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