discomfort and peril.

The first comers in the spring of 1607, numbering a bare hundred men and
no women, were moved by the spirit of adventure. With a cumbrous and
oppressive government over them, and with no private ownership of land nor
other encouragement for steadygoing thrift, the only chance for personal
gain was through a stroke of discovery. No wonder the loss of time and
strength in futile excursions. No wonder the disheartening reaction in the
malaria-stricken camp of Jamestown.

A second hundred men arriving early in 1608 found but forty of the first
alive. The combined forces after lading the ships with "gilded dirt" and
cedar logs, were left facing the battle with Indians and disease. The dirt
when it reached London proved valueless, and the cedar, of course, worth
little. The company that summer sent further recruits including two women
and several Poles and Germans to make soap-ashes, glass and pitch--"skilled
workmen from foraine parts which may teach and set ours in the way where we
may set thousands a work in these such like services."[1] At the same time
it instructed the captain of the ship to explore and find either a lump of
gold, the South Sea passage, or some of Raleigh's lost colonists, and it
sent the officials at Jamestown peremptory notice that unless the £2000
spent on the present supply be met by the proceeds of the ship's return
cargo, the settlers need expect no further aid. The shrewd and redoubtable
Captain John Smith, now president in the colony, opposed the vain
explorings, and sent the council in London a characteristic "rude letter."
The ship, said he, kept nearly all the victuals for its crew, while the
settlers, "the one halfe sicke, the other little better," had as their diet
"a little meale and water, and not sufficient of that." The foreign experts
had been set at their assigned labors; but "it were better to give five
hundred pound a tun for those grosse commodities in Denmarke than send for