NIA,
Earth's only paradise!...

And in regions far
Such heroes bring ye forth
As those from whom we came;
And plant our name
Under that star
Not known unto our north.

See the parting upon Thames's side, Englishmen going, English kindred,
friends, and neighbors calling farewell, waving hat and scarf, standing
bare-headed in the gray winter weather! To Virginia--they are going to
Virginia! The sails are made upon the Susan Constant, the Goodspeed, and
the Discovery. The last wherry carries aboard the last adventurer. The
anchors are weighed. Down the river the wind bears the ships toward the
sea. Weather turning against them, they taste long delay in the Downs,
but at last are forth upon the Atlantic. Hourly the distance grows
between London town and the outgoing folk, between English shores and
where the surf breaks on the pale Virginian beaches. Far away--far away
and long ago--yet the unseen, actual cables hold, and yesterday and
today stand embraced, the lips of the Thames meet the lips of the James,
and the breath of England mingles with the breath of America.

CHAPTER II. THE ADVENTURERS

What was this Virginia to which they were bound? In the sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries the name stood for a huge stretch of
littoral, running southward from lands of long winters and fur-bearing
animals to lands of the canebrake, the fig, the magnolia, the chameleon,
and the mockingbird. The world had been circumnavigated; Drake had
passed up the western coast--and yet cartographers, the learned, and
those who took the word from the learned, strangely visualized the North
American mainland as narrow indeed. Apparently, they conceived it as a
kind of extended Central America. The huge rivers puzzled them. There
existed a notion that these might be estuaries, curling and curving
through the land from sea to sea. India--Cathay--spices and wonders and
Orient wealth--lay beyond the South Sea, and the South Sea was but a few
days' march from Hatteras or Chesapeake. The Virginia familiar to the
mind of the time lay extended, and she was very slender. Her right hand
touched the eastern ocean, and her left hand touched the western.

Contact and experience soon modified this general notion. Wider
knowledge, political and economic considerations, practical reasons of
all kinds, drew a different physical form for old Virginia. Before the
seventeenth century had passed away, they