.
India--Cathay--spices and wonders and Orient wealth--lay beyond the South
Sea, and the South Sea was but a few days' march from Hatteras or
Chesapeake. The Virginia familiar to the mind of the time lay extended, and
she was very slender. Her right hand touched the eastern ocean, and her
left hand touched the western.

Contact and experience soon modified this general notion. Wider knowledge,
political and economic considerations, practical reasons of all kinds, drew
a different physical form for old Virginia. Before the seventeenth century
had passed away, they had given to her northern end a baptism of other
names. To the south she was lopped to make the Carolinas. Only to the west,
for a long time, she seemed to grow, while like a mirage the South Sea and
Cathay receded into the distance.

This narrative, moving with the three ships from England, and through a
time span of less than a hundred and fifty years, deals with a region of
the western hemisphere a thousand miles in length, several hundred in
breadth, stretching from the Florida line to the northern edge of