So England was eager to expand under her own flag.  With the fresh courage and buoyancy of youth she fitted out ships and sent forth expeditions.  And while she shared with the rest of the Europeans the vision of India and the Orient, her “gentlemen adventurers” were not long in seeing the possibilities that lay concealed beyond the inviting harbors, the navigable rivers, and the forest-covered valleys of North America.  With a willing heart they believed their quaint chronicler, Richard Hakluyt, when he declared that America could bring “as great a profit to the Realme of England as the Indes to the King of Spain,” that “golde, silver, copper, leade and perales in aboundaunce” had been found there:  also “precious stones, as turquoises and emauraldes; spices and drugges; silke worms fairer than ours in Europe; white and red cotton; infinite multitude of all kind of fowles; excellent vines in many places for wines; the soyle apte to beare olyves for oyle; all kinds of fruites; all kindes of odoriferous trees and date trees, cypresses, and cedars; and in New-founde-lande aboundaunce of pines and firr trees to make mastes and deale boards, pitch, tar, rosen; hempe for cables and cordage; and upp within the Graunde Baye excedinge quantitie of all kinde of precious furres.”  Such a catalogue of resources led him to conclude that “all the commodities of our olde decayed and daungerous trades in all Europe, Africa and Asia haunted by us, may in short space and for little or nothinge, in a manner be had in that part of America which lieth between 30 and 60 degrees of northerly latitude.”

Even after repeated expeditions had discounted the exuberant optimism of this description, the Englishmen’s faith did not wane.  While for many years there lurked in the mind of the Londoner, the hope that some of the products of the Levant might be raised in the fertile valleys of Virginia, the practical English temperament none the less began promptly to appease itself with the products of the vast forests, the masts, the tar and pitch, the furs; with the fish from the coast waters, the abundant cod, herring, and mackerel; nor was it many years before tobacco, indigo, sugar, cotton, maize, and other commodities brought to the merchants of England a great American commerce.

The first attempts to found colonies in the country by Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh were pitiable failures.  But the settlement on the James in 1607 marked the beginning of a nation.  What sort of nation?  What race of people?  Sir Walter Raleigh, with true English tenacity, had said after learning of the collapse of his own colony, “I shall yet live to see it an English nation.”  The new nation certainly was English in its foundation, whatever may be said of its superstructure.  Virginia, New England, Maryland, the Carolinas, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Georgia were begun by Englishmen; and New England, Virginia, and Maryland remained almost