A false notion once generally accepted is able to live in some ghostly shape after the breath is out of its body. The hope of a passage to the Pacific by means of a strait and the belief in a narrow isthmus in latitude 40° could not long survive the increase of knowledge that followed the settlement of Virginia and Captain Smith's explorations. Note 5. But sixteen years after the landing at Jamestown, when these two geographical jack-o'-lanterns had ceased to flicker, the poet George Sandys, who was secretary of the colony, wrote that he was ready to venture his life in finding a way to the South Sea, but this way was now to be by an overland route. Sandys's plan. About the same time Henry Briggs, the famous Savile lecturer at Oxford, proved to the satisfaction of many that the rivers running westward from the Virginia mountains must reach the Pacific in about one hundred and fifty miles. Note 6. One Marmaduke Parkinson, an explorer sailing in the Potomac, confirmed the theory of the learned mathematician by discovering in the house of a chief a "China Boxe," whatever that may have been. Luke Fox. In 1631 Luke Fox set sail by the northwest, carrying a letter from Charles I addressed "to the Emperor of Japan," which he probably was not able to deliver. Northwest. Fox, p. 172. In 1634 Captain Thomas Yong got as far as the falls of the Delaware in the endeavor to go through the continent in latitude 40°. The strait and isthmus and northwest passage having failed, Yong was content to go by fresh water till he should reach a Mediterranean Sea in the heart of America, which he believed to open into both the "North Ocean" and the South Sea. Weston Documents 45 and 47 and ff. As the century advanced the fresh-water route had in turn to be finally abandoned, and seekers after the Pacific were fain to betake themselves to dry-shod travel, and even to mountain-climbing, as George Sandys had proposed. Catlet and Lederer. A Colonel Catlet is mentioned who reached the Alleghanies in the endeavor to find a river flowing westward, but he was daunted by what seemed to him almost impassable ranges of mountains that barred his way. Glover, in Phil. Trans., xi 626. Comp. Perfect Descr. of Va., 1649 and Lederer's Voyage. Over these "rocky hills and sandy desarts" scarce a bird was seen to fly. In 1669, Lederer, a German surveyor, set out from Virginia on a similar futile exploration. Lawson's Carolina, 47. As late as 1700 the well-informed Lawson speaks hopefully of the proximity of the Pacific to North Carolina. This fallacy had prompted many desperate adventures, and had been the cause of many important discoveries, in the two centuries that it held possession of men's minds. Scot's Magazine, 1765, page 161. It reached its last attenuation in 1765, when the public prints announced that large boats were fitting out at Quebec to try the whale-fishing in Lake Ontario, and that "they have hopes of finding a communication by water with the western ocean, founded on the favorable reports of some Indians, who inform that a river runs westward many hundreds of miles as large as the Mississippi."
V.
Gold-hunting. As the mistake made by Columbus had left for heritage an almost ineradicable passion for the discovery of a westward sea way to Japan and China, so the vast treasure of gold and silver drawn by the Spaniards from Mexico and Peru produced a belief in the English mind that a colony planted at any place on the American coast might find gold. Here, again, the undoubting Hakluyt and other writers after him were ready with learned conclusions balancing on the tight rope of very slender premises. If an Indian had been seen wearing a piece of copper that "bowed easily," this flexibility proved it to be tarnished gold. If a savage seemed to say in his idiom, or by gestures and other signs, something which the puzzled newcomers took to signify that in a country farther on the copper was too soft for use, or that it was yellow, or that it had a good luster, what further evidence could an ingenious writer desire of the existence of the precious metal in that country? Hakluyt. Pref. to Va., magnified. Purchas, the successor of Hakluyt in geographical research, explains the divine purpose in thus endowing a heathen land with gold, which is that the Indian race "as a rich bride, though withered and deformed, ... might find many suitors for love of her portion," and thus the pagans be converted. Pilgrimage, 795. But Purchas filches both the simile and the pious thought from Herrera, who in turn probably pilfered it with many better things from the good Las Casas. Purchas also speaks with more optimism than elegance of the "silver bowels and golden entrails of the hills," as though one had but to dig into the first mountain to be enriched.
Frobisher's gold. Frobisher brought home from sub-arctic islands what his clumsy assayers avouched to be "gold eure." Refining works were erected for this stuff at Deptford to no profit, and to this day the inquisitive student is not able to ascertain from the conflicting reports whether there was any gold in the ore or not. Early Virginia gold-hunting. The main causes of the suffering at Jamestown during the first winter were the waste of time and the consumption of supplies while lading the ships with the glittering "dust mica" which is so abundant in the Virginia sands. The worthlessness of this cargo could not weaken the hopes of those alchemists who were able to produce gold merely by the use of arguments. The mines in Virginia moved farther west. It wanted only that explorers should reach the mountains. In spite of the sickness that wasted the colony in 1610, Lord De la Warr sent an expedition to dig gold on the upper James, but the warlike up-river tribes soon drove the prospectors back. In 1634, Sir John Harvey sent another body of men on the same fool's errand, though there had not been found in all the years preceding a particle of tangible evidence that gold existed in Virginia. But on the James, as on the Hudson, the glistering pigment with which the Indians besmeared their faces on occasions of display was believed to contain gold, and the places of its procurement were sought with ludicrous secrecy. Note 7.
Fact and fable about America. The unfaltering faith in the existence of abundant gold on the eastern coast of North America could not have subsisted on thin air so long if it had not been stimulated by the almost fabulous wealth drawn from South America by Spain. It had received encouragement also from the tales told by adventurers returned from America, who seem to have thought it necessary to bring back stories that would match in some degree the prevalent beliefs about the New World. The earliest but one of all the documents relating to America preserved among the British state papers is the statement of one David or Davy Ingram. With a hundred other luckless seamen he was put ashore in Mexico by Sir John Hawkins, because the ship lacked provisions. Ingram, traveling from tribe to tribe, achieved the notable feat of crossing the continent in a year. In 1569 he embarked on a French ship that he found near the mouth of the St. John River in what is now the province of New Brunswick. It was eleven years later that Davy Ingram, at home in England, made his statement, and the sailor's story had by that time gained much, perhaps, by frequent telling to wonder-loving listeners. Ingram's story. Sometimes he relates facts with sobriety, speaking the truth by relapse, it may be; again, he seems to be repeating tales told him by the savages, who were habitual marvel-mongers, or weaving into the account of what he had seen legends common in the folklore about America that had grown up in Europe; or perchance he only falls into an old forecastle habit of incontinent lying without provocation. The American women are described as "wearing great plates of gold covering their whole bodies like armor.... In every cottage pearls are to be