CHAPTER XXII
The time is at hand when the curtain must be rung down upon the scenes I have tried to present. I was constrained to follow the fortunes of John Smith and Pocahontas, for do what we will we cannot eliminate them from an all-important place in the early history of Virginia. Others were just as deserving, but the historians of their day failed to leave us material regarding them. Like my great favourite, the modest, brave George Percy, who lived long at Jamestown, they quietly slipped back into the shadows from which they only emerged to suffer and toil awhile for the common good.
I find it hard to leave my story. A glorious chapter in the history of Jamestown awaits a stronger pen than mine. At Jamestown, "in 1619, a year before the Mayflower skirted the coast of Massachusetts, the Virginians inaugurated representative government on the American continent—'an example never lost but ever cherished as the dearest birthright of freemen.' There, on June 21, 1621, the Virginians extorted the concession that 'no orders of court shall bind the said Colony unless they be ratified by the General Assemblies.' In 1624 they there asserted the right of self-taxation and control of the public purse, protesting that 'the Governor shall not lay any imposition upon the Colony, their land or commodities otherwise than by the authority of the General Assembly, and employed as the said Assembly shall appoint.' Though loyal to the King, in 1635, at Jamestown, Governor Harvey was 'thrust out,' for encroaching upon the rights of the people. Nay, after the downfall of monarchy they confronted Cromwell himself (who sent his threatening ships to Jamestown) and only yielded to his usurpation upon an honourable capitulation, acknowledging their submission as 'a voluntary act not forced or constrained by conquest,' and guaranteeing them 'such freedom and privileges as belong to the free-born people of England.' After the Restoration they broke out in open rebellion against the oppressions of government and anticipated by a century the final and victorious struggle for the liberties of America. On the untimely death of their leader—the well-born, the gallant, the accomplished, the eloquent Bacon—their revolt was quenched in blood; but even so, without any surrender of their chartered rights."[83]
These events are the glory and honour of our country, but my plan was to tell only of the birth of the nation, not its restless youth or strong manhood. My task was an humbler one: to honour the men who failed,—but not in courage or fortitude; who put their hands to the plough and never looked back; who devoted their lives, with no hope of reward, to carrying on the work assigned them; who fought the battle and fell on the field, regardless of the discouragement, disloyalty, and detraction meted out to them. They sowed; but others reaped the rich harvest. They laid the foundation; others built the fair structure. God be thanked, they suffered not in vain! When the kings of the earth send their navies into Virginia waters, when multitudes throng the gates, when cannon speaks to cannon, when orators bring their choicest words to grace the hour, a voice more eloquent than all these will rise from the sands of the desolate little island of Jamestown,—"We who lie here in unmarked graves died for you!"
Ninety-nine years after Jamestown was settled the seat of government was removed to Williamsburg. There was then no further excuse for the existence of a town on the little peninsula. Mrs. Ann Cotton, writing soon after Bacon's Rebellion, gives sufficient reasons for this. "It is low ground, full of marshes and swamps, which make the aire especially in the sumer insalubritious and unhealthy. It is not at all replenished with springs of fresh water, and that which they have in their wells brackish, ill-scented, penurious and not grateful to the stomach ... and (in the town) about a dozen families are getting their living by keeping of ordinaries at extraordinary prices."[84]
So it appears that "the town, even though measured by what would appear to be a standard of its time, was small, poor, and insignificant. This fact invests the place with the deepest interest, when it is remembered that from such a small beginning in the wilderness has sprung what bids fair to become, if not so already, the greatest nation of the earth."[85]
The town, deserted by all its best citizens, rapidly fell into decay and ruin. The brick houses tumbled down, the church left nothing but its sturdy old tower to stand sentinel over the graves of those who had built it and worshipped within it.
Jamestown Church Tower, Rear View, showing Old Foundations.
Copyright, 1906, by Jamestown Official Photo. Corp'n.
The peninsula, to-day an island, was divided into farms, and "martial ranks of corn" stood in the plain on which John Smith exercised his men in military evolutions. Around the church the young trees had it all their own way, clasping the gravestones and bearing them aloft in their strong young arms. There was nobody to hinder or protest.
