The Beginners of a Nation / A History of the Source and Rise of the Earliest English Settlements in America, with Special Reference to the Life and Character of the People

by Edward Eggleston

LIST OF MAPS.

(In the coast line the American maps follow the charts of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey; the third map conforms to the British Ordnance Survey.)

• I.—Chesapeake Bay [1]
• II.—James River [28]
• III.—The cradle of the Pilgrims [149]
• IV.—Coast explored by the Pilgrims [177]
• V.—The colony at St. Mary's [245]
• VI.—Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth [275]
• VII.—The early settlements on Narragansett Bay [296]
• VIII.—New England after the dispersions [343]

BOOK I.
RISE OF THE FIRST ENGLISH COLONY.

CHAPTER THE FIRST.
ENGLISH KNOWLEDGE AND NOTIONS OF AMERICA AT THE PERIOD OF SETTLEMENT.

I.

The Elizabethan age. The age of Elizabeth and James—the age of Spenser, of Shakespeare, and of Bacon—was a new point of departure in the history of the English race. All the conditions excited men to unwonted intellectual activity. The art of printing was yet a modern invention; the New World with its novelties and unexplained mysteries was a modern discovery; and there were endless discussions and agitations of spirit growing out of the recent reformation in religion. Imagination was powerfully stimulated by the progress of American exploration, by the romantic adventures of the Spaniards in the West Indies, and their dazzling conquest of new-found empires in Mexico and Peru. It was an age of creation in poetry, in science, and in religion, and men of action were everywhere set on deeds of daring. The world had regained something of the vigor and spontaneity of youth, but the credulity and curiosity of youth were not wanting. The mind of the time accepted and reveled in marvelous stories. The stage plays of that drama-loving age reflected the interest in the supernatural and the eager curiosity about far-away countries. Books of travel fitted the prevailing taste. He who could afford to buy them regaled himself with the great folios of Hakluyt's Voyages and Purchas his Pilgrimes. General readers delighted in little tracts and pamphlets relating incidents of far-away travels, or describing remote countries and the peoples inhabiting them, or the "monstrous strange beasts" found in lands beyond the bounds of Christendom.

Credulity about America. America excited the most lively curiosity as a world by itself and the least known of all the "four parts" into which the globe was then divided. There were those, indeed, who made six parts of the world by adding an arctic continent, which included Greenland and a vast southern land supposed to stretch from Magellan's Strait southward to the pole. George Beste, First Voyage of Sir Martin Frobisher. It was easy to believe in these two superfluous continents; they were mirages of the New World. Every great discovery excites expectation of others like it. And in a time when vague report or well-worn tradition counted for more than observation or experimental knowledge, it was inevitable that current information about America should be distorted and mixed with fable. In that age, still pre-Baconian, men had few standards by which to measure probabilities, and to those shut in by the narrow limits of mediæval knowledge the mere uncovering of a new continent whose existence contravened the fixed beliefs of the ages was so marvelous that nothing told about it afterward seemed incredible.

Illusions of discoverers. The history of American exploration is a story of delusion and mistake. The New World was discovered because it lay between Europe and the East Indian Spice Islands by the westward route. Columbus, seeking the less, found the greater by stumbling on it in the dark. Zuan Caboto—in English, John Cabot—who is described by a contemporary as "a Venetian fellow with a fine mind, greatly skilled in navigation," discovered North America in 1497. But he did not exult that he was the finder of a vast and fertile continent in which great nations might germinate, for he believed that his landfall at Cape Breton was within the dominions of the Grand Cham of China, and he sailed down the coast again the next year, "ever with the intent to find said passage to India." [Note 1.] It was announced on his return from his first voyage that Henry VII had "won a part of Asia without a stroke of the sword."

The discovery of the Pacific by Balboa in 1513, and the voyage of Magellan's ship across that ocean in 1520, were not sufficient to remove the illusion that America was connected with Asia. The notion that the New World was an Asiatic peninsula died lingeringly about the middle of the sixteenth century; but to reach Asia was still the main purpose of western exploration, and America was for a long time regarded mainly as an obstruction. The belief in a passage to the Pacific by means of some yet-to-be-discovered strait severing the continent of America, survived far into the seventeenth century, and the hope of coming by some short cut into a rich commerce with the Orient led to a prying exploration of all the inlets, bays, and estuaries on the American coast and so promoted discovery, but it retarded settlement by blinding men to the value of the New World. [Note 2.]

II.

Frobisher. Adventure by sea became a favorite road to renown for ambitious Englishmen in the time of Elizabeth, and the belief in a passage through or round North America grew into a superstition. The discovery of this strait seemed, in the phrase of George Beste, a writer of the time, "the onely thing of the world that was left undone whereby a notable mind might be made famous and fortunate." Sir Martin Frobisher, who is reckoned by Camden "among the famousest men of our age for counsell and glory gotten at sea," made three voyages in 1576 and the following years to that part of the American coast almost under the arctic circle. Frobisher's Voyages, Hakl. Soc., passim. He desisted from the attempt to get to China by an arctic channel only when he had involved the "venturers" or stockholders associated with him in heavy debts, and spent the fortune of his wife and stepchildren, to whom "glory gotten at sea" must have been insufficient compensation. "Sir Martin Frobisher whome God forgive" is the phrase in which he is spoken of by his wife.

Gilbert. In the year of Frobisher's first voyage, Sir Humphrey Gilbert issued a treatise to prove that there was a way to the East Indies round North America. This he demonstrated by a hydra-headed argument constructed after the elaborate fashion of that unscientific age, proving the existence of a northwest passage, first by authority, secondly by reason, thirdly by experience of sundry men's travels, and fourthly by circumstance. Voy., 184-227. Not content with getting to China by logic, and nothing daunted by Frobisher's brilliant failure, Gilbert mortgaged his estate that he might engage in attempts yet more disastrous than Frobisher's, and lost his life during his second voyage, in 1584.

Hakluyt. About this time there appeared on the scene the famous geographer, Richard Hakluyt, one of those men that exert a marked influence in favor of a new movement mainly by ardor and industry. Hakluyt's fervor was akin to enthusiasm, his belief of every story favorable to projects for colonization, and his unwavering faith in the projects themselves bordered on flat credulity. To men of his own time his tireless advocacy of American exploration and colony-planting must have seemed irksome hobby-riding. But he was the indispensable forerunner of colonization. "Your Mr. Hakluyt hath served for a very good trumpet," says Sidney. Believing in everything American as unwaveringly as if his soul's salvation depended on his faith, he believed in nothing more sublimely than in a passage to the "South Sea" or Pacific Ocean. He seized on every vague intimation of ignorant map-makers, on every suspicion of an explorer, on every fond tale of an Indian that tended to lend support to the theory in hand. All evidence was of equal weight in his scales, provided it lay on the affirmative side of the balance. It mattered little to him where his witnesses placed this elusive passage. In Hakluyt's mind it was ubiquitous. The Pacific is now "on the backside" of Montreal Island, and the great Laurentian lakes suffer a sea change; now it is reached by a river flowing three months to the southward—that is, the Mississippi. Then the much-sought strait is carried northward on the authority of an old map—"a great old round carde"—shown him "by the King of Portingall." But he had also seen "a mightie large old mappe in parchment" which showed, as far south as latitude 40°, a little neck of land "much like the streyte neck or Isthmus of Darienna." Hakl. Disc. on Western Planting. He had seen the same isthmus on another old map "with the sea joynninge hard on both sides as it doth on Panama." In a paper meant for private use, he expresses solicitude that the nearness of the Pacific to Florida shall not become known too commonly. N. Y. Col. Docs. I, 16. Many years later an injunction was granted in Holland forbidding a publisher to insert in a map the newly discovered channel into the South Sea.

III.

Ralegh. Both Frobisher and Gilbert made ineffectual attempts to plant colonies in the new lands, but colony-planting held a place in their minds quite secondary to the search for the South Sea in the north and the finding of gold. It was only when the large and lucid mind of Sir Walter Ralegh took up the subject seriously that the settlement of an agricultural colony became for a while the real object of American voyages. Ralegh sent no men to the arctic or to the wintry shores of Newfoundland, as Frobisher and Gilbert had done. He turned to milder latitudes, and dispatched his explorers in 1584, and his colonists in 1585, to the coast of what is now North Carolina.

But the ever-mischievous South Sea delusion did not vanish when the period of colonization was reached. Ralph Lane's quest. Ralph Lane, the governor of Ralegh's first colony on Roanoke Island, having inquired perhaps for that western sea which Hakluyt had seen "on the mightie old mappe in parchment," understood the inventive savages to say that the Roanoke River sprang from a rock so near to a sea that the waves in storm often dashed into this fountain, making the river brackish for some distance below. That the story might be more interesting, they added that there was gold there, and that the walls of a town in that land were made of pearls. This is what the white men fancied the Indians said; but whatever they said was spoken in a tongue of which Lane's men had but the most scanty knowledge, if indeed it were not given mainly by signs. [Note 3.] Nothing dispirited by the extravagance of these tales, Lane and some of his men set out to immortalize and enrich themselves—like a company of children running after the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Lane's Account in Hakl. III. While the crafty Indians were plotting the destruction of the colonists left behind, the governor and his followers pursued their quest until they were obliged to eat their dogs, made palatable by seething with a dressing of sassafras leaves. They returned, half famished and wholly disappointed, just in time to rescue the colony from destruction. But faith is faith, and despite his severe experience Lane went back to England believing that the Roanoke rose near to the Bay of Mexico "that openeth out into the South Sea." The map which the colonists brought with them when they abandoned the country in 1586 handed down the delusion, in another form, by showing a strait leading from the neighborhood of Port Royal into a body of water to the westward. [Note 4.]

