It was entirely reasonable that the London Company should have looked upon the discovery of a route to the South Sea through Virginia as one of the principal objects to be accomplished by their enterprise. Doubtless the fact that so many members of the East India Company were also interested in the London, had a marked influence in creating and sustaining the determination to find a passage to the Indies by way of the Powhatan, but it can be easily seen that apart from the benefit which would result to those members who wished to carry on in their own private capacity a direct trade with the East, it would have been an incomparable advantage to the London Company as a body to have had in its territory the shortest highway to all the wealthiest nations of Asia. The words of Ralph Lane, already quoted, were just as applicable to the colony at Jamestown as to that at Roanoke; nothing, he declared, but the discovery of a good mine or a passage by water or land to the South Sea could bring the country in request in England as a desirable place for settlement.[1] The managers of the London Company were fully aware of the force of these words, independently of the immediate profit that would flow to the members of their organization from the possession of a mine, or the entrance to the East by way of the West. The instructions given to the leaders of the first voyage in 1606 were
- ↑ The correctness of this statement is confirmed by the letters of the Spanish Ambassador, Velasco, written many years afterwards. See Brown’s Genesis of the United States, pp. 634, 638.
a license to Richard Penkevel to discover a passage to the east by the north, northeast, or northwest (Fœdera, vol. XVI, pp. 660-663). In 1609 Henry Hudson, moved by a suggestion which Captain John Smith had made to him, to the effect that the Atlantic and Western oceans were connected north of Virginia by means of an open sea, explored the coast line as far as the river now bearing his name. He was finally left to perish, by a mutinous crew, while engaged in the attempt to find the passage to the Indies through American waters.
