ing, but these were years of a continuing struggle for the
very life of the colony itself. In the circumstances, perhaps ten years
should be viewed as a short time.

Be that as it may, there are other questions that have been even more
bothersome, if only because they have seemed more pertinent to the
modern interest in Virginia's history. The American has been accustomed
to view the Virginia colony as the first permanent settlement in his
country, as the point at which his own history has its beginning, but
he finds in the Jamestown colony a pattern of activity somewhat
different from that he associates with the later development of the
country. What kind of a colony was it? Was it really a colony? Just
what were the adventurers trying to accomplish in Virginia? Were they
actually interested in colonization, in the proper sense of the term,
or were their objectives commercial? These and other such questions
have claimed much of the attention of those who have sought to
interpret for their fellow countrymen the early history of Virginia.
The difficulty arises partly from the American's insistence that the
later history of his country be taken as the standard for judging
every action of the first adventurers, and partly from a failure to
appreciate the extent to which the earlier ventures in Virginia were
necessarily exploratory in character.

If one of us could ask the adventurers in 1606 what it was they hoped
to accomplish in America, he probably would be told that it depended
very much on what they might find there. Although Richard Hakluyt had
been most industrious in collecting available information from the
earlier explorations of North America, including those by Spanish and
French explorers, the specific information at hand was quite definitely
limited. By the close of the sixteenth century European explorers had
charted the broad outlines of the North American coast, and here and
there they had filled in much of the detail, as had the French in
Canada, the Spaniard and the Frenchman on the coast of Florida, and the
Englishman along the coastal regions to be later known as Carolina and
New England. But the information at the command of the adventurers in
one country was not always available to those of another; indeed,
within any one country there were shipmasters who carried in their
heads working charts of coastal waters wholly unknown to the
geographers and cartographers who sought to serve the larger intere