The romance remained. The
lad who would have enlisted under Drake found no difficulty in joining
Morgan, and, if the occasion offered, he was ready to join the bold
Captain Kidd with alacrity.
The seventeenth century furnished another kind of romance. It was the
century of settlement. In the year 1606, after Sir Walter Raleigh had
led the way, the Virginia Company sent out the _Susan Constant_ with
two smaller ships, containing a handful of colonists. They settled on
the James River. Among them was John Smith, an adventurer and
free-lance quite of the Elizabethan strain. In him John Oxenham lived
again. We all know the story of Captain John Smith. He began his
career by killing Turks; he continued it by exploring the creeks and
rivers of Virginia, with endless adventures. Sometimes he was a
prisoner of the Indians. Once, if his own account is true, he was
rescued from imminent death by the intervention of Pocahontas, called
Princess--or Lady Rebecca. He explored Chesapeake Bay, and he gave the
name of New England to the country north of Cape Cod. Such histories,
of which this is only one, kept alive in England the adventurous
spirit and the romance of the West. The dream of _finding_ gold had
vanished: what belonged to the present were the things done and
suffered in His Majesty's plantations with all that they suggested.
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