IV.

Seeking the Pacific on James River. Twenty years after the return of Ralegh's first colonists the Jamestown company was sent to plant the germ of an English-speaking nation in North America. Beginning with the first voyage of Columbus, the search for a route through America had lasted a hundred and fourteen years. No passage north of Magellan's Strait had been found, yet a belief in the existence of such a water-way remained a part of the geographical creed of the time. The Jamestown emigrants were officially instructed to explore that branch of any river that lay toward the northwest, perhaps because the charmed latitude of 40° might thus be reached. It was in carrying out this instruction that Captain John Smith came to grief at the hands of the Indians while looking for the Pacific in the swamps of the Chickahominy. Smith rarely mixed his abounding romance with his geography; he is as sober and trustworthy in topographical description and in map-making as he is imaginative in narration. But Smith was at this time under the influence of the prevailing delusion, and he hoped that his second voyage up the Chesapeake would lead him into the Pacific. Hudson. His belief in a passage to the westward in latitude 40°, just beyond the northward limit of his own explorations, he communicated to his friend Henry Hudson, who was so moved by it that he sailed to America in 1609 in violation of his orders, and in seeking the strait to the South Sea penetrated the solitudes of the picturesque river that bears his name. Dermer. The explorer Dermer was intent on winning immortality by finding a passage to the Pacific when, in 1619, he was storm-driven into Long Island Sound. At Manhattan Island, or thereabout, he got information from the obliging Indians that made plain his way to the Orient. He was very secretive about this route, which, however, seems to have lain through Delaware Bay.

A false notion once generally accepted is able to live in some ghostly shape after the breath is out of its body. The hope of a passage to the Pacific by means of a strait and the belief in a narrow isthmus in latitude 40° could not long survive the increase of knowledge that followed the settlement of Virginia and Captain Smith's explorations. [Note 5.] But sixteen years after the landing at Jamestown, when these two geographical jack-o'-lanterns had ceased to flicker, the poet George Sandys, who was secretary of the colony, wrote that he was ready to venture his life in finding a way to the South Sea, but this way was now to be by an overland route. Sandys's plan. About the same time Henry Briggs, the famous Savile lecturer at Oxford, proved to the satisfaction of many that the rivers running westward from the Virginia mountains must reach the Pacific in about one hundred and fifty miles. [Note 6.] One Marmaduke Parkinson, an explorer sailing in the Potomac, confirmed the theory of the learned mathematician by discovering in the house of a chief a "China Boxe," whatever that may have been. Luke Fox. In 1631 Luke Fox set sail by the northwest, carrying a letter from Charles I addressed "to the Emperor of Japan," which he probably was not able to deliver. Northwest. Fox, p. 172. In 1634 Captain Thomas Yong got as far as the falls of the Delaware in the endeavor to go through the continent in latitude 40°. The strait and isthmus and northwest passage having failed, Yong was content to go by fresh water till he should reach a Mediterranean Sea in the heart of America, which he believed to open into both the "North Ocean" and the South Sea. Weston Documents 45 and 47 and ff. As the century advanced the fresh-water route had in turn to be finally abandoned, and seekers after the Pacific were fain to betake themselves to dry-shod travel, and even to mountain-climbing, as George Sandys had proposed. Catlet and Lederer. A Colonel Catlet is mentioned who reached the Alleghanies in the endeavor to find a river flowing westward, but he was daunted by what seemed to him almost impassable ranges of mountains that barred his way. Glover, in Phil. Trans., xi 626. Comp. Perfect Descr. of Va., 1649 and Lederer's Voyage. Over these "rocky hills and sandy desarts" scarce a bird was seen to fly. In 1669, Lederer, a German surveyor, set out from Virginia on a similar futile exploration. Lawson's Carolina, 47. As late as 1700 the well-informed Lawson speaks hopefully of the proximity of the Pacific to North Carolina. This fallacy had prompted many desperate adventures, and had been the cause of many important discoveries, in the two centuries that it held possession of men's minds. Scot's Magazine, 1765, page 161. It reached its last attenuation in 1765, when the public prints announced that large boats were fitting out at Quebec to try the whale-fishing in Lake Ontario, and that "they have hopes of finding a communication by water with the western ocean, founded on the favorable reports of some Indians, who inform that a river runs westward many hundreds of miles as large as the Mississippi."

V.

Gold-hunting. As the mistake made by Columbus had left for heritage an almost ineradicable passion for the discovery of a westward sea way to Japan and China, so the vast treasure of gold and silver drawn by the Spaniards from Mexico and Peru produced a belief in the English mind that a colony planted at any place on the American coast might find gold. Here, again, the undoubting Hakluyt and other writers after him were ready with learned conclusions balancing on the tight rope of very slender premises. If an Indian had been seen wearing a piece of copper that "bowed easily," this flexibility proved it to be tarnished gold. If a savage seemed to say in his idiom, or by gestures and other signs, something which the puzzled newcomers took to signify that in a country farther on the copper was too soft for use, or that it was yellow, or that it had a good luster, what further evidence could an ingenious writer desire of the existence of the precious metal in that country? Hakluyt. Pref. to Va., magnified. Purchas, the successor of Hakluyt in geographical research, explains the divine purpose in thus endowing a heathen land with gold, which is that the Indian race "as a rich bride, though withered and deformed, ... might find many suitors for love of her portion," and thus the pagans be converted. Pilgrimage, 795. But Purchas filches both the simile and the pious thought from Herrera, who in turn probably pilfered it with many better things from the good Las Casas. Purchas also speaks with more optimism than elegance of the "silver bowels and golden entrails of the hills," as though one had but to dig into the first mountain to be enriched.

Frobisher's gold. Frobisher brought home from sub-arctic islands what his clumsy assayers avouched to be "gold eure." Refining works were erected for this stuff at Deptford to no profit, and to this day the inquisitive student is not able to ascertain from the conflicting reports whether there was any gold in the ore or not. Early Virginia gold-hunting. The main causes of the suffering at Jamestown during the first winter were the waste of time and the consumption of supplies while lading the ships with the glittering "dust mica" which is so abundant in the Virginia sands. The worthlessness of this cargo could not weaken the hopes of those alchemists who were able to produce gold merely by the use of arguments. The mines in Virginia moved farther west. It wanted only that explorers should reach the mountains. In spite of the sickness that wasted the colony in 1610, Lord De la Warr sent an expedition to dig gold on the upper James, but the warlike up-river tribes soon drove the prospectors back. In 1634, Sir John Harvey sent another body of men on the same fool's errand, though there had not been found in all the years preceding a particle of tangible evidence that gold existed in Virginia. But on the James, as on the Hudson, the glistering pigment with which the Indians besmeared their faces on occasions of display was believed to contain gold, and the places of its procurement were sought with ludicrous secrecy. [Note 7.]

Fact and fable about America. The unfaltering faith in the existence of abundant gold on the eastern coast of North America could not have subsisted on thin air so long if it had not been stimulated by the almost fabulous wealth drawn from South America by Spain. It had received encouragement also from the tales told by adventurers returned from America, who seem to have thought it necessary to bring back stories that would match in some degree the prevalent beliefs about the New World. The earliest but one of all the documents relating to America preserved among the British state papers is the statement of one David or Davy Ingram. With a hundred other luckless seamen he was put ashore in Mexico by Sir John Hawkins, because the ship lacked provisions. Ingram, traveling from tribe to tribe, achieved the notable feat of crossing the continent in a year. In 1569 he embarked on a French ship that he found near the mouth of the St. John River in what is now the province of New Brunswick. It was eleven years later that Davy Ingram, at home in England, made his statement, and the sailor's story had by that time gained much, perhaps, by frequent telling to wonder-loving listeners. Ingram's story. Sometimes he relates facts with sobriety, speaking the truth by relapse, it may be; again, he seems to be repeating tales told him by the savages, who were habitual marvel-mongers, or weaving into the account of what he had seen legends common in the folklore about America that had grown up in Europe; or perchance he only falls into an old forecastle habit of incontinent lying without provocation. The American women are described as "wearing great plates of gold covering their whole bodies like armor.... In every cottage pearls are to be found, and in some houses a peck"—an assertion that had a grain of truth in it, since the sailor no doubt mistook wampum beads for pearls. Fireflies, in this old tar's exalted memory, are "fire dragons, which make the air very red as they fly," while the buffalo appears as an animal "as big as two of our oxen." The streets in one "city" are broader than London streets, which we may readily believe. The banqueting houses are built of crystal, "with pillars of massie silver, some of gold." This is a fine example of the manner of a mind afflicted with the vice of exaggeration; crystal becomes silver in the next breath, and silver is as instantly transmuted to gold. All that optimistic projectors sought in America—gold, silver, pearls by the peck, and great abundance of silkworms—are obligingly supplied in Ingram's narrative. Such tales impressed the imagination in a romantic and uncritical age. [Note 8.]

