CHAPTER XI
BOOKPLATES IN AMERICA
SIXTY years ago the intelligent European reader would have rubbed his eyes and looked at his feet to be sure that they were not where his head ought to be, if told that American readers formed, in a marked degree, a very large class to whom publishers and authors should look for sympathy and encouragement. That is all changed now, and there is probably no country in the world where books, and all that is implied in that magic word, arouse so keen an interest.
It will not be out of place to pause and think of the honoured names of a few of those who have helped to prepare the road for this change. Of course, some seeds of good fruit were sown many generations before. Passing over Sir Walter Raleigh, colonist and author, we reach, in a few years, George Sandys, poet and colonist, one of the brave companions of Captain John Smith.
John Smith was a member of the council of the 105 emigrants who on December 19th, 1606, set out from Blackwall to found a colony in Virginia. Combining prudence with intrepid enterprise, he became the trusted founder and leader of the colony. In one expedition inland in December, 1607, he was taken prisoner by the Indians, and is said to have been rescued by the intervention of Pocahontas, the Indian Princess.
George Sandys, son of the Archbishop of York, born in 1578, two years before John Smith, was, in 1611, named as one of the “Undertakers” in the third Virginia charter, and in 1621 was made Treasurer of the Virginia Company, not very long before the colony was taken over by the Crown. What is to the point of our story is that, in his colony home on the banks of James River, he translated Ovid’s Metamorphoses, dedicated to Charles I., and published in folio in London in 1626.
In 1623 the Rev. William Morrell, armed with a commission to superintend the churches there, went out in Captain Robert Gorges’ expedition to Massachusetts, lived at Plymouth there one year, and, returning to England, published in London, in 1525, in quarto, Latin hexameters, with a translation into English heroic verse, and entitling the book: “New-England, or a briefe Enarration of the Ayre, Earth, Water, Fish, and Fowles of that Country. With a Description of the ... Habits and Religion of the Natives.”
In 1629 William Wood emigrated from England to Massachusetts, and after staying there about four years, he came back to England, and in 1634 published his “New England’s Prospect: A true, lively, and experimentall Description of that part of America commonly called New England: Discovering the State of that Countrie, both as it stands to our new-come English Planters and to the old Native inhabitants: Laying downe that which may both enrich the Knowledge of the mind-travelling Reader, or benefit the future Voyager, London, by Thomas Cotes for John Bellamie. 1634.”
The author soon went back to the colony, became a representative in the State Legislature, became the chief founder of Sandwich in Plymouth Colony, and died there in 1639.
Of the youth of Roger Williams, the next colonist author, a curious incident is recorded: “He attended trials in the Court of Star Chamber, in order to take down notes of them in a shorthand.” Many will recall at once, how often working as a reporter, has led to a literary career. In this connection the name of Charles Dickens, and a host of other authors, occur at once.
In 1626 Roger Williams took his B.A. degree from Pembroke College, Cambridge; and on December 1st, 1630, he embarked from Bristol in a ship named the Lyon, and after a voyage of over two months, reached Nantasket February 5th, 1631. He had been ordained in England; but neither in the old country nor the new did his ideas of a Church and Church government generally agree with the views of those in authority.