foresters, and vine dressers, perhaps even, when the gold should be at last
discovered, of miners. At home, the colonizing merchants and statesmen
looked for some such thing. In return for what she laded into ships,
Virginia was to receive English-made goods, and to an especial degree
woolen goods, "a very liberall utterance of our English cloths into a maine
country described to be bigger than all Europe." There was to be direct
trade, country kind for country kind, and no specie to be taken out of
England. The promoters at home doubtless conceived a hardy and simple
trans-Atlantic folk of their own kindred, planters for their own needs,
steady consumers of the plainer sort of English wares, steady gatherers, in
return, of necessaries for which England otherwise must trade after a
costly fashion with lands which were not always friendly. A simple, sturdy,
laborious Virginia, white men and Indians. If this was their dream, reality
was soon to modify it.


A new commodity of unsuspected commercial value began now to be grown in
garden-plots along the James -- the "weed" par excellence, tobacco. That John
Rolfe who had been shipwrecked on the Sea Adventure was now a planter in
Virginia. His child Bermuda had died in infancy, and his wife soon after
their coming to Jamestown. Rolfe remained, a young man, a good citizen, and
a Christian. And he loved tobacco. On that trivial fact hinges an important
chapter in the economic history of America. In 1612 Rolfe planted tobacco
in his own garden, experimented with its culture, and prophesied that the
Virginian weed would rank with the best Spanish. It was now a shorter
plant, smaller-leafed and smaller-flowered, but time and skilful gardening
would improve it.

England had known tobacco for thirty years, owing its introduction to
Raleigh. At first merely amused by the New World rarity, England was now by