As late as December 5, 1621, in a letter from the Virginia Company to Governor Wyatt, these words occur: "The Conjectures of the Southwest Passage and the piece of copper which you sent us gladly saw and heard." This long-surviving desire for a short passage to the East Indies is traceable to the passion that existed in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for spices, and this no doubt came from the gross forms of cookery in that time. Anderson's Commerce, sub anno 1504, cites Guicciardini on the great quantities of spices used, and adds: "For in those days the people of Europe were much fonder of spices in their cookery, etc., than they have been in later times." The rise in the price of commodities in Elizabeth's time may have been only apparent, but it promoted voyages looking to the extension of commerce. Compare Holinshed, i, 274. [Sidenote: Note 6, page 10.] Waterhouse's Declaration of Virginia, 1622, a rare tract. Also Purchas, iii, 892, 893, where these words are quoted from Briggs: "The Indian Ocean, which we commonly call the South Sea, which lyeth on the West and Northwest Side of Virginia, on the other side of the mountains beyond our Falls [of James River] and openeth a free and faire passage, not only to China, Japan, and the Moluccas, but also to New Spaine, Peru, and Chili, and those rich countries of Terra Australis not as yet discovered." It is one of many marks of practical sagacity in Captain John Smith that after his experience on the American coast he was able to form views of the geography of the continent almost a century in advance of the opinions held in his time. He speaks of "those large Dominions which doe stretch themselves into the main God knoweth how many thousand miles" (Generall Historie, book vi). [Sidenote: Note 7, page 14.] So late as 1626, Fleet, the only survivor of the massacre of Spelman's party, after spending five years in captivity among the Virginia Indians, persuaded a London merchant to intrust him with a vessel for the Indian trade by his stories of the "powder of gold" with which the savages made a paint for their faces. To this story he added a statement that he had often been in sight of the South Sea or Pacific Ocean. Fleet's Journal may be found in Scharf's History of Maryland, i, 13, etc. Van der Donck relates, in his description of New Netherland, that Kieft, the director of New Netherland, and Van der Donck, found an Indian painting himself and bought the pigment, which being burned in a crucible yielded two pieces of gold. (See the translation in New York Historical Society Collection, ii, 161, 162.) A bag of specimens of the precious ores of the Hudson River region was sent to Holland by the ill-fated ship that sailed out of New Haven in 1645. The ship was seen no more except by the New Haven people, who beheld its specter in the sky. Of the Hudson River gold mines no specter has ever been seen in earth or sky. [Sidenote: Note 8, page 15.]