ther of Raleigh Gilbert,) they gladly
abandoned the colony, and returned to England in the spring of 1608.

It was in this year that Henry Hudson, an Englishman, employed by the
Dutch East India Company, after entering the Chesapeake, and remarking
the infant settlement of the English, discovered the beautiful river
which still retains the name of that distinguished navigator. The Dutch
afterwards erected near its mouth, and on the Island of Manhattan, the
fort and cabins of New Amsterdam, the germ of New York.

Smith had hitherto declined, but now consented, September, 1608, to
undertake the office of president. Ratcliffe was under arrest for
mutiny; and the building of the fine house which he had commenced for
himself in the woods, was discontinued. The church was repaired, the
storehouse newly covered, magazines for supplies erected, the fort
reduced to a pentagon figure, the watch renewed, troops trained; and the
whole company mustered every Saturday in the plain by the west bulwark,
called "Smithfield." There, sometimes, more than a hundred dark-eyed and
dark-haired tawny Indians would stand in amazement to see a file of
soldiers batter a tree, where a target was set up to shoot at.

Newport arrived with a second supply, and brought out also presents for
Powhatan, a basin and ewer, bedstead and suit of scarlet clothes.
Newport, upon this voyage, had procured a private commission in which he
stood pledged to perform one of three impossibilities; for he engaged
not to return to England without either a lump of gold, a certainty of
the South Sea, or one of Sir Walter Raleigh's lost colonists. Newport
brought also orders to discover the Manakin (originally Monacan)
country, and a barge constructed so as to be taken to pieces, which they
were to carry beyond the falls, so as to convey them down by some river
running westward to the South Sea or Pacific Ocean. Vasco Nunez, in
1513, crossing the Isthmus of Darien, from the summit of a mountain
discovered, beyond the other side of the continent, an ocean, which,
from the direction in which he saw it, took the name of the "South Sea."

The cost of this last supply brought out by Newport was two thousand
pounds, and the company ordered that the vessels should be sent back
freighted with cargoes of corresponding value, and threatened, in case
of a failure, that the colonists should be left in Virginia as banished
men. It appears that the Virginia Company had been deeply inc