The English colonies were driven by commercial and imperial ambitions, but they were also set about with religious rhetoric. Some arguments were of the “because it’s there” variety. In 1609, a London preacher drumming up business for Jamestown, England’s first enduring North American colony, argued that all humanity was called by God to “spread abroad,” in obedience to a “general law of replenishing the earth.” Some found particular significance in journeying westward. Abraham had moved west to Canaan, and the Gospel had spread west from Jerusalem to Rome and then to England, the “end of the earth.” Now, in a final leap toward the setting sun, the Gospel would “in the latter ages of the world . . . bend Westward, and before its setting, brighten these parts, with his glorious luster also.” Whether anyone ever left home on account of these pretty word pictures, we may doubt. Most of the first English colonists were traders and adventurers. When some began to travel on religious grounds, they did so less as pilgrims than as exiles.