All this march we could neither see
Savage nor Towne."*
* Percy's "Discourse."
The ships now stood into those waters which we call Hampton Roads. Finding
a good channel and taking heart therefrom, they named a horn of land Point
Comfort. Now we call it Old Point Comfort. Presently they began to go up a
great river which they christened the James. To English eyes it was a river
hugely wide. They went slowly, with pauses and waitings and adventures.
They consulted their paper of instructions; they scanned the shore for good
places for their fort, for their town. It was May, and all the rich banks
were in bloom. It seemed a sweet-scented world of promise. They saw
Indians, but had with these no untoward encounters. Upon the twelfth of May
they came to a point of land which they named Archer's Hope. Landing here,
they saw "many squirels, conies, Black Birds with crimson wings, and divers
other Fowles and Birds of divers and sundrie colours of crimson, watchet,
Yellow, Greene, Murry, and of divers other hewes naturally without any art
using . . . store of Turkie nests and many Egges." They liked this place,
but for shoal water the ships could not come near to land. So on they went,
eight miles up the river.
Here, upon the north side, thirty-odd miles from the mouth, they came to a
certain peninsula, an island at high water. Two or three miles long, less
than a mile and a half in breadth, at its widest place composed of marsh
and woodland, it ran into the river, into six fathom water, where the ships
might be moored to the trees.
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