VI.

Indian devil-worship. The interest in America was heightened by popular curiosity regarding the Indians. The American savages were sometimes treated as sun-worshipers, but they were more commonly thought to be worshipers of devils. The prevailing belief in witchcraft, divination, and abounding evil spirits rendered it easy for Europeans to accept the Indian deities as supernatural beings, and to credit the pretensions of the powwows, or Indian priests, to give knowledge of distant or future events, to heal the sick, and even to bring rain in time of drought. But it was observed at Plymouth that when the Pilgrims prayed for rain it fell gently, and that the rain procured by the Indian conjurers was violent and destructive—a rain with something devilish about it. According to writers of the time, the demons worshiped by the savages were able to materialize themselves on great occasions, appearing to their votaries in some beastly form. This belief in Indian devil-worship fitted well with the religious faith of the period, which can hardly be described as anything but a sort of Manichæism dividing the government of the universe almost equally between good and evil powers. Religionists of all schools desired to convert these subjects of Satan, not from those philanthropic motives that are main considerations in modern propagandism, but because their conversion would glorify God, and yet more because it would despite the devil. Sometimes the religious motive was incongruously supported by hopes of commercial advantage. The navigator Davis wrote to Secretary Walsingham that if the Indians "were once brought over to the Christian faith they might soon be brought to relish a more civilized kind of life and be thereby induced to take off great quantities of our coarser woolen manufactures."

Indians exhibited. The early explorers made a practice of kidnapping Indians and transporting them to England, where the sight of barbarians without doublet or hose quickened the interest in projects for colonization and adventure. In our age of commercial activity and extended geographical knowledge one can form but a weak conception of the excitement produced by the sight of "the Indian man and woman," no doubt Esquimaux, brought by Frobisher. Portraits of these rarities were made for the king and queen and others. In 1605 Weymouth brought from the coast of Maine five kidnapped Indians, "with all their bows and arrows" and two beautiful birch-bark canoes. Rosier's True Relation. "This accident," exclaimed Sir Ferdinando Gorges, "hath been the means of putting life into all our plantations." Some of the savages captured at various times were exhibited for money, and one perhaps was shown after he was dead; at least we may venture to conjecture so much from Shakespeare's jeer in The Tempest at the idle curiosity of the crowd. In England, says Trinculo, "any strange beast makes a man. Tempest, ii, 2. When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian." This interest in outlandish savages no doubt suggested to the poet the creation of the monster Caliban, who probably seemed a realistic figure to the imagination of that age.

VII.

Notions about animals. The animals of the new continent excited the wonder of the people of Europe and increased the interest in America. Regarding them, also, the most extravagant stories were easily credited. It was recorded in the sober Latin of Peter Martyr that the advance of Cabot's ships was retarded by the multitude of codfish on the Newfoundland coast, and that the bears were accustomed to catch these fish in their claws. [Note 9.] It is hard to recognize the familiar opossum in the description by Purchas: "A monstrous deformed beast, whose fore part resembleth a fox, the hinder part an ape, excepting the feet, which are like a man's; beneath her belly she hath a receptacle like a purse, where she bestows her young until they can shift for themselves." The humming bird was believed to be a cross between a fly and a bird. The Hudson River Dutch settlers went further, and named it simply "the West Indian bee." These dainty creatures were prepared for exportation to Europe in New Amsterdam by drying them, in Barbadoes by filling them with sand. Evelyn's Diary, i, 277. They were accounted "pretty delicacies for ladies, who wore them at their breasts and girdles." Evelyn saw two preserved as great rarities at Oxford, in 1564. A New England versifier extols

The humbird for some queen's rich cage more fit
Than in the vacant wilderness to sit.

Wood's New Eng. Prospect, p. 23. Flying squirrels, when brought into English parks in 1608, were the occasion of much wondering excitement. King James begged for one of them, like a spoiled child. The skins of muskrats were esteemed for their odor and were brought to England "as rich presents." It was thought that musk might be extracted from this animal. Hariot, the learned man of Ralegh's first colony, fancied that the civet cat would prove profitable to settlers in America, but his words indicate that he had been misled by traces of the skunk, whose perfume has never yet come into request. De Bry's Hariot, p. 10. Speaking of the "civet catte," he says, "in our travails there was found one to have been killed by a salvage or inhabitant; and in many places the smell where one had lately beene before."

The raccoon, the "aroughcun" of the Virginia Indians, being a plantigrade, was esteemed a monkey; the peccaries were called the wild hogs of America, and were thought to have "their navels on the ridge of their backs." [Note 10.] Somewhere in the region of the Hudson River a beast is described as having a horn in the middle of his forehead, from which it would appear that the unicorn on the royal coat of arms may have been found running at large. It is not easy to account for the "camel mare," reported to have been seen about three hundred miles west from the coast of New Jersey, unless it belonged to the genus Incubus. The bewildering number of new creatures found in America troubled the European scholars of that day, who were ever theological. They were puzzled to get so many four-footed beasts and creeping things into the compass of Noah's ark. Mercator, the Flemish geographer, avoided this difficult embarkation by concluding that America had been excepted from the Deluge.

VIII.

Thus grotesque and misleading were many of the glimpses that Europe got of the New World as the mists of ignorance slowly lifted from it. An age of romance and adventure. These erratic notions regarding America give one an insight into the character of the English people at the period of discovery and colony-planting. Credulity and the romantic spirit dwell together. The imagination in such an age usurped the place of discrimination, and the wonderful became the probable. The appetite for the marvelous fostered exaggeration; every man who had sailed in foreign seas thought it shame not to tell of wonders. The seventeenth century indeed betrayed a consciousness of its own weakness in a current proverb, "Travelers lie by license." History and fiction had not yet been separated. Like every other romantic age, the period of Elizabeth and James was prodigal of daring adventure; every notable man aspired to be the hero of a tale. English beginnings in America were thus made in a time abounding in bold enterprises—enterprises brilliant in conception, but in the execution of which there was often a lack of foresight and practical wisdom.

Elucidations.

[Note 1, page 3.] See the careful and learned discussion of the Voyages of Cabot by the late Charles Deane, in Winsor's Narrative and Critical History of America, vol. iii. Mr. Deane effectually destroys the delusion which so long gave the credit of this discovery, or a part of it, to Sebastian Cabot, the son of the real discoverer. Mr. Henry Harrisse, in John Cabot, the Discoverer of America, and in an earlier work, Jean et Sebastien Cabot, etc., reaches the same conclusion. He even doubts Sebastian's presence in the expeditions of his father, John Cabot, etc., p. 48.

[Note 2, page 4.] Yet George Beste, who sailed with Frobisher, says: "Now men neede no more contentiously strive for roume to build an house on, or for a little turffe of ground, ... when great countreys and whole worldes offer and reache out themselves to them that will first voutsafe to possesse, inhabite, and till them." These countries, he says, "are fertile to bring forth all manner of corne and grayne, infinite sortes of land cattell, as horse, elephantes, kine, sheepe, great varietie of flying fowles of the ayre, as phesants, partridge, quayle, popingeys, ostridges, etc., infinite kinds of fruits, as almonds, dates, quinces, pomegranats, oringes, etc., holesome, medicinable, and delectable" (Frobisher's Voyages, Hakluyt Society, p. 38).

[Note 3, page 8.] Ralegh, in his History of the World, book i, chap, viii, sec. xv, has an interesting digression on the danger of trusting such communications, and he relates an anecdote of misapprehension by this very party sent under Grenville and Lane: "The same happened among the English, which I sent under Sir Richard Greeneville to inhabit Virginia. For when some of my people asked the name of that country, one of the savages answered, 'Wingandacon,' which is as much as to say, as, 'You wear good cloaths,' or gay cloaths." From this answer it came that the coast of North Carolina was called "Wingandacon," or, in its Latinized form, Wingindacoa, while the chief, or "king," of the country appears in the narratives of the time as Wingina. Ralegh says that Yucatan means merely "What say you?" and that Peru got its name from a similar mistake.

[Note 4, page 8.] I found the original of this map among the drawings made by John White in the Grenville Collection in the British Museum. It was reproduced to accompany a paper of mine on the Virginia Colony in the Century Magazine of November, 1882. It excited interest among scholars, as it was supposed to have been previously unknown. A copy was afterward found, however, in the collection made by Dr. Kohl for the State Department at Washington. The drawings in the Sloane MSS., British Museum, attributed to John White by Dr. E. E. Hale, in the Transactions of the American Antiquarian Society, iv, 21, are not White's originals. The latter are in the Grenville Collection. See my comparison of the two in The Nation of April 23, 1891.