In 1856 the peninsula had become an island, and access to it was by a rowboat. A large portion of the island was already engulfed by the waves. The bank was giving away within one hundred and fifty feet of the old tower of the church. Travellers in the excursion boats to Old Point Comfort began to observe the singular behaviour of a large cypress tree in the river opposite the tower. The cypress seemed to be slowly moving onward. An old traveller remembered that the tree in 1846 stood on land; it was now two hundred and ninety feet in the water from the shore! Evidently the shore itself was receding. Through the munificent gift of Mr. and Mrs. Edward Barney, in 1895, twenty-two acres of the island, including its historic area, came into the possession of the Association for the Preservation of Virginian Antiquities—a band of daughters of Virginia organized to rescue from decay and oblivion the sites of her early history, carving anew, like the Antiquary at the graves of the slaughtered Presbyterians, the story of those who "broke the way with tears."
Our guests on our anniversary day will not find the picturesque old church tower standing alone, looking toward the sea to which the anxious eyes of the sleepers beneath had been cast in the early days of starvation. Weakened by the storms of nearly three centuries, the old tower demanded support. The church has been rebuilt upon the old plan and the old foundations. A splendid sea-wall has been given by the government to the women of the Virginia Association—to do what their feeble hands tried but could not do. All is changed—except the old cypress far out in the water, which keeps its own secret, and refuses to yield to time, or wave, or change. Who knows? Perhaps his clasping roots may hold that other child of the forest, the old brave chieftain Opechancanough.
Part of the humble little town has been exhumed. The walls and foundations of the third and fourth churches, and of some few houses have been laid bare. Very few relics have been discovered; the bones of a gigantic man, the cenotaph of a knight, skeletons which crumbled at the touch of the air, shot from some alien gun, a bit here and there of broken crockery. But beneath the mould of two centuries was found evidence of another and lasting foundation, the fundamental basis of all happiness, all moral good, and all national prosperity—that of the simple, wholesome domestic life of the fireside. A pipe, scissors, thimble, and candlestick lay together in one of the uncovered chambers.
CHAPTER XXIII
LEGENDS OF THE OLD STONE HOUSE
The "Old Stone House" on Ware Creek, according to the Virginia historians, was the resort, at three different times, of the disembodied spirits of famous historical characters. "This unfinished stone edifice, evidently designed for a fortification, stands on a hill facing the water, and is difficult of access by reason of the impenetrable thickets and ravines overgrown with mountain laurel by which it is surrounded. Only by following a narrow path on the top of a wooded ridge can it be approached."[86] In consequence of its evil name nobody two hundred years ago ever visited it; and if a belated huntsman stumbled upon it by accident, he made haste to retrace his steps, frightened by the dark corners suggestive of hiding-places, and awed by the warning whispers of the wind as it sighed through the pines.
The country around it is desolate. The ravines are filled with poisonous vines and tenanted by the deadly rattlesnake. The house itself is a roofless ruin, embroidered by ivy and caressed by the Virginia creeper, the long boughs of which, like long arms, wave in the air to warn away all intruders.
The building is small, of solid masonry, the walls two feet thick, pierced with loopholes for musketry. There is one door from which stone steps descend to an underground chamber. This is probably the first stone house ever built by the English colonists, and is generally conceded by historians and antiquarians to be the edifice of which in 1609 Anas Todkill and others wrote to the London Company, "We built a fort for a retreat neere a convenient river, upon a high commanding hill very hard to be assaulted and easie to be defended; but the want of corne occasioned the end of all our worke, it being worke enough to provide victuall."
In this provision of "victuall," the starving colonists, as we have seen, were aided by Pocahontas, who brought, it is supposed, her "wild train" laden with baskets of food as far as this house, and there dismissing them, waited for Captain John Smith. The spot was favourable as a hiding-place from the fury of her father, the old king whose house was not far away, with its substantial chimney built by the treacherous Dutchmen. Here Pocahontas may have rested when she came "through the irksome woods with shining eyes" to warn her hero of danger and treachery from her own people.
