The Englishmen living already in America, in southern Virginia, were more concerned about the Catholic Spaniards to the south of them than about a few Dutch traders on an unknown river to the north. Jamestown had been planted by the London Company with very much the same objects that Raleigh had in mind when he planted Roanoke--a threat to New Spain among other things. While the colony was young and relatively weak, therefore, the Virginians lived in constant dread of themselves being surprised and destroyed by the Spaniards. Their neighbors in the south had a reputation for making short shrift of heretics or any foreign colonies that might endanger Florida or Spanish silver fleets. Some years earlier several hundred Huguenots from France who planted a colony on the southern coast had been butchered to the last man in a surprise attack. Indeed, the Virginians’ fears were well founded. The Spanish admiralty more than once nursed just such an action against the “English pirates’ nest” on the James River. That they didn’t attack was probably due to their own increasing vulnerability, for the Spanish star had been in decline since the destruction of the Armada. To the north, the Virginians had mainly been concerned about the French. The northern boundary of English “Virginia,” the 45th parallel, cut through the Bay of Fundy, but the Frenchmen failed to observe this delineation of the border. Whereas Dutch interlopers might be passed off as no more than individual traders who could be ousted at will, the government-backed traders of New France, firmly entrenched as they were in the far north, needed special watching. There was no English colony in those parts to forestall serious French encroachment. The Plymouth Company had failed in its mission to settle a plantation in northern Virginia. It had been with the hope of finding gold or a trade route to the Indian sea, or in lieu of that at least an outlet for English woolens, that King James granted charters in 1606 to the London Company and the Plymouth Company. The merchants of these two joint-stock trading companies were to settle southern and northern Virginia respectively, thus driving an English wedge of actual occupation between the vast territorial claims of New Spain and New France. Under the direction of Sir Thomas Smith of the London Company the southern colony, Jamestown, was successfully planted. But in the north, on the border of French Canada, the colonists sent over by the Plymouth Company failed. They were too much in love with “El Dorado.” There had been an unusually good prospect of trade in furs to tide over the Plymouth Company’s plantation until it could become permanently rooted by agriculture. Gosnold, Pring, Weymouth--all had predicted the success of such a venture. But colonization failed. There was no John Smith at Sagadahoc.