[Note 5, page 10.] As late as December 5, 1621, in a letter from the Virginia Company to Governor Wyatt, these words occur: "The Conjectures of the Southwest Passage and the piece of copper which you sent us gladly saw and heard." This long-surviving desire for a short passage to the East Indies is traceable to the passion that existed in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for spices, and this no doubt came from the gross forms of cookery in that time. Anderson's Commerce, sub anno 1504, cites Guicciardini on the great quantities of spices used, and adds: "For in those days the people of Europe were much fonder of spices in their cookery, etc., than they have been in later times." The rise in the price of commodities in Elizabeth's time may have been only apparent, but it promoted voyages looking to the extension of commerce. Compare Holinshed, i, 274.

[Note 6, page 10.] Waterhouse's Declaration of Virginia, 1622, a rare tract. Also Purchas, iii, 892, 893, where these words are quoted from Briggs: "The Indian Ocean, which we commonly call the South Sea, which lyeth on the West and Northwest Side of Virginia, on the other side of the mountains beyond our Falls [of James River] and openeth a free and faire passage, not only to China, Japan, and the Moluccas, but also to New Spaine, Peru, and Chili, and those rich countries of Terra Australis not as yet discovered." It is one of many marks of practical sagacity in Captain John Smith that after his experience on the American coast he was able to form views of the geography of the continent almost a century in advance of the opinions held in his time. He speaks of "those large Dominions which doe stretch themselves into the main God knoweth how many thousand miles" (Generall Historie, book vi).

[Note 7, page 14.] So late as 1626, Fleet, the only survivor of the massacre of Spelman's party, after spending five years in captivity among the Virginia Indians, persuaded a London merchant to intrust him with a vessel for the Indian trade by his stories of the "powder of gold" with which the savages made a paint for their faces. To this story he added a statement that he had often been in sight of the South Sea or Pacific Ocean. Fleet's Journal may be found in Scharf's History of Maryland, i, 13, etc. Van der Donck relates, in his description of New Netherland, that Kieft, the director of New Netherland, and Van der Donck, found an Indian painting himself and bought the pigment, which being burned in a crucible yielded two pieces of gold. (See the translation in New York Historical Society Collection, ii, 161, 162.) A bag of specimens of the precious ores of the Hudson River region was sent to Holland by the ill-fated ship that sailed out of New Haven in 1645. The ship was seen no more except by the New Haven people, who beheld its specter in the sky. Of the Hudson River gold mines no specter has ever been seen in earth or sky.

[Note 8, page 15.] I have quoted from Mr. Sainsbury's abstract of the fragment in the British Public Record Office, but a similar statement by Ingram was inserted in Hakluyt's Divers Voyages in 1589. It was omitted in the later edition as too incredible even for Hakluyt. See also a paper by Dr. De Costa, in the Magazine of American History, March, 1883, on the copy of Ingram's Statement preserved in the Bodleian Library. Ingram's story, and others like it, seem to be satirized in the play of Eastward, Ho! by Chapman, Jonson, and Marston. The assertion of Seagull, in the play, that "they have in their houses scowpes, buckets, and diverse other vessels of massie silver," would seem at first sight to be an unmistakable allusion to the extravagance of Ingram's narrative. But in the second edition of Bullein's A Dialogue against the Fever Pestilence, which was published in 1573, one Mendax, describing an unknown land, declares that "their pottes, panns, and all vessells are cleane gold garnished with diamondes." This shows that Ingram's story had probably absorbed certain traits from what I have ventured to call European folklore tales about America—folk tales originally applied to the Orient, no doubt; echoes of Sir John Mandeville and Marco Polo, perhaps. Of course it is just possible, but not probable, that Bullein had heard the tales of Ingram, who had returned three years or more before he printed his second edition. The authors of Eastward, Ho! probably enlarged on Bullein.

[Note 9, page 18.] "Unguibusque inter squamas immissis," Decade III, book vi. These details are probably given on the authority of Sebastian Cabot, whose veracity is not above suspicion.

[Note 10, page 19.] Some of the early writers speak of "apes." Strachey calls what appears to be a raccoon a monkey, and Brickell, as late as 1743, uses the same word. The peccaries are recorded as in the text by the marvel-loving Purchas, p. 805. One finds unicorns in Speed's Prospect, Description of New York. Speed also lets us know that the buffalo was accustomed to defend himself by vomiting "a hot scalding liquor" on the dogs that chased it. Argall was the first Englishman to see the bison, in 1613. Citing his letter, Purchas says, p. 943, "In one voyage ... they found a slow kind of cattell as bigge as kine, which were good meate."

CHAPTER THE SECOND.
JAMES RIVER EXPERIMENTS.

I.

Departure of the emigrants. In December, 1606, there lay at Blackwall, below London, the Susan Constant, of one hundred tons, the Godspeed, of forty tons, and the little pinnace Discovery, of but twenty tons—three puny ships to bear across the wintry Atlantic the beginners of a new nation. The setting forth of these argonauts produced much excitement in London. Patriotic feeling was deeply stirred, public prayers were offered for the success of the expedition, sermons appropriate to the occasion were preached, and the popular feeling was expressed in a poem by Michael Drayton. Even those who were too sober to indulge the vain expectations of gold mines and spice islands that filled the imaginations of most Englishmen on this occasion could say, as Lord Bacon did later: "It is with the kingdoms on earth as it is with the kingdom of heaven: sometimes a grain of mustard seed proves a great tree. Who can tell?" Ld. Chancellor's Speech in reply to the Speaker. On the 19th of that most tempestuous December the little fleet weighed anchor and ran down on an ebb tide, no doubt, as one may nowadays see ships rush past Blackwall toward the sea. Never were men engaged in a great enterprise doomed to greater sorrows. A. D. 1606. From the time they left the Thames the ships were tossed and delayed by tempests, while the company aboard was rent by factious dissensions.

II.

The laws and orders. Those who shaped the destinies of the colony had left little undone that inventive stupidity could suggest to assure the failure of the enterprise. King James, who was frivolously fond of puttering in novel projects, had personally framed a code of unwise laws and orders. The supremacy of the sovereign and the interests of the Church were pedantically guarded, but the colony was left without any ruler with authority enough to maintain order. The private interest of the individual, the most available of all motives to industry, was merged in that of the commercial company to which Virginia had been granted. All the produce of the colony was to go into a common stock for five years, and the emigrants, men without families, were thrown into a semi-monastic trading community like the Hanseatic agencies of the time, with the saving element of a strong authority left out. Better devices for promoting indolence and aggravating the natural proneness to dissension of men in hard circumstances could scarcely have been hit upon. Anarchy and despotism are the inevitable alternatives under such a communistic arrangement, and each of these ensued in turn.

III.

Character of the emigrants. The people sent over in the first years were for the most part utterly unfit. Smith's Gen. Hist., iii, c. i and c. xii. Of the first hundred, four were carpenters, there was a blacksmith, a tailor, a barber, a bricklayer, a mason, a drummer. There were fifty-five who ranked as gentlemen, and four were boys, while there were but twelve so-called laborers, including footmen, "that never did know what a day's work was." Advertisements for Planters of New Eng., p. 5. The company is described by one of its members as composed of poor gentlemen, tradesmen, serving men, libertines, and such like. Comp. Briefe Declaration in Pub. Rec. Off., Sainsbury i, 66; and New Life of Va. "A hundred good workmen were better than a thousand such gallants," says Captain Smith. Of the moral character of the first emigrants no better account is given. Essay on Plantations. It was perhaps with these men in view that Bacon declared it "a shameful and unblessed thing" to settle a colony with "the scum of the people."

IV.

The arrival. The ships sailed round by the Canaries, after the fashion of that time, doubling the distance to Virginia. They loitered in the West Indies to "refresh themselves" and quarrel, and they did not reach their destination until seedtime had well-nigh passed. They arrived on the 6th of May, according to our style. Driven into Hampton Roads by a storm, they sailed up the wide mouth of a river which they called the James, in honor of the king. A. D. 1607. At that season of the year the banks must have shown masses of the white flowers of the dogwood, mingled with the pink-purple blossoms of the redbud against the dark primeval forest. Percy, in Purchas, p. 1689. Wherever they went ashore the newcomers found "all the ground bespread with many sweet and delicate flowers of divers colors and kinds." The sea-weary voyagers concluded that "heaven and earth had never agreed better to frame a place for man's habitation."

The first meetings with Indians. They were like people in an enchanted land—all was so new and strange. On the first landing of a small party they had a taste of savage warfare. "At night, when wee were going aboard, there came the savages creeping from the Hills like Beares, with their Bowes in their Mouthes, charged us very desperately, hurt Captain Gabrill Archer in both hands, and a Sayler in two places of the body very dangerous. Percy, in Purchas iv, pp. 1685, 1686. After they had spent their arrowes, and felt the sharpness of our shot, they retired into the Woods with a great noise and so left us."

But the newly arrived did not find all the Indians hostile. The chief of the Rappahannocks came to welcome them, marching at the head of his train, piping on a reed flute, and clad in the fantastic dress of an Indian dandy. He wore a plate of copper on the shorn side of his head. The hair on the other side was wrapped about with deer's hair dyed red, "in the fashion of a rose." Two long feathers "like a pair of horns" were stuck in this rosy crown. His body was stained crimson, his face painted blue and besmeared with some glistering pigment which to the greedy eyes of the English seemed to be silver ore. A. D. 1607. He wore a chain of beads, or wampum, about his neck, and his ears were "all behung with bracelets of pearls." There also depended from each ear a bird's claw set with copper—or "gold," adds the narrator, indulging a delightful dubiety.