These are the bits of folk-lore gleaned by that patient and accurate historian, Charles Campbell. Sixty years ago he visited the Stone House, and verified the existence then in the minds of the common people of three distinct legends belonging to the locality. No one doubts the romantic attachment of the Indian princess to Captain Smith. It sprang into existence perhaps at the heroic moment when she shielded his doomed head with her own bosom, and became the dominant influence of her short and eventful life.
Who can doubt that he early learned enough of her tongue to tell her of his mighty deeds, of the court of the great Sigismund, of his triumphal procession thither preceded by the heads, borne on lances, of the three slaughtered Turks; drawing, the while, pictures in the sand similar to the marvellous creations with which he illustrated the maps with which we are familiar? It is pathetic to know that the time was to him only an episode in a life of adventure. Even the saving of his own life, so often miraculously preserved, was a matter of little importance, remembered only in a generous moment, to secure for her an interest with his Queen. To Pocahontas he was more than a hero—he was little less than the Great Father himself. To him she was an attractive, beautiful child, and yet of a nation despised—"all savage," as he termed them.
One does not like to mar the romance by accepting the story of her marriage to one of Powhatan's captains. So dear is the romance of the Indian girl's devotion to John Smith, that we are tempted to be unjust to John Rolfe and to explain her marriage at Jamestown as the consequence of her longing to belong to the people of her hero,—to be "forever and ever his countrywoman,"—and to find in the Puritanic John Rolfe, with his tiresome throes of conscience and long-drawn apologies for loving her, a counterpart of her gallant captain. When she met John Smith in London, very pitiful must she have appeared to him, as her portrait does to us, in her stiff brocade, high, starched ruff, and English hat; she, the swaying, graceful windflower of the forest!
She must have appeared to him strangely unlike her charming self. Her dark locks, shaven closely on her temples, as was the custom of her people while she was a maid, had been suffered to grow since she had become a matron, and hung rebelliously about her pearl ear-rings; her lithe wrists, primly sustaining her fan of three feathers, were fettered by broad English cuffs. Those feathers were the only familiar connecting links between her past and her present! All else was strange.
We read that she neither smiled nor spoke for two hours when she was visited by Captain Smith. Presently she said, "They did tell me you were dead, and I knew no other until I came to Plymouth," and then in response to his deferential devoirs to "the Lady Rebekah," indignantly declares that she will have none of such talk! She means always to call him "Father," and be to him a "child," as she had been in Virginia.
And so the legend begins; and when she finds "her grave," as the quaint old writer says, "at Gravesend," she could not rest "in ye chauncell of ye church," but John Rolfe having married another wife, and Captain Smith having died, she was free to return to her old haunts, to meet her hero without let or reproof, and explain all that had been so wrong and so unfortunate. The belated fishermen, returning to their homes on the Ware, grew accustomed to seeing a thin thread of smoke issuing from the Old Stone House, and flitting past the loopholes might sometimes be discerned the dusky form of Pocahontas, with the white plume, the badge of royalty, in her dark hair. Here she awaited as of yore the coming of Captain Smith, and here he came and held converse with her. At last the troubled soul is comforted—the "deare and darling daughter" of Powhatan fades away from the legends of the old Virginians and is seen no more. Let us hope she is happy in a state where there are no separations and no mysteries, and that if she ever revisits the pale glimpses of the moon her errand may be one of beneficence to her many descendants.
The grim old fortress was untenanted, except by this Indian maiden, for nearly a hundred years, and then "the dreadful pyrate Blackbeard" secretes his ill-gotten treasures in the subterranean vault. To and fro he moves with muffled oars, mans the port-holes with his guns, and rests secure from assault. With his rifles he can pick out every man who dares to thread the defile. Presently his outgoing is watched, and one fine day he is assailed, and conquered on board his own sloop. He was a bold buccaneer, and had given orders that at a signal his magazine should be fired and friend and foe perish together. But his followers preferred surrender to death, and were all brought captive to Jamestown. Very brutal was the triumph of his captors. He had given trouble and resisted long, and now they would make sure of him. They returned with his gory head hanging from the prow of their vessel, and out of the skull that had housed his busy brain they fashioned a drinking-cup and rimmed it with silver, after the manner of their fathers in the old days of England. He became the Captain Kidd of Virginia waters. His phantom ship could be seen on moonlight nights on the York River, and his headless body would disembark therefrom and hover over his buried treasure. The treasure was never found; perhaps it is there still under some stone of the old fortress.
