110 STATEN ISLAND INSTITUTE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES 
preparing the way for the greatest and best success at a later day. 
Conspicuous among the leaders in these movements were Walter 
Raleigh, Humphrey Gilbert, Francis Drake, Richard Hakluyt, John 
White, all names to be ever held in honor by the American people. 
Few, perhaps none, of those taking part in these voyages ex- 
pected to settle down permanently in the new country. The most 
common intention seems to have been to stay awhile, a year at 
most, and return with such gold and silver and precious stones as 
they might be able to accumulate. A purpose could hardly have 
been expected on the part of individuals to stay longer when one 
considers the vast distance from home-and friends, the perils of 
ocean travel in those days, the unused climate, and the exposure 
of life and liberty to the merciless practices of the aborigines or 
the more savage Spaniard. These temporary and shifting arrange- 
ments were no doubt much to the distaste of the great patriotic 
promoters of the enterprises, but they had to make the best ar- 
rangements they could; it was these or none at all. They might 
have done better if the men that were induced to go were of a sort 
adapted to the mission upon which they were sent. Unfortunately 
this was quite uniformly not the case. “The men that build up or 
keep up institutions are those who stick to the task, those whose 
best interests are bound up in the community of which they are a 
part, who have accumulated honor and emoluments by their stead- 
fastness, and who have learned incidentally to let well enough 
alone. 
But the movement toward the west, which we are specially study- 
ing now, differed in one important respect from those that pre- 
ceded it. It determined with unflinching earnestness to establish 
be) 
a permanent colony in “ Wyngandacoia,” as the new English ter- 
ritory was called by Amadas and Barlow, the captains of Raleigh’s 
expedition of 1584, an outlandish name ill-liked by Elizabeth, who 
b) 
fortunately changed it to “ Virginia”’ in her own honor. 
According to a letter in cipher from the Spanish Ambassador 
Zuniga in London to the King of Spain under date of March, 
