In 1610 the Company issued a paper of instructions upon this subject of Virginia commodities.

The daughter was expected to send to the mother country sassafras root, bay berries, puccoon, sarsaparilla, walnut, chestnut, and chinquapin oil, wine, silk grass, beaver cod, beaver and otter skins, clapboard of oak and walnut, tar, pitch, turpentine, and powdered sturgeon.
It might seem that Virginia was headed to become a land of fishers, of foresters, and vine dressers, perhaps even, when the gold should be at last discovered, of miners.

At home, the colonizing merchants and statesmen looked for some such thing.

In return for what she laded into ships, Virginia was to receive English-made goods, and to an especial degree woolen goods, "a very liberall utterance of our English cloths into a maine country described to be bigger than all Europe." There was to be direct trade, country kind for country kind, and no specie to be taken out of England.

The promoters at home doubtless conceived a hardy and simple trans-Atlantic folk of their own kindred, planters for their own needs, steady consumers of the plainer sort of English wares, steady gatherers, in return, of necessaries for which England otherwise must trade after a costly fashion with lands which were not always friendly.
A simple, sturdy, laborious Virginia, white men and Indians.