After this we hear nothing for many years of the Old Stone House. It crumbled away very little, being so strong; but nobody is tempted to approach it or use it in any way. The luxuriant vines bear great trumpet-shaped flowers, and clothe the walls with a brilliant beauty, seen only by the bats, hanging by crooked black fingers from every projection, and ready to fly in the face of the intruder, or the noxious serpents which wind in and out and increase and multiply with no check from man, their enemy.
Finally, about the year 1776, tenants appear again in the little fortress, ghostly forms throng the wide door, strange sounds of exultation are borne by the winds, and fitful unreal lights flit about or hover over the spot. From a distance these are observed, but there is no investigation, indeed the times are too stirring to admit of investigation. The Governor of Virginia has fled from the irate Commonwealth, and digests his chagrin on board his own sloop, riding at a safe distance near Yorktown. Men are in arms, burning words leap from lip to lip,—a great crisis is at hand, a great cloud is rising, soon to darken the land and break in the thunder and lightning of a mighty tempest.
What wonder, then, that it should be believed that the bugles of the fast-coming Revolution have reached Nathaniel Bacon in his long sleep in the York River, where "thoughtful Mr. Lawrence" had sunk his gallant young body lest it meet with ignominy at the hands of Lord Berkeley; that Drummond and Carver, and Bland and Hansford, and all the grand spirits who, with their leader, had lived a hundred years too soon, should meet him now, to exult and triumph!
What matter, now, that they had bled and suffered, and laid down their bright young lives, so full of promise, for a "lost cause"! The cause had lived, and soon the young republic would break its shackles and stand forth with its foot upon the tyrant's neck. The mills of the gods had not been idle, and here in the mysterious Old Stone House, the fortress in which no living man had ever dwelt, they met to plan, to rejoice, to triumph, night after night, until the foes of the country they loved so well should be driven from her shores in disgrace and defeat.
These are the legends—if they are not too recent to be classed as legends—with which, a century ago, Virginians dignified the Old Stone House. The early settlers were firm believers in supernatural influences and warnings. A blazing star had appeared before a storm when the three ships set forth to find this country, another in the year of the massacre of 1622, and yet another on the eve of Bacon's Rebellion. Tongue-like flames flitted to and fro over the early graveyards, and ghostly lights hovered over the undrained marshes. The "boat of birchen bark" lighted by a firefly lamp of the lost lovers in the Dismal Swamp was seen as late as the nineteenth century. Huntsmen in the cold, freezing nights would sometimes find themselves suddenly enveloped in a warm cloud,—this was because a ghost had met them and passed over them in the dark. Sterner than all these was the belief that witches—malignant spirits—were suffered to enter human bodies and bend men and women to their evil purposes.
Ghost stories have long been out of fashion. They have no longer a place in literature or even beside the winter fireside. The American of to-day may be a dreamer of dreams and seer of visions, but they are of the future, not the past. His phantoms are all ahead of him. Perhaps I should apologise for admitting them into a serious work. And yet I think that everything connected with the story of the birth of our nation deserves preservation. I believe, with Carlyle, that "the leafy, blossoming Present Time springs from the whole Past, remembered and unrememberable."
As Time goes on and touches with effacing finger one and another of the events that have marked, like milestones, the onward march of the great Anglo-Saxon race, we may be sure that the birth of this Western nation will ever be "remembered." "We shall not," said Daniel Webster, "stand unmoved on the shore of Plymouth while the sea continues to wash it, nor will our brethren in another early and ancient colony forget the place of its first establishment till their river ceases to flow by it. No vigour of youth, no maturity of manhood, will lead the nation to forget the spots where its infancy was cradled and defended."