It was, in part, the hope of finding gold—as the Spanish had found it in Mexico and Peru—that moved Sir Walter Raleigh to send colonizing ventures to North America. But any resource that might bring wealth to the gentlemen adventurers in London and to England itself was not to be overlooked. Thomas Hariot, one of those who reached Roanoke Island with Raleigh’s initial colonists in 1585, reported that: In two places of the countrey specially, one about fourescore, & the other six score miles from the fort or place where we dwelt, we found nere the water side the ground to be rocky, which by the triall of a Minerall man was found to hold iron richly. It is found in many places of the country els. [Illustration: _Around the edges of a brass clock face made in England about 1750 and now in the possession of Colonial Williamsburg, some unknown engraver depicted ironworking operations. Here, above the numbers 11 and 12 on the clock face, open-pit miners are shown digging and hauling ore._] Nothing further is known of these discoveries, including their exact location, for the Roanoke colony did not survive. But the settlement made in 1607 at Jamestown did endure. Sending careful instructions, the sponsoring Virginia Company of London directed the adventurers to Virginia to look not only for gold but for iron ore. Among the first group of settlers was George Read, a blacksmith, to be joined the following year by Richard Dole of the same craft, and Peter Keffer, gunsmith. No doubt some of these workers in iron—perhaps all three of them—had a hand in the experimental smelting and forging of local bog iron during Jamestown’s first year or two. Captain John Smith reported that the colony’s “best commoditie was Iron which we made into little chissels.” Archaeological excavations at Jamestown and at nearby Denbigh Plantation in recent years have disclosed the sites of what appear to have been small furnaces for smelting iron ore. At the same time, the colonists were shipping ore back to England, seven tons of iron being smelted at Bristol from Virginia ore as early as 1608. Four years later, William Strachey wrote: Sir Tho: Dale hath mencioned in his Letters to the [Worthies?] of the Councell of a goodly Iron myne, and Capt Newport hath brought home of that mettell so sufficient a tryall, as there hath bene made 16. or 17. tonne of Iron, so good as the East Indian Marchants bought that of the Virginian Company, preferring that before any other Iron of what Country soever. [Illustration: _A conjectural sketch, after Sidney King, of an earthen furnace for smelting iron. Furnaces such as this were used in England early in the seventeenth century, and similar ones may have been used at Jamestown._]