Purchas i, 686 and following. During the period of preliminary exploration every trait of savage life was eagerly observed by the English. The costume, the wigwams, and most of all the ingenious weapons of wood and stone, gave delight to the curiosity of the newcomers.

V.

Founding of Jamestown. The colonists chose for the site of their town what was then a malarial peninsula; it has since become an island. The place was naturally defended by the river on all sides, except where a narrow stretch of sand made a bridge to the main. [Note 1.] Its chief advantage in the eyes of the newcomers was that the deep water near the shore made it possible to moor the ships by merely tying them up to trees on the river bank. Relatyon of the Discovery of our River, Am. Antiq. Soc., iv, 61. Here the settlers planted cotton and orange trees at once, and experimental potatoes, melons, and pumpkins, but they postponed sowing grain until about the first of June in our reckoning.

The winter of misery. They took up their abode in hastily built cabins roofed with sedge or bark, and in ragged tents. The poorer sort were even fain to shelter themselves in mere burrows in the ground. A. D. 1607. Ill provided at the start, the greater part of their food was consumed by the seamen, who lingered to gather comminuted mica for gold. In this hard environment, rent by faction, destitute of a competent leader and of any leader with competent authority, the wonder is that of this little company a single man survived the winter. Purchas, p. 1690. "There never were Englishmen left in any foreign country in such misery as we were in this new-discovered Virginia," says George Percy, brother to the Earl of Northumberland. A pint of worm-eaten barley or wheat was allowed for a day's ration. This was made into pottage and served out at the rate of one small ladleful at each meal. "Our drink was water, our lodgings castles in the air," says Smith. The misery was aggravated by a constant fear of attack from the Indians, who had been repulsed in an energetic assault made soon after the landing of the English. It was necessary for each man to watch every third night "lying on the cold, bare ground," and this exposure in a fever swamp, with the slender allowance of food of bad quality and the brackish river water, brought on swellings, dysenteries, and fevers. Sometimes there were not five men able to bear arms. "If there were any conscience in men," says Percy, "it would make their hearts bleed to hear the pitiful murmurings and outcries of our sick men without relief every day and night for the space of about six weeks." The living were hardly able to bury the dead, whose bodies were "trailed out like dogs." Half of the hundred colonists died, and the survivors were saved by the Indians, who, having got a taste of muskets and cannon in their early attack on Jamestown, now brought in supplies of game, corn, persimmons, and other food, to trade for the novel trinkets of the white men.

VI.

Emergence of Captain John Smith. Peril and adversity bring the capable man to the front. The colony proceeded, by means of the technicalities habitually used in those days, to rid itself of its president, Wingfield, a man of good intentions but with no talents suitable to a place of such difficulty. Slowly, by one change and then another, the leadership fell into the hands of Captain John Smith. During the voyage he had drawn upon himself the jealousy of the others, probably by his boastful and self-asserting habit of speech. When the list of councilors, till then kept secret, was opened at Jamestown and his name was found in it, he was promptly excluded by his associates. It was only on the intercession of the clergyman, Hunt, that he was at length admitted to the Council.

His paradoxical character has been much misunderstood. Those who discredit the historical accuracy of Captain Smith's narratives consider his deeds of no value. It is the natural result and retribution of boasting that the real merit of the boaster is cast into the rubbish heap of contempt along with his false pretensions. On the other hand, those who appreciate Smith's services to the colony in its dire extremities believe that the historical authority of such a man must be valid.

His romantic tendencies. His character, double and paradoxical as it is, presents no insoluble enigma if we consider the forces of nature and of habit underlying its manifestations. According to his own highly colored narrative, he had fed his fervid imagination on romances of chivalry. The first natural result in a youth so energetic as he, was that he should set out to emulate the imaginary heroes of whom he had read. It was equally a matter of course that a man of his vanity should exaggerate his own adventures to the size of those that had excited his admiration. The same romantic turn of the imagination that sent him a-wandering after exploits in Flanders and in the wars with the Turks, in Barbary, and in Ireland, made his every adventure seem an exploit of heroic size. Such a man is valuable when boldness and aggressive action are in request; to relate facts where autobiography is involved he is little fitted.

His story of his own life. According to Smith's own narrative, he was robbed and shipwrecked at sea; he slew three infidel champions in single combat and cut off their heads, just for the amusement of the ladies; he was made captive by the Turks and escaped by slaying his master with a flail; he encountered pirates; in the plunder of a ship he secured by the grace of God a box of jewels; and, to round off his story, he was beloved in romance fashion by a fair Turkish lady, one Tragabigzanda; befriended by a Russian lady, the good Calamata; and, later, was snatched from the open jaws of death by the devotion of the lovely Princess Pocahontas, daughter of King Powhatan, of Virginia. What more could one ask? Here are the elements of all the romances. But, to crown all, he emulated the misadventure of the prophet Jonah, and he even out-Jonahed Jonah. He got ashore by mere swimming without the aid of a whale, when cast overboard by Catholic pilgrims to appease a tempest. Never any other wanderer since the safe return of Ulysses passed through such a succession of marvelous escapes as this young John Smith. His accidents and achievements, even without exaggeration, were fairly notable, doubtless, but they are forever obscured by his vices of narration.

Interest in colonization. By the time he was twenty-eight years old this knight-errant had pretty well exhausted Europe as a field for adventure. Soon after his return to his own land he found the navigator Gosnold agitating for a new colony in Virginia, the scene of Ralegh's failures. That being the most difficult and dangerous enterprise then in sight, nothing was more natural than that Smith should embark in it. From this time to the end of his life this really able man gave his best endeavors to the advancement of American colonization. His character. In counsel he was accounted wise, and his advice was listened to with more than common deference in the assemblies of the Virginia Company as long as the company lasted. In labor he was indefatigable, in emergencies he proved himself ready-witted and resourceful. His recorded geographical observations are remarkably accurate considering his circumstances, and his understanding of Indian life shows his intelligence. His writings on practical questions are terse, epigrammatic, and wise beyond the wisdom of his time. But where his own adventures or credit are involved he is hardly more trustworthy than Falstaff. His boasting is one of the many difficulties a historian has to encounter in seeking to discover the truth regarding the events of an age much given to lying.

VII.

Smith's exploration and trading. On Smith principally devolved the explorations for a passage to the Pacific and the conduct of the Indian trade. He was captured by the Indians in the swamps of the Chickahominy and carried from village to village in triumph. Contriving to secure his release from the head chief, Powhatan, he returned to Jamestown. Nothing could have suited better his bold genius and roving disposition than the life he thereafter led in Virginia. A. D. 1607, 1608. He sailed up and down the bays and estuaries, discovering and naming unknown islands, ascending great unknown rivers, cajoling or bullying the Indians, and returning to his hungry countrymen at Jamestown laden with maize from the granaries of the savages. Oxford Tract, passim. Smith and his companions coasted in all seasons and all weather in an open boat, exercising themselves in morning psalm-singing and praying, in manœuvring strange Indians by blustering or point-blank lying, and in trying to propagate the Christian religion among the heathen—all in turn as occasion offered, like true Englishmen of the Jacobean time. Gen. Hist passim.

His narrative. Captain Smith's earlier accounts of these achievements in Virginia seem to be nearer the truth than his later Generall Historie. As years rolled on his exploits gained in number and magnitude in his memory. The apocryphal story of his expounding the solar system by means of a pocket compass to savages whose idiom he had had no opportunity to learn is to be found only in his later writings. He is a prisoner but a month in the narrative of the Oxford Tract of 1612, which was written by his associates and published with his authority, but his captivity had grown to six or seven weeks in the Generall Historie of 1624. His prosaic release by Powhatan had developed into a romantic rescue by Pocahontas. Two or three hundred savages in the earlier account become four or five hundred in the later. Certain Poles assist him in the capture of an Indian chief in the authorized narrative of Pots and Phettiplace. In the later story our hero performs this feat single-handed. A mere cipher attaches itself sometimes to the figure representing the number of his enemies, who by this simple feat of memory become ten times more redoubtable than before.

His service to the colony. But it does not matter greatly whether the "strangely grimmed and disguised" Indians seen by Smith at one place on the Potomac, who, according to the story, were shouting and yelling horribly, though in ambuscade, numbered three or four hundred as in one account, or three or four thousand as in his later story. Oxf. Tract, p. 32. Gen. Hist., bk. iii, ch. v. To Captain Smith remains the credit of having been the one energetic and capable man in those first years—the man who wasted no time in a search for gold, but won from the Indians what was of infinitely greater value—the corn needed to preserve the lives of the colonists. In an open boat, with no instrument but a compass, he explored and mapped Chesapeake Bay so well that his map was not wholly superseded for a hundred and forty years. Historie of Travaile into Virginia, p. 41. Even Wingfield, who had reason to dislike Smith, recognizes the value of his services; and Strachey, who had every means of knowing, says that "there will not return from" Virginia "in hast any one who hath bene more industrious or who hath had (Captain Geo. Percie excepted) greater experience amongst them, however misconstruction maye traduce here at home."

