The romantic career of this gallant and garrulous hero did not end with his departure from the infant colony at Jamestown.  By a curious destiny his fame is associated with the beginnings of both the southern and the northern portions of the United States.  To Virginia Smith may be said to have given its very existence as a commonwealth; to New England he gave its name.  In 1614 he came over with two ships to North Virginia, explored its coast minutely from the Penobscot river to Cape Cod, and thinking it a country of such extent and importance as to deserve a name of its own, rechristened it New England.  On returning home he made a very good map of the coast and dotted it with English names suggested by Prince Charles.  Of these names Cape Elizabeth, Cape Ann, Charles River, and Plymouth still remain where Smith placed them.  In 1615 Smith again set sail for the New World, this time with a view to planting a colony under the auspices of the Plymouth Company, but his talent for strange adventures had not deserted him.  He was taken prisoner by a French fleet, carried hither and thither on a long cruise, and finally set ashore at Rochelle, whence, without a penny in his pocket, he contrived to make his way back to England.  Perhaps Smith’s life of hardship may have made him prematurely old.  After all his wild and varied experience he was now only in his thirty-seventh year, but he does not seem to have gone on any more voyages.  The remaining sixteen years of his life were spent quietly in England in writing books, publishing maps, and otherwise stimulating the public interest in the colonization of the New World.  But as for the rocky coast of New England, which he had explored and named, he declared that he was not so simple as to suppose that any other motive than riches would “ever erect there a commonwealth or draw company from their ease and humours at home, to stay in New England.” [Sidenote:  John Smith]

In this opinion, however, the bold explorer was mistaken.  Of all migrations of peoples the settlement of New England is preeminently the one in which the almighty dollar played the smallest part, however important it may since have become as a motive power.  It was left for religious enthusiasm to achieve what commercial enterprise had failed to accomplish.  By the summer of 1617 the Pilgrim society at Leyden had decided to send a detachment of its most vigorous members to lay the foundations of a Puritan state in America.  There had been much discussion as to the fittest site for such a colony.  Many were in favour of Guiana, which Sir Walter Raleigh had described in such glowing colours; but it was thought that the tropical climate would be ill-suited to northern men of industrious and thrifty habit, and the situation, moreover, was dangerously exposed to the Spaniards.  Half a century had scarcely elapsed since the wholesale massacre of Huguenots in Florida.  Virginia was then talked of, but Episcopal ideas had already taken