The discovery of minerals in a district brings about dense population and a hurried settlement. Men come to fisheries or hunting-grounds at stated times, and leave to come again. The progress of agricultural colonization, if steady and continuous, is usually very slow. Thus, where Central America gave gold and silver, there adventurers from Europe hurried in and stayed. The fisheries of Newfoundland saw men come and go; the sea was there the attraction, not the land. The agricultural resources of Virginia and New England were left undeveloped by Europeans, until the time came when business-like companies were formed by men who could afford to wait, and when enthusiasts went over the Atlantic not so much to make money as to live patiently and in the fear of God. [Sidenote: _The North-West Passage._] But, though the sixteenth century passed away before men's eyes, which were dazzled with the splendour of the {12} tropics, had given more than passing glances to the sober landscape of North America, discoverers from Cabot onwards were not idle; and from the first, the ever powerful hope of finding a new road to the Indies took adventurers to the north-west in spite of cold and wind and tide. Because North America was unattractive in itself, therefore men seem to have imagined that it must be on the way to something better; and also, because it was unattractive in itself, they did not wait to see what could be made out of it, but kept perpetually pushing on to a further goal. They argued, as Bacon shows in the passage already quoted, and argued rightly, that in the north the Old and New Worlds were nearest together, and that here therefore was the point at which to cross from one to the other. They found sea channels evidently leading towards the west; they saw the great river of Canada[7] come widening down from the same quarter; and thus, long after the quest of the Indies had in Central America been swallowed up in the riches found on the way, in North America it remained the one great object of the men who went out from Europe, and of the Kings who sent them out. [Footnote 7: The idea that there was a way to the Indies by the St. Lawrence long continued. Thus Lescarbot writes (_Nova Francia_, Erondelle's translation, 1609, chap. xiii, p. 87) of the great river of Canada as 'taking her beginning from one of the lakes which do meet at the stream of her course (and so I think), so that it hath two courses, the one from the east towards France, the other from the west towards the south sea.']