Corn Conquers Virginia 45 



Still, for all that, he knew whereof he spoke. He himself had 

 sailed to the New World. He had seen that amazing country 

 of the red savages with his own eyes. Recently, he had dis- 

 patched an expedition at his own expense to report on the 

 advisability of an English settlement there. 



His captains, Amadas and Barlow, were returned with their 

 findings; they had found it truly a "goodlie land" with "the 

 highest and reddest cedars of the world, far bettering the cedars 

 of the Azores. The king sent us every day a brace or two of 

 fat bucks, conies, hares, fish . . . the best in the world. He 

 sent us divers kinds of fruits, melons, walnuts, cucumbers, 

 gourds, peas and divers roots and fruits, very excellent good; 

 and of their country corn, which is very white, fair, and well 

 tasted, and groweth three times in five months. In May they 

 sow, in July they reap; in June they sow, in August they reap; 

 in July they sow, in September they reap. Only they cast the 

 corn into the ground, breaking a little of the soft turf with a 

 wooden mattock or pickaxe. Ourselves proved the soil and 

 put some of our peas in the ground and in ten days they were 

 fourteen inches high." 



The country so highly praised was that lying round Pimlico 

 Sound. With characteristic enthusiasm Raleigh had set about 

 forming a colony of planters. 



It was no mean company that sailed under Ralph Lane in 

 the seven ships of Sir Richard Grenville's fleet. One of the 

 youngest of them was a nineteen-year-old lad from Suffolk, 

 Thomas Cavendish. Three years later he was to command three 

 ships and chase the Don from the Pacific with a thoroughness 

 equal to Drake's, and then come back to England having 

 circumnavigated the globe. Another was the mathematician 

 Thomas Hariot, several of whose theories Descartes was not 

 above appropriating. Still another was John White, destined 

 to become the grandfather of the ill-fated Virginia Dare. 



They found the country as Raleigh's captains had reported 

 it. But what interested these Elizabethan adventurers was not 



