ith which Captain Christopher Newport, who commanded the
ships dispatched to Virginia, had formerly served. It was a good enough
working theory, based partly on knowledge of the geography of Russia
and partly on interrogation of the Indians in Carolina by Raleigh's
men. And the rivers of that part of North America which lies east of
the Mississippi form just such a system as the Virginia adventurers
envisaged, except for the fact that the Ohio and other westward flowing
streams do not empty into the Pacific.

The modern American has usually looked upon such a venture as this as
something distinctly apart from an agricultural type of endeavor, but
there is good reason for believing that the London adventurers took a
different view. They understood the dependence of agriculture upon an
opportunity to market its products, and they considered the success of
their commercial ventures to be the surest and the quickest way of
providing easy access to a market. If a new and practicable route to
China could be found in America, any colony located close at hand to
the portage along which the goods of the Orient were moved for
transshipment to England would find a ready market for food and other
provisions by supplying the ships engaged in a highly profitable trade.
More than that, the plenty and the regularity of this shipping would
provide easy freightage for the encouragement of a variety of
agricultural and horticultural experiments looking to the production of
such commodities as sugar, ginger, wine, or vegetable dyes and oils.
The adventurers well understood the advantage to be gained by
duplicating the success previously won by the Portuguese and Spaniards
with such experiments in the Azores, in Madeira, in the Canaries, and
more recently in the West Indies.

To put the point briefly, Virginia was founded upon many different
hopes for profitable undertakings--some of them commercial, some
agricultural, and some industrial. The records show an early interest
in several extractive industries, including mining, not just for gold
but for copper and iron as well. First instructions for trade with the
native Indians reveal an immediate concern for the establishment of
good relations with them and for laying in a good stock of Indian corn
as a food reserve, but they show too a concern for the policies that
would shape the development of a wider trade. Provision in the charter,
and in the instructions of the royal council, for the