Before the seventeenth century had passed away, they had given to her northern end a baptism of other names.

To the south she was lopped to make the Carolinas.

Only to the west, for a long time, she seemed to grow, while like a mirage the South Sea and Cathay receded into the distance.
This narrative, moving with the three ships from England, and through a time span of less than a hundred and fifty years, deals with a region of the western hemisphere a thousand miles in length, several hundred in breadth, stretching from the Florida line to the northern edge of Chesapeake Bay, and from the Atlantic to the Appalachians.

Out of this Virginia there grow in succession the ancient colonies and the modern States of Virginia, Maryland, South and North Carolina, and Georgia.
But for many a year Virginia itself was the only settlement and the only name.

This Virginia was a country favored by nature.