nobody but men of that kind to make the first settlement.
Then, after those men had cleared some land, built some houses, and
raised their first crop, men of other kinds might have been sent as fast
as there was need for their services.

But that was not the way in which the London Company went to work. They
chose for their first settlers about the most unfit men they could have
found for such a purpose. There were one hundred and five of them in
all, and forty-eight of them--or nearly half of the whole company--were
what people in those days called "gentlemen"--that is to say, they were
the sons of rich men. They had never learned how to do any kind of work,
and had been brought up to think that a gentleman could not work without
degrading himself and losing his right to be called a gentleman. There
were a good many "servants" also in the party, and probably most of them
were brought to wait upon the gentlemen. There were very few farmers and
not many mechanics in the party, although farmers and mechanics were the
men most needed. There were some goldsmiths, who expected to work the
gold as soon as the colonists should find it, and there was a
perfume-maker. It is hard to say in what way this perfume-man was
expected to make himself useful in the work of planting a settlement in
the swamps of Virginia; but, as there were so many fine "gentlemen" in
the party, the perfumer probably thought his wares would be in demand.

None of the men brought families with them. They were single men, who
came out to this country, not to make comfortable homes for wives and
children, by hard and patient work, but to find gold and pearls, or to
grow rich in some other quick and easy way, and then to go back and live
in ease in England.

It is a wonder that such men ever succeeded in planting a settlement at
all. From the first it does not seem to have been clear to them that
they ought to raise plenty of food for themselves and learn how to live
by their own work. They expected the company in London to send them most
of their food and everything else that they needed. They had plenty of
rich land and a good climate, but they expected to be fed by people
three thousand miles away, across a great ocean.

Luckily, there was one man of sense and spirit among them--the
celebrated Captain John Smith--who got them to work a little, and, after
many hardships and two or three narrow escapes from failure, the colony
was firmly planted.

The