h that Hakluyt's objectives in America had at last
become attainable.

Leaving aside the search for a passage to China, which may never have
been so important to Hakluyt as it was to the people whose interest in
America he sought to enlist, Sandys undertook to carry through, all at
once, the program Hakluyt had outlined for Queen Elizabeth as early as
1584 in his famous "_Discourse on Western Planting_." It was a program
that looked to the development in America of products that would free
England of dependence upon trades with other parts of the world which
were in any way disadvantageous to England, and that would guarantee to
any Englishmen who developed such products a sure profit on their
investment. It was a program that had taken its shape first from the
prospect, in Raleigh's day, of an early war with Spain, and perhaps it
should be noted that when Sandys came to office in 1619 the Thirty
Years War had only recently had its beginning with the king's own
son-in-law a central figure. The war has gone down in our history books
as the last of the great religious wars, and many were the Englishmen
who thought that England should be, or would be soon involved.

In Virginia, Sandys promised to produce iron. It is strange that the
attempt to develop an iron industry in Virginia, on which the company
spent all told something like L5,000, should have made less impression
on modern historians than has an early and brief search for gold that
was incidental to other explorations. The iron industry in England was
suffering from the depletion of the island's wood supply, which was
still depended upon for smelting, and Virginia promised an unlimited
supply. Other industries that he hoped to develop in the colony are
suggested by a list of tradesmen the company invited to adventure to
Virginia in 1620: among them, sawyers, joiners, shipwrights,
millwrights, coopers, weavers, tanners, potters, fishermen,
fishhookmakers, netmakers, leather dressers, limeburners, and dressers
of hemp and flax. Even more important because so much depended upon
persuading the individual adventurers to invest their own money in the
development of their land, were plans for the production of sugar,
wine, indigo, silk, cotton, olive oil, rice, etc. In the development of
these products Sandys intended the public lands--those cultivated under
the direct supervision of the company and by its own tenants--to serve
more or less in the capacity of experiment