ut the voyage across the Atlantic was so long and costly, that it
proved impossible to transport in any reasonable length of time enough
workers to Virginia to supply her needs. And the few thousand that came
over in the early years of the Seventeenth century were in such great
demand that they could secure wages several times higher than those in
vogue throughout Europe. Thus the London Company, from the very outset,
found itself face to face with a difficulty which it could never
surmount. Virginia could not compete with the ship-stores of the Baltic
nations because her labor, when indeed it was found possible to secure
labor at all, was far more expensive than that of Poland or Sweden or
Russia. It mattered not that the Company sent over indentured servants,
bound by their contracts to work for a certain number of years; the
effect was the same. The cost of transportation swallowed up the profits
from the servant's labor, when that labor was expended upon industries
which had to face the competition of the cheap workers of the Old World.

It speaks well for the acumen of Captain John Smith that he seems to
have been the first to grasp clearly this truth. He wrote that the
workingmen had made a beginning of "Pitch and Tarre, Glass, Sope-ashes
and Clapboard," but that little had been accomplished. "If you rightly
consider what an infinite toyle it is in Russia and Swetland, where the
woods are proper for naught else, and though there be the helpe both of
man and beast in those ancient Common-wealths, which many a hundred
years have used it, yet thousands of those poor people can scarce get
necessaries to live ... you must not expect from us any such
matter."[1-13]

The attempt to produce iron in Virginia was pursued even more
vigorously, but with equally poor success. The early settlers, eager to
assure the Company that the venture they had entered upon would soon
yield a rich return, spoke enthusiastically of the numerous indications
of the presence of iron ore. In 1609 Captain Newport brought with him to
England a supply of ore from which sixteen or seventeen tons of metal
were extracted of a quality equal or superior to that obtained from any
European country. The iron was sold to the East India Company at the
rate of L4 a ton.[1-14] Immediately plans were launched for taking
advantage of what seemed to be a splendid opportunity. In the course of
the first three years machinery for smelting and manufacturing iron wa