In a work called The Discovery of New Brittaine, Captain Edward Bland describes an expedition supported by Virginia Govenor Berkeley to explore the land to the southwest of Richmond toward the [now] Greensboro/Winston-Salem area in North Carolina.  Captain Bland led an expedition of some one hundred armed men and others accompanied by several
Indian "scouts"--translators and messengers.  In 1650 there had been very few up country expeditions much beyond the fall line in Virginia.  This expedition left in August of 1650 from Fort Henry (which is the old fall line name for now Petersburg).  Their purpose was to explore and trade for skins and other commodities--it having been noticed that some Indians in
the Fort Henry to Jamestown area carried ornaments made of copper and some had clay tobacco pipes which were ornamented in silver.  It was hoped that sources of silver and copper could be discovered and that the tribes to the southwest could be persuaded to trade their goods with the English through the ports at the end of the Chesapeake Bay.

It had been reported to Bland that there was an English trader living among the Indians somewhere along the Virginia/North Carolina line [which of course in 1650 did not exist]; Bland only knew that the trader lived along an unmapped river know only by a local tribal name.  But somewhere to the southwest, perhaps 200-250 miles away was an "English" trader.  After a
long journey, during which Bland describes (for the first time by an European) the rich river bottom country along the Roanoke River (which William Byrd would later visit and claim and describe in his book The Land of Eden), the group was somewhere near the area where the supposed English trader lived and sent ahead a letter by an Indian messenger:

"August 30.  Being wearied with our last dayes travell, we continued at Maharineck, and this day spake with a Tuskarood Indian, who told us that the Englishman was a great way off at the further Tuskarood Towne, and wee hired this Tuskarood Indian to run before, and tell his Werrowance [chief] wee intended to lay him downe a present at Hocomowananck, and desired to have him meete us there, and also wrote to that effect to the Englishman in English, Latine, Spanish, French and Dutch, the Tuskarood promising in three dayes to meete us at Hocomawananck."

This polyglot letter was then sent forward with the messenger.  Now, consider this:  what kind of assumption was Bland making that he should have drafted a letter in five languages?  How was it that there was in Bland's company of men the knowledge of five languages?  And if Bland is reasonably supposing that the Indians are referring to any European as an
Englishman, what is already the case in the back-country even at this early date?  What would have led Bland to even consider the possibility of a recipient of his letter who might read any one of these languages?  Must he not have assumed that the back country was already inhabited by people who spoke English as well as people of other national origin?  What was being assumed by writing a copy also in "Latine"?

Here is a simple text--an exerpt from a travel journal--but in this briefpassage an important window into the seventeenth century in America is opened. The journal is found in a volume entitled The First Explorations of the Trans-Allegheny Region by the Virginians  1650-1674.