wind,” that would delight their senses as they drew near to the strand, an allusion probably suggested to him by the glowing descriptions brought back to England by the adventurers who took part in the expeditions to Roanoke many years before, or it may have come to him from the traditions of the earliest explorations in the Spanish Main. Clayton, an English traveller who visited Virginia about eighty years after the foundation of Jamestown, was disposed to attribute the statement of the sailors to that extreme love of the marvellous, which has always distinguished those following a seafaring life, but as he justified his incredulity by his failure to detect the odor himself in the single instance of his own voyage to the Colony, his conclusions cannot be properly set against the general experience of a host of mariners through so many generations.[1]
- ↑ Clayton’s Virginia, p. 5, Force’s Historical Tracts, vol. III. On the 2d of July, 1584, Captains Amadas and Barlow, as they approached the coast of the modern North Carolina, but before it had been sighted, detected “a smel so sweet and so strong as if we had bene in the midst of some delicate garden abounding with all kinds of odoriferous flowers, by which they were assured that the land could not be farre distant.” Hakluyt’s Voyages, p. 301. Strachey, writing many years later, has recorded “that before we come in sight of yt (i.e. Virginia) thirty leagues, we smell a sweet savour as is usually from off Cape Vincent, the South Cape of Spayne, if the wynd come from the Shoare.” Historie of Travails into Virginia, p. 43. The distance to which these odors were wafted off shore is possibly explained in the following from the voyages of Captain Devries (Voyages from Holland to America, p. 31). Writing in 1630, he says “The 2nd December, threw the lead in 14 fathoms sandy bottom and smelt the land (the Delaware or New Jersey shore), which gave a sweet perfume as the wind came from the northwest, which blew off land and caused these sweet odours. This comes from the Indians setting fires at this time of year to the woods and thickets, in order to hunt, and the land is full of sweet smelling herbs as sassafras, which has a sweet smell. When the wind blows out of the north west, and the smoke too is driven to sea, it happens that the land is smelt before it is seen.”
