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ey said, that not far off from that place lived a nation of Indians, that made salt, and sold it to their neighbors. That this was a great and powerful people, which never suffered any strangers to return that had once discovered their towns. Captain Batt used all the arguments he could to get them forward, but in vain. And so, to please those timorous Indians, the hopes of this discovery were frustrated, and the detachment was forced to return. In this journey it is supposed that Batt never crossed the great ridge of mountains, but kept up under it to the southward. For of late years the Indian traders have discovered, on this side the mountains, about five hundred miles to the southward, a river they call Oukfuskie, full of broad sunken grounds and marshes, but falling into the bay or great gulf between cape Florida and the mouth of the Mississippi, which I suppose to be the river where Batt saw the Indian cabins and marshes, but is gone to from Virginia without ever piercing the high mountains, and only encountering the point of an elbow, which they make a little to the southward of Virginia. Sec. 91. Upon Captain Batt's report to Sir William Berkeley, he resolved to make a journey himself, that so there might be no hinderance for want of sufficient authority, as had been in the aforesaid expedition. To this end he concerted matters for it, and had pitched upon his deputy governor. The assembly also made an act to encourage it. But all these preparations came to nothing, by the confusion which happened there soon after by Bacon's rebellion. And since that, there has never been any such discovery attempted from Virginia, when Governor Spotswood found a passage over the great ridge of mountains, and went over them himself. Sec. 92. The occasion of this rebellion is not easy to be discovered: but 'tis certain there were many things that concurred towards it. For it cannot be imagined, that upon the instigation of two or three traders only, who aimed at a monopoly of the Indian trade, as some pretend to say, the whole country would have fallen into so much distraction; in which people did not only hazard their necks by rebellion, but endeavored to ruin a governor, whom they all entirely loved, and had unanimously chosen; a gentleman who had devoted his whole life and estate to the service of the country, and against whom in thirty-five years experience there had never been one single complaint. Neither can it be suppo
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