48 Singing Valleys 



white and sweet flour. . . . "It maketh a good bread/' He 

 describes the Indians' methods of planting and cultivation, 

 and estimates that one English acre "forty perches long and 

 four wide, yields 200 London bushels of maize and beans." In 

 England, he adds, a wheat yield of forty bushels per acre is 

 considered a plenteous harvest. It is to Thomas Hariot's ac- 

 curate eye and mind that we owe our knowledge that the 

 Indians of Virginia planted their corn, four grains to a hill, 

 "set not to touch," in the pattern of the Maya, and immor- 

 talized by them in their day-sign for planting. 



An edition of Hariot's work was printed in Frankfort in 

 1590. This, and John White's earnest pleas that the settlement 

 in Virginia should not be abandoned, but encouraged and 

 aided, did much to stir England out of the lassitude which 

 came over her when the lively menace of the Armada had been 

 reduced to ashes. White had returned to Virginia with a new 

 company of settlers, among them his daughter Eleanor and 

 her husband, Ananias Dare. Even after tragedy had overtaken 

 the second colony, leaving only the charred ruins of houses, a 

 baby's shoe and the word CROATOAN cut on one of the 

 trees, White persisted in advocating a settlement in Virginia. 

 He pointed to Hariot's Briefe and True Report and to his 

 own illustrations to prove the richness of the land, and that it 

 would support planters, provided these dig in fields, not in the 

 river sand. 



Gloriana was dead; Raleigh was in the Tower. Jamie the 

 Scotsman, with the reek of whiskey on his breath, had brought 

 a tradesman's point of view to Whitehall. Swashbuckling ad- 

 venture was regarded askance. But a merchant company, with 

 such estimable directors as Sir George Somers, Sir Thomas 

 Gates, Captain Edward Wingfield and the Reverend Richard 

 Haklyut, cousin and namesake of the famous author of Voyages 

 and Discoveries, and himself a writer whose Principal Voyages, 

 was influencing the minds of Englishmen; a company with 

 shares to sell, and dividends to reap, a company chartered to 



