The combined forces after lading the ships with "gilded dirt" and cedar logs, were left facing the battle with Indians and disease.

The dirt when it reached London proved valueless, and the cedar, of course, worth little.

The company that summer sent further recruits including two women and several Poles and Germans to make soap-ashes, glass and pitch--"skilled workmen from foraine parts which may teach and set ours in the way where we may set thousands a work in these such like services."[1] At the same time it instructed the captain of the ship to explore and find either a lump of gold, the South Sea passage, or some of Raleigh's lost colonists, and it sent the officials at Jamestown peremptory notice that unless the L2000 spent on the present supply be met by the proceeds of the ship's return cargo, the settlers need expect no further aid.

The shrewd and redoubtable Captain John Smith, now president in the colony, opposed the vain explorings, and sent the council in London a characteristic "rude letter." The ship, said he, kept nearly all the victuals for its crew, while the settlers, "the one halfe sicke, the other little better," had as their diet "a little meale and water, and not sufficient of that." The foreign experts had been set at their assigned labors; but "it were better to give five hundred pound a tun for those grosse commodities in Denmarke than send for them hither till more necessary things be provided.

For in over-toyling our weake and unskilfull bodies to satisfie this desire of present profit we can scarce ever recover ourselves from one supply to another....