Smith overthrown. During the autumn of 1608 and the winter following Captain Smith was sole ruler of Jamestown, all the other councilors having gone; but the next spring there arrived five hundred new colonists inadequately provisioned, and under two of the old faction leaders who were Smith's mortal enemies. These were the visionary and turbulent Archer and his follower Ratcliffe. A. D. 1609. Smith got some of the newcomers to settle at Nansemond, and others took up their abode near the falls of the James River. [Note 2.] After much turmoil Smith was disabled by an accident, and his enemies contrived to have him sent home charged, among other things, with having "incensed" the Indians to assault the insubordinate settlers under West near the falls, and with having designed to wed Pocahontas in order to secure royal rights in Virginia as son-in-law to Powhatan.

His later years. He afterward explored the New England coast with characteristic thoroughness and intelligence. What he published in his later years by way of advice on the subject of colony-planting is full of admirable good sense. With rare foresight he predicted the coming importance of the colonial trade and the part to be played by the American fisheries in promoting the greatness of England by "breeding mariners." He only of the men of his time suspected the imperial size and future greatness of North America. He urged that the colonies should not annoy "with large pilotage and such like dues" those who came to trade in their ports. Low customs, he says, enrich a people. This is a strange doctrine in an age when foreign trade seemed almost an evil, and false conceptions of economic principles were nearly universal. Captain Smith's words are often pregnant with a wit whose pungency is delightful. In mental and physical hardihood, and in what may be called shiftiness, as well as in proneness to exaggeration and in boastfulness, he was in some sense a typical American pioneer—a forerunner of the daring and ready-witted men who have subdued a savage continent. [Note 3.]

VIII.

The famine of 1609-'10. Disaster of some sort could hardly have been avoided had Captain Smith been allowed to stay, but after his departure ruin came swiftly, and there was no hand strong enough to stay it. The unchecked hostility of the savages drove the outsettlers from Nansemond and the falls of the James. [Note 4.] The Indians found exercise for their devilish ingenuity in torturing those who fell into their hands alive, and outraging the dead. A. D. 1609, 1610. The brave but unwise Percy added fuel to their consuming fury by visiting their shrine and desecrating the tombs of their chiefs. There was now no one who could carry on the difficult Indian trade. Ratcliffe, who had conspired to send Smith back to England, fell into an ambuscade while emulating Captain Smith's example in trading with Powhatan. He was tortured to death by the Indian women, and only fifteen of his fifty men got back to Jamestown. The brood hogs of the colony were all eaten, the dogs came next, and then the horses, which were to have stocked Virginia, were consumed to their very hides. Rats, mice, and adders were relished when they were to be had, and fungi of various sorts were eaten with whatever else "would fill either mouth or belly." A. D. 1610. An Indian slain in an assault on the stockade was dug up after he had been three days buried, and eaten "by the poorer sort," their consuming hunger not being embarrassed by the restraints of gentility. From this horrible expedient it was but one step to the digging up of their own dead for food. Famine-crazed men even dogged the steps of those of their comrades who were not quite wasted, threatening to kill and devour them. Among these despairing and shiftless men there was but one man of resources. Daniel Tucker—let his later sins as tyrant of Bermuda be forgiven—bethought himself to build a boat to catch fish in the river, and this small relief "did keep us from killing one another to eat," says Percy. He seems to have been the only man who bethought himself to do anything. [Note 5.] One man, in the ferocity engendered by famine, slew his own wife and salted what he did not eat at once of her flesh, but he was put to death at the stake for this crime. Some, braving the savages, sought food in the woods and died while seeking it, and were eaten by those who found them dead. Others, in sheer desperation, threw themselves on the tender mercies of the Indians and were slain. To physical were added spiritual torments. One despairing wretch threw his Bible into the fire, crying out in the market place that there was no God in heaven. Percy adds, with grim theological satisfaction characteristic of the time, that he was killed by the Indians in the very market place where he had blasphemed in his agony. The depopulated houses, and even the palisades so necessary for protection, were burned for firewood by the enfeebled people, and Jamestown came presently to look like the slumbering ruins of some ancient fortification. Tragicall Relation, 1623. Briefe Declaration, 1624, both in British Pub. Record Office. Percy's Trewe Relacyon, MS., Petworth House. Fortunately, the Indians did not think it worth while to lose any more of their men in attacking the desperate remainder. It seemed inevitable that all who were shut up in the Jamestown peninsula should perish of hunger in a very few days. Of the nearly five hundred colonists in Virginia in the autumn of 1609, there were but sixty famine-smitten wretches alive in the following June, and hardly one of these could have survived had help been delayed a few days longer.

IX.

The arrival of Gates and Somers, 1610. Relief came to the little remnant from a quarter whence it was least expected. The emigrants of the preceding year had been sent out under the authority of Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers. The two leaders were jealous of each other, and for fear either should gain advantage by prior arrival they embarked in the same ship. A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colony of Virginia, 1619, p.23. This ship became separated from the rest of the fleet and went ashore on the Bermudas, then uninhabited, and "accounted as an inchaunted pile of rockes and a desert inhabitation for Divels," in the words of a writer of the time; "but all the fairies of the rocks were but flocks of birds, and all the Divels that haunted the woods were but herds of swine." [Note 6.] Here old Sir George Somers, a veteran seaman, constructed two little cedar vessels, and provisioning them for the voyage with what the islands afforded—live turtles, and the flesh of wild hogs and waterfowl salted—the company set sail for Virginia in the spring of 1610, arriving barely in time to save the colony from extinction. Finding that their provisions would not last more than two or three weeks, they abandoned the wreck of Jamestown, crowding all the people into four pinnaces, including the two improvised cedar boats built on the Bermudas. They sailed down the river in the desperate hope of surviving until they could reach Newfoundland and get supplies from fishing vessels. The four little craft were turned back on encountering Lord De la Warr, the new governor, ascending the James to take charge of the colony. The meeting with De la Warr was bitterly regretted by the old settlers, who preferred the desperate chance of a voyage in pinnaces on a shipless sea with but a fortnight's provision to facing again the horrors of life at Jamestown.

De la Warr's arrival, 1610. With all the formalities thought necessary at that time, De la Warr took possession of Jamestown, now become a forlorn ruin full of dead men's bones. Gates was sent to England for a new stock of cattle, while the brave old Sir George Somers once more embarked for the Bermudas in the Patience, the little cedar pinnace which he had built wholly of the wood of that island without a particle of iron except one bolt in the keel. Smith's Oxford Tract, so called. In this boat he sailed up and down until he found again "the still vexed Bermoothes," where he hoped to secure provisions. He died in the islands. Argall was also sent to the Bermudas, but missed them, and went north to the fishing banks in search of food.

[Note 7.] Jamestown was cleansed, and with a piety characteristic of that age the deserted little church was enlarged and reoccupied and daily decorated with Virginia wild flowers. De la Warr's government, 1610. All the bitter experience of the first three years had not taught the true method of settling a new country. [Note 8.] The colony was still but a camp of men without families, and the old common stock system was retained. To escape from the anarchy which resulted from a system that sank the interest of the individual in that of the community, it had been needful to arm De la Warr with the sharp sword of martial law. British Museum, MS. 21,993, ff. 174, 178. Instr. to Gates and De la Warr. Some of the instructions given him were unwise, some impossible of execution. To convert the Indians out of hand, as he was told to do, by shutting up their medicine men or sending them to England to be Christianized by the methods then in use, did not seem a task easy of accomplishment, for Indian priests are not to be caught in time of war. But De la Warr undertook another part of his instructions. Gold-hunting. A hundred men under two captains were sent on a wild-goose chase up the James River to find gold or silver in the mountains, whither the phantom of mines had now betaken itself. This plan originated with the London managers of Virginia affairs, and men had been sent with De la Warr who were supposed to be skillful in "finding out mines." But being especially unskillful in dealing with the Indians, they were tempted ashore by savages, who offered them food and slew them "while the meate was in theire mouthes." Briefe Declaration, MS., Pub. Rec. Off. The expedition thereupon turned back at a point about forty miles above the present site of Richmond.

Flight of De la Warr. A new town was begun at the falls, in the fond belief that two mines were near, and De la Warr took up his residence there. Jamestown, drawing its water from a shallow and probably polluted well, became the seat of a fresh epidemic. In the month of March following his arrival the governor fled from the colony to save his own life, leaving Virginia more than ever discredited.

X.

Sir Thomas Dale, 1611. As the hope of immediate profit from Virginia died away, the colony would have been abandoned if there had not arisen in its favor a patriotic enthusiasm which gave it a second lease of life. Many of the great noblemen were deeply engaged in this new agitation in favor of the unlucky colony, and none more deeply, perhaps, than Prince Henry, the heir apparent. Docs. Rel. to Col. Hist. N. Y., i, pp. 1, 2, 3, 9, 10, 16-21. At Henry's request, Sir Thomas Dale, an officer who had been employed about the prince's person, and who with other English officers was now in the service of the Netherlands, was granted leave of absence to go to Virginia. Since the colony was a check to Spain, the Netherlands were supposed to have an indirect interest in the enterprise and were persuaded to continue Captain Dale's pay. De la Warr, who remained in England, was nominally governor; Gates, when present in Virginia, was the ranking officer; but for five years Dale appears to have been the ruling spirit in the colony.

