It was a pretty scene, but there was one drawback to it all.  Everything showed the season so far advanced, and served to remind us of the lateness of our start.  We had intended to take our little voyage on the James in the springtime.  It had been a good deal a matter of sentiment; but sentiment will have its way in houseboating.  We had wished to begin in that gentle season when the history of the river itself began, and when the history of this country of ours began with it.

For, whatever may have gone before, the real story of the James and of America too commences with the bloom of the dogwood some three hundred years ago, when from the wild waste of the Atlantic three puny, storm-worn vessels (scarcely more seaworthy than our tub of a houseboat) beat their way into the sheltering mouth of this unknown river.

That was in the days when the nations of Europe were greedily contending for what Columbus had found on the other side of the world.  In that struggle England was slow to get a foothold.  Neglect, difficulty, and misfortune made her colonies few and short-lived.  By the opening of the seventeenth century Spain and France, or perhaps Spain alone, seemed destined to possess the entire new hemisphere.  In all the extent of the Americas, England was not then in possession of so much as a log fort.  Apparently the struggle was ended and England defeated.  No one then could have imagined what we now behold—­English-speaking people possessing most and dominating all of that newfound Western World.

This miracle was wrought by the coming of those three little old-time ships, the Sarah Constant, the Goodspeed, and the Discovery.

It was in the year 1607 that the quaint, high-sterned caravels, representing the forlorn hope of England, crossed the ocean to found a colony on Roanoke Island.  Storm-tossed and driven out of their reckoning, they turned for refuge one April day into a yawning break in the coast-line that we now call Chesapeake Bay.  Following the sheltering, inviting waters inland, they took their way up a “Greate River,” bringing to it practically the first touch of civilization and establishing upon its shore the first permanent English settlement in the New World—­the birthplace of our country.

The civilizers began their work promptly.  Even as they sailed up the river looking for a place to found their colony, they robbed the stream of its Indian name, Powhatan, that so befitted the bold, tawny flow, bestowing instead the name of the puerile King of England.  That was the first step toward writing in English the story of the James River, the “Greate River,” the “King’s River.”

It was later by three hundred years lacking one when our houseboat came along to gather up that story.  But to our regret it was not springtime.  The dogwood blossoms had come and gone when Gadabout lay behind Craney Island; and she would start upon her cruise up the James in the heart of the summertime.