Twenty years after the return of Ralegh's first colonists the Jamestown company was sent to plant the germ of an English-speaking nation in North America. Beginning with the first voyage of Columbus, the search for a route through America had lasted a hundred and fourteen years. No passage north of Magellan's Strait had been found, yet a belief in the existence of such a water-way remained a part of the geographical creed of the time. The Jamestown emigrants were officially instructed to explore that branch of any river that lay toward the northwest, perhaps because the charmed latitude of 40° might thus be reached. It was in carrying out this instruction that Captain John Smith came to grief at the hands of the Indians while looking for the Pacific in the swamps of the Chickahominy. Smith rarely mixed his abounding romance with his geography; he is as sober and trustworthy in topographical description and in map-making as he is imaginative in narration. But Smith was at this time under the influence of the prevailing delusion, and he hoped that his second voyage up the Chesapeake would lead him into the Pacific. His belief in a passage to the westward in latitude 40°, just beyond the northward limit of his own explorations, he communicated to his friend Henry Hudson, who was so moved by it that he sailed to America in 1609 in violation of his orders, and in seeking the strait to the South Sea penetrated the solitudes of the picturesque river that bears his name. The explorer Dermer was intent on winning immortality by finding a passage to the Pacific when, in 1619, he was storm-driven into Long Island Sound. At Manhattan Island, or thereabout, he got information from the obliging Indians that made plain his way to the Orient. He was very secretive about this route, which, however, seems to have lain through Delaware Bay. [Sidenote: Note 5.] [Sidenote: Sandys's plan.] [Sidenote: Note 6.] [Sidenote: Luke Fox.] [Sidenote: Northwest. Fox, p. 172.] [Sidenote: Weston Documents 45 and 47 and ff.] [Sidenote: Catlet and Lederer.] [Sidenote: Glover, in Phil. Trans., xi 626. Comp. Perfect Descr. of Va., 1649 and Lederer's Voyage.] [Sidenote: Lawson's Carolina, 47.] [Sidenote: Scot's Magazine, 1765, page 161.]