The heavy hand of Dale, 1611-1616. To induce him to go, Dale had been deceived regarding the condition of the plantation, as had been everybody else that had gone to Jamestown after the first ships sailed. The vice-admiral, Newport, was the principal reporter of Virginia affairs in England and the principal agent of the company in this deception. Dale's rough temper was already well known. It was for this, no doubt, that he had been chosen to do a rude piece of work. A Briefe Declaration of the Plantation of Virginia, 1624, MS., Pub. Rec. Off. On his arrival he saw the desperate state of the undertaking. He pulled Vice-Admiral Newport's beard and threatened him with the gallows, demanding "whether it weare meant that people heere in Virginia shoulde feed uppon trees."

Under the inefficient government of George Percy, who had again been placed in charge, the seedtime of 1611 was allowed to pass without the planting of corn. The Jamestown people were found by Dale "at their daily and usual work bowling in the streets." Brit. Museum, MS., 21,993, f. 174. But the days of unthrifty idleness were at an end. "The libertyes, ffranchises, and immunityes of free denizens and natural-born subjects of any our other dominions" promised to the colonists, were also at an end from the moment of the arrival of this sharp-set soldier and disciplinarian. Dale's pitiless use of martial law turned Virginia not exactly into a military camp, but rather into a penal settlement where men suffered for the crime of emigration. The men taken to Virginia in Dale's own company were hardly fit for anything else, and were so "diseased and crazed in their bodies" that at one time not more than sixty out of three hundred were capable of labor. Briefe Declaration. The food sent with Sir Thomas Dale by the corrupt contractors was "of such qualitie as hoggs refused to eat." Sir Thomas Gates afterward made oath to its badness before the Chief Justice in London.

XI.

The years of slavery. Dale regarded himself as an agent of the company. His aim was by hook or crook to make the hitherto unprofitable colony pay dividends to the shareholders, who were his employers. His relation to the emigrants was that of a taskmaster; one might, perhaps, more fitly call him a slave-driver. Instead of seeking to render the colony self-supporting by clearing corn ground, he gave his first attention to lading vessels with sassafras root, then much prized as a medicine, and cedar timber, valued especially for its odor.

During a part of Dale's time eight or nine ounces of meal and half a pint of peas was the daily ration. Briefe Declaration. Percy to Northumberland, Hist. MS., Commission, Rept., iii, 53, 54. In their declaration, made some years afterward, the surviving colonists aver that both the meal and the peas were "moldy, rotten, full of cobwebs and maggots, loathsome to man and unfit for beasts." Better men than these might have been driven to mutiny by the enforced toil and bad food. And mutiny and desertion were usually but other names for suicide under the rule of the pitiless high marshal. Some fled to the woods, hoping to reach a mythical Spanish settlement believed to be not very far away. Dale set the Indians on them, and they were brought back to be burned at the stake. Others, who in desperation or deadly homesickness resolved to venture their lives in a barge and a shallop "for their native country," suffered in various ways for their temerity. Death by shooting or hanging was clemency. One offender was put to death by the awful torture of breaking on the wheel, a penalty that Dale may have learned during his stay on the Continent. Taylor, the water poet, has left us the sickening details of such an execution in Germany in 1616. Observations and Travel from London to Hamburgh, p. 13. One need not waste any sympathy on those who were hanged for stealing to satisfy hunger; death is more merciful than life to men in such a case. But one poor rogue, who thought to better his rations by filching two or three pints of oatmeal, had a bodkin run through his tongue and was chained to a tree until he perished of hunger. Though these things were twice attested by the best men in the colony, one prefers to make some allowance for their passionate resentment, and to hope that some of the horrors related are exaggerated. It is hard to believe, for example, that men unable to work were denied food, and left to creep away into the wretched burrows in the ground used for shelter, there to die unregarded in the general misery.

In 1612 a company of ten men sent out to catch fish braved the perils of the ocean in a little bark and got back to England. It was the only escape from Dale's tyranny, pitiless and infernal. "Abandon every hope who enter here" was almost as appropriate to the mouth of the James River as to the gate of Dante's hell. All letters of complaint sent to England were intercepted, and all efforts of friends of the colonists in England to succor or rescue them were thwarted by the company in London. Briefe Declaration. The king's pass to one of the colonists authorizing him to leave Virginia was sent to him by his friends closely made up in a garter, to avoid the vigilance of Sir Thomas Dale.

Dale's services. Dale's administration was strongest on its military side. There was no danger that the Indians would reduce the colony to any straits while he was in charge. He gave his first attention to fortification, and he even begged for two thousand convicts out of English jails to form a line of posts from Hampton to a point a hundred miles above Jamestown. He sent Argall all the way to Mount Desert to plunder a Jesuit settlement and make prize of a French ship—an undertaking congenial to Dale's military temper and the Viking tastes of Argall. As his experience increased, Dale came to understand that other than military measures were needed to found a colony, though he never more than half comprehended the elements of the problem. In his later time he cleared more corn ground, and he could boast at his departure that Virginia contained six horses, a hundred and forty-nine neat cattle, two hundred and sixteen goats, and hogs without number. Dale set off a private garden of three acres of land to each of the old planters, on the condition that they should provide food for themselves while still giving nearly all of their time to the service of the common stock. Even this slave's-patch of private interest given to only a fraction of the colonists put some life into Virginia; but two thirds of the people were retained in the old intolerable bondage, and not even the most favored secured personal ownership of land. Dale's administration was remembered as "the five years of slavery." [Note 9.]

XII.

Dale's return. The rough-handed soldier from the Low Countries had indeed brought the Virginia chaos into order, but it was an order almost as deadly as the preceding anarchy. Dale confessed that the government of Virginia was "the hardest task he had ever undertaken," and he got himself out of it after five years by making a theatrical return to England in 1616 with a train of Indians, including the "Princess" Pocahontas, converted, baptized with a Christian name as Rebecca, and wedded to an Englishman. [Note 10.] He added glowing reports of the country, and proved all by exhibiting "at least sixteen several sorts of staple commodities to be raised in this plantation." For greater effect, samples of twelve of these products of the colony were sold by public auction in the open court of the company. Though Dale could show many commodities, some of which have never flourished in Virginia since his time, he left behind him not an established community, but a mere camp of unhappy men retained in the country by the sheer impossibility of getting away. [Note 11.] After nine years of suffering, Virginia consisted of some three hundred and twenty-six men, twenty-five women and children, and graves outnumbering many times over all the living souls.

Three things had been discovered in Dale's time that were of importance to the colony. Dale had by personal experiment learned the two fishing seasons in the James River. The colonists had begun the profitable cultivation of tobacco, and the economic success of the colony was thereby assured. Lastly, even Dale's small experiment with private interest rendered the apportionment of the land and the establishment of private ownership certain to come in time. As early as 1614 it was estimated that three men working for themselves raised more corn than ten times as many when the labor was for the public stock. [Note 12.]

XIII.

Argall's government. Captain Argall, who succeeded Sir Thomas Dale, was a bold and notable mariner. He had built the first Virginia vessel; he had traded with the Indians for corn with as much enterprise and address as Captain Smith had shown; he had in a small ship called the Dainty made the first experimental voyage to James River by the westward route, avoiding the long circuit by the Canaries and West Indies. It had been his fortune to be the first Englishman to see the American bison, which he found near the Potomac. He it was who by a shrewd trick had captured Pocahontas and held her as hostage; and he drove the French out of Maine, despoiling their settlement at Mount Desert. To a mastery of all the arts that make the skillful navigator he added the courteous politeness of a man of the city and the unfaltering rapacity of a pirate. As governor, he robbed the company with one hand and the hapless colonists with the other. While using the ships and men of the colony to carry on the Indian trade, he turned all the profits of it into his own wallet. The breeding animals of the colony accumulated by Dale he sold, and made no account of the proceeds. There was hardly anything portable or salable in Virginia that he did not purloin. He even plundered the property of Lady De la Warr, the widow of his predecessor. He boldly fitted out a ship belonging to Lord Rich, and sent an expedition of sheer piracy to the West Indies under an old letter of marque from the Duke of Savoy. When advices from England warned Argall that his downfall was imminent, he forthwith redoubled his felonious diligence. Lord Rich's intrigue. His chief partner in England was Lord Rich, who became the second Earl of Warwick in 1619, about the time of Argall's return, and who is known to history in his later character as a great Puritan nobleman, who served God while he contrived to better his estate with both hands by such means as troublous times put within his reach. He was not content with small pickings. Rich appears to have aimed at nothing less than wrecking the company and securing the land and government of Virginia. [Note 13.] The first step toward this was to get a charter for a private or proprietary plantation within Virginia which should be exempt from all authority of the company and the colony. This independent government was to serve as a refuge from prosecutions for Argall and other piratical agents, and at last to possess itself of the wreck and remainder of Virginia. The second step in this intrigue was one that could have availed nothing in any time less respectful to shadowy technicalities and less prone to legal chicanery than that of James I. As we have seen, jealousy was excited in Virginia by the possibility of Captain Smith's wedding Pocahontas and setting up a claim to authority based on her inheritance from Powhatan. Stith, 142. A tradition lingered in Virginia a hundred years later that King James questioned Rolfe's right to intermarry with a foreign princess without the consent of his sovereign. If this had any foundation, it grew out of the value of a pretext in a time of technicality and intrigue. There may have been already a scheme to trade upon the hereditary right of Powhatan's daughter. Pocahontas died in England, leaving an infant son. Argall, on his arrival, hastened to notify the company that Opechankano, the brother and successor of Powhatan, had resolved not to sell any more land, but to reserve it for the son of Pocahontas when he should be grown. The company charged that this was a ruse to serve the ends which Argall, Rich, and others had in view. The larger plan miscarried, but Argall found his prey so tempting that he lingered longer than was safe, and got away in the nick of time by the aid of Lord Rich, who had stood guard like a burglar's pal, and who contrived to delay the ship carrying out the new governor until a small swift-sailing vessel could be sent to fetch away Argall and his varied booty of public and private plunder. The Companie's root of difference. MS. Rec. Va. Co., May 7, 1623. In that day justice often went by favor, and Argall consigned his spoils to hands so powerful that the Virginia Company, stripped bare by his treacherous villainy, could never recover any of its lost property. MS. Rec. Va. Co., passim. The embittered colonists had the bootless satisfaction of sending over after the runaway governor twenty-four bundles of accusatory depositions.

