xperience with the new trade to begin to
appreciate some of its difficulties, as in the need to employ larger
and more expensive ships than were standard in England's maritime trade
and the great distance to China by way of the Cape of Good Hope.
Perhaps, after all, some route through America might have the advantage
over the Cape route. In the opinion of the late Sir William Foster,
through many years historiographer of the India Office, this was a
chief reason for the interest Sir Thomas Smith took in Virginia.

Let it be noted that Sir Thomas' interest in Virginia outlasted the
hope that a successful search for a passage to China might be based on
Jamestown. Nevertheless, the point may help to explain the marked
emphasis on this hope that one finds at the beginning of the project.
Instructions to the first expedition directed the choice of a seat on
some navigable river, and added, "if you happen to discover divers
portable rivers, and mongst them any one that hath two main branches,
if the difference be not great make choice of that which bendeth most
toward the North-West, for that way you shall soonest find the other
sea." The other sea, of course, was the Pacific, or as Englishmen were
likely to say, the South Seas, whose waters also washed the shores of
China. Vain as was this hope of trade with the Orient through America,
it was destined for survival, in one form or another, through many
years. As late as the middle of the nineteenth century, it would be a
principal argument for the construction of a trans-continental railway.

In 1606 the supposition was that the river system of North America
might be like that of Russia, where easy portages joining rivers
flowing in different directions made it possible to travel, most of the
way by boat, from the north to the south of the country and return.
"You must observe," advised the adventurers, "whether the river on
which you plant doth spring out of mountains or out of lakes; if it be
out of any lake, the passage to the other sea will be the more easy,
and [it] is like enough that out of the same lake you shall find some
spring which runs the contrary way toward the East India Sea; for the
great and famous rivers of Volga, Tanis and Dwina have three heads
near joynd, and yet the one falleth into the Caspian Sea, the other
into the Euxine Sea, and the third into the Polonian Sea." For this
information, the Virginia adventurers were indebted to the Muscovy
Company, w