sts
of the nation. Thus the London adventurers in 1606, though having at
hand a substantial body of useful information regarding the coasts, the
winds, and the currents running northward from the West Indies past St.
Augustine to Cape Hatteras, and comparable information regarding the
more northern waters explored by Frobisher, Davis, Gilbert, and others,
had only a sketchy knowledge of the intervening coastline that would
soon be explored by Captain Samuel Argall on commission from the
Virginia Company and by Henry Hudson, an Englishman temporarily in the
service of Dutch merchants. Even Chesapeake Bay, to which the London
adventurers dispatched their first expedition, was known to them
chiefly by the reports of Indians interrogated by Raleigh's agents as
they worked out from Roanoke Island. The first colonists in Virginia
gave to London detailed information regarding the lower Chesapeake and
the James River, but not until 1608 did Captain John Smith find the
time to explore the upper reaches of the bay and to identify the great
rivers emptying into it there. It hardly seems necessary to argue the
utility of such explorations, to which eloquent testimony exists in the
new bounds immediately fixed for the colony in the second charter. But
many have been the attempts to pass judgment on the success or failure
of the first settlers at Jamestown that have been written as though
their primary assignment had not been to explore.

Exploration and fortification--these two terms are consistently linked
in the papers on which the early English adventurers jotted notes for
their guidance or for the instruction of their agents in America. The
very first objective of the explorers was to locate a suitable site for
fortification, in order that further explorations might be conducted
from a secure base. The fortifications to be raised had to meet
exacting standards, such as would be approved by the military engineers
with whom the adventurers consulted along with the geographers, the
cartographers, and the shipmasters who also possessed useful
information. For these fortifications were intended to provide security
not so much against the native Indian as against the ships and soldiers
of Spain. Over the years there had been some debate as to how the fort
might be best located, with the result that in 1607 it was decided to
locate it some distance up a river that would afford navigation for an
ocean-going vessel but would force the en