Gosnold returned to America with a hundred men and adequate supplies, it
was not to Buzzard's Bay, but to the mouth of the James River, that he
steered, and on its banks the colony was founded. Gosnold himself seems to
have been a man of the type that afterward made the New England whalers
famous in all seas; the mariners of New Bedford, New London, Sag Harbor
and Nantucket. But the companions of his second voyage were by no means of
this stamp: the bulk of them were "gentlemen," who had no familiarity with
hard fare and hard work, and expected nature to provide for them in the
wilderness as bountifully as the London caterers had done at home. To the
accident which brought Gosnold to a southerly instead of a northerly port
on this occasion may be due the fact that Virginia instead of
Massachusetts became the home of the emigrant cavaliers. Had they, as well
as the Puritans, chosen New England for their abiding place, an
amalgamation might have taken place which would have vitally modified
later American history. But destiny kept them apart in place as well as in
sentiment and training; and it is only in our own day that Reconstruction,
and the development of means of intercommunication, bid fair to make a
homogeneous people out of the diverse elements which for so many
generations recognized at most only an outward political bond.

Captain John Smith, fortunately, was neither a cavalier nor a simple
mariner, but a man in a class by himself, and just at that juncture the
most useful that could possibly have been attached to this adventure. His
career even before the present period had been so romantic that, partly
for that reason, and partly because he himself was his own chief
chronicler, historians have been prone to discredit or modify many of its
episodes. But what we know of Smith from other than a Smith source tallies
so well with the stories which rest upon his sole authority that there
seems to be no sound cause for rejecting the latter. After making all
deductions, he remains a remarkable personage, and his influence upon the