XIV.

Fall of the lottery. From the first nobody reaped any profit from investments made in the new colony except the clique of merchants who had been allowed to sell wretched supplies for the distant settlers at ruinous rates. Rich and those interested with him had abundantly reimbursed themselves for all outlays on their part. The Virginia Company, swindled by commercial peculators at home, robbed by a pirate governor in America, and embarrassed by Spanish intrigues at the English court, had also been deprived of the lotteries, large and small, which had supplied money for sending eight hundred emigrants to Virginia. The lottery, which had fallen into great disrepute and had suffered "many foul aspersions," was abolished in compliance with a public sentiment. [Note 14.] The company was tottering swiftly to a fall; vultures like Warwick were waiting longingly for its death.

Revival of interest, 1618. But there set in once more a widespread patriotic movement in its behalf. Such movements were characteristic of that vital age when love of country was fast coming to count for more as a motive to action than loyalty to the person of a prince. "Divers lords, knights, gentlemen, and citizens, grieved to see this great action fall to nothing," came to its rescue with one final effort which resulted after some years in putting the enterprise well beyond the danger of failure. They formed auxiliary societies within the Virginia Company, after the custom of corporations in that day. Each of these undertook to plant a settlement or "hundred." In one year the population rose from less than four hundred to about a thousand. The newly active element infused a more liberal spirit into the company, and set about correcting the abuses in its management.

XV.

The Great Charter, 1618. The movement of 1618 was retarded by the disgrace into which the colony had fallen. An unbroken series of misfortunes and disappointments, the bad conduct of the company's affairs, the ill fame of Dale's remorseless tyranny, and the fresh Argall scandal, had made Virginia odious. Pub. Rec. Off. Col. Papers, iii, 40. Disc. of the Old Va. Co. One convict to whom the alternative was proposed, chose hanging in preference to transportation to Virginia. It was needful that something should be done to restore credit. The men who took the lead in the patriotic movement of 1618 on behalf of Virginia were mainly liberal statesmen—that Earl of Southampton who is known as the friend of Shakespeare; Sir Edwin Sandys, one of the greatest men of a great age, whose brave support of popular liberty had lost him the favor of the king; Sir John Danvers, and others. The records before the election of Sandys in 1619 were probably destroyed to conceal the guilt of the managers. We can only conjecture that the rising influence of the men who were able a few months later to overthrow the ruling party had much to do with the most notable change that took place in the conduct of affairs in the Virginia Company at this time. On the 13th of November, 1618—memorable but neglected and forgotten date—the Virginia Company, acting within the powers conferred on it by its charter, granted to the residents in Virginia a document styled a "Great Charter or Commissions of Priviledges, Orders, and Lawes." No copy of this instrument now exists, but some of its provisions have been preserved. It established a legislative body, to consist of councilors of estate and of representatives or burgesses chosen by the several "plantations" or hundreds, and it limited the power of the governor. This charter was the starting point of constitutional government in the New World. It contained in embryo the American system of an executive power lodged mainly in one person, and a Legislature of two houses. One might without much exaggeration call this paper a sort of Magna Charta of America, and it was a long and probably a deliberate step toward popular government. [Note 15.] If the results that have followed it be considered, it can hardly be accounted second in importance to any other state paper of the seventeenth century.

XVI.

Division of land. Not only did this admirable charter establish a representative form of government and do away with martial law, but it fairly launched the Virginians on the current of freedom and advancement by authorizing a liberal division of land to all those who had arrived before the departure of Sir Thomas Dale. [Note 16.] The oldest land titles in Virginia are deduced from the authority of the Great Charter of 1618. Aspinwall Papers, p. 14, note. Communism, pernicious everywhere, is at its worst in an infant settlement. True Declaration, p. 25. "Every man sharked for his own bootie," says a writer on Virginia in 1609, "but was altogether careless of the succeeding penurie." The distribution of land abolished the common stock system of labor, and opened a pathway to the ambition of the diligent.

The good news in Virginia. Tidings of the great change wrought in their condition and prospects by the new charter reached the dwellers on the James River in the spring of 1619, and the colonists were "ravished with so much joy" that they felt themselves "now fully satisfied for their long labors and as happy men as there were in the world." [Note 17.] They valued their liberties as no man can who has not known the bitterness of bondage, and in 1623, when they had reason to fear the re-establishment of the old tyranny, the Virginia Assembly petitioned the king in these strong words: "Rather than be reduced to live under the like government, we desire his Majesty that commissioners may be sent over to hang us." Tragicall Relation, 1623. We have here, perhaps, the very first of the many protests of colonial Legislatures against oppression from England.

XVII.

The sending of wives to Virginia. In 1618, before the adoption of the charter, it was concluded, in the quaint phrase of the time, "that a plantation can never flourish till families be planted and the respects of Wives and Children fix the people on the soyle," or, in simpler words, that a colony of bachelors can hardly found a state. [Note 18.] The first ship laden with home-makers carried over ninety maids, and the company thought it necessary to promise special rewards to the men who should marry these young women. If the maids were as certified, "young, handsome, and well recommended," they needed no such dowry in a land that had hardly a woman in it. Young or old, handsome or homely, the maids did not prove a drug. Shipload after shipload of them were eagerly bought by the planters, who had to pay a round sum in the high-priced tobacco of that early time to defray the cost of transporting these wives. Besides having to pay for his wife, the planter could have her only on the condition of winning her consent; and the eager courtship that ensued on the arrival of a shipload of maids must have been one of the most amusing scenes in the settlement of America. Suitors far outnumbered the women, and the latter had things pretty much their own way. The first cargo of this interesting merchandise was landed in 1619, but as late as 1624 the women were probably in danger of setting the colonists by the ears, for the governor felt obliged to issue a proclamation threatening fine or whipping for the offense of betrothal to more than one person at a time. [Note 19.] In 1632, thirteen years after the first shipment, we find the colony still being replenished with women sent in the same fashion. In that year, two, whose behavior during the voyage had been disgraceful, were sent back as unfit to be mothers of Virginians. The precaution could not have been of much practical use, but it indicates the early growth of a wholesome local pride. When there were house mothers in the cabins, and children born in the country, the settlers no longer dreamed of returning to England; and there was soon a young generation that knew no other skies than those that spanned the rivers, fields, and vast primeval forests of their native Virginia, which now for the first time became a home.

XVIII.

The struggle ended, 1624. It is not the Virginia colony alone that we have seen in the crucible. The fate of English colonization was no doubt settled by the experiments made during the first years on the James River, and the story told in this chapter is but the overture to the whole history of life in the United States. In our colonizing age a settlement might be made in the heart of Africa with a far smaller loss of life than was incurred in the first sixteen years in Virginia. From 1607 to 1623 there were landed in Virginia more than six thousand people. The number that returned to England was inconsiderable, but in the year 1624, when the colony passed under a royal government, there remained alive in the colony only twelve hundred and seventy-five. Of those who came in these early years four fifths perished. A part of this loss was due to radically wrong conceptions of the nature, end, and proper methods of colonization, a part to corrupt and incompetent management in the London Company. The bad character of many of the earliest emigrants was one cause of difficulty. The writers of the time probably exaggerated this evil in order to excuse the severity of the government and the miseries into which the settlers fell. But the loss of many of the early comers must be accounted a distinct gain to Virginia. Unfitted for their environment, they were doomed to extinction by that pitiless law which works ever to abolish from the earth the improvident, the idle, and the vicious.