historian, took care to see that Captain Newport did not have a
hero's role. But those of us who would understand the context in which
our history first developed will do well to consider the career of
Christopher Newport.

In carrying out the second supply, which reached Jamestown in September
1608, Newport had aboard 70 new colonists, including two women and
eight Polish and German experts in the manufacture of glass, tar,
pitch, and soap ashes. He had a broad commission for completing the
exploration of the James River above the falls that much later would
fix the site of Richmond, and for determining the fate of Raleigh's
lost colony. He found no answer to that riddle, which remains to our
own day an intriguing mystery; indeed, he seems not to have found the
time for any real investigation of the problem. As a result, he brought
back only rumors of four survivors living on the Chowan River. The
instruction gains its chief interest from the suggestion it conveys of
a renewed interest on the part of the adventurers in the area
previously explored by Raleigh's men. Perhaps the adventurers
anticipated the further disappointments resulting from the additional
exploration of the James, and so thought again of the Roanoke River,
which Captain Ralph Lane had partly explored in 1585 and 1586 with the
hope that it might lead to China. Perhaps they had an eye mainly for
the publicity that could be had for any news of Raleigh's colonists.
Whatever the fact, a renewed interest in the Carolina region would find
very concrete expression in a new charter the adventurers secured
shortly after Newport's return to England in January 1609.

The actual bounds of the Jamestown colony under the first Virginia
charter ran 100 miles along the coast and 100 miles inland from the
coast. This, at any rate, was the area to which title was promised by
the charter. The second charter gave title to an area reaching 200
miles both northward and southward along the coast from Point Comfort,
at the mouth of the James, and "up into the Land throughout from Sea to
Sea, West and Northwest." In these greatly enlarged bounds one
immediately detects three major interests: (1) a desire to control the
entire extent of any passage that might be found to the South Seas, (2)
the hope that something might be accomplished in Carolina, and (3) the
need for a title to the whole of the Chesapeake, whose exploration had
been completed by Captain John Smith in the pr