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.
Elucidations.
[Note 1, page 29.] In 1889, when I visited Jamestown, there was no apparent trace of Sandy Beach which had connected the island with the mainland. This bit of sand, in the antique phrase of one of the early colonists, was "no broader than a man may well quaite a tileshard." Strachey, in Purchas, p. 1752. Jamestown is now a farm; the ruins of the church and many of the tombs in the eighteenth-century churchyard remain; but the upper end of the island is wearing away, and I picked out of the crumbling sand, far from the later burying place, human bones of earlier burials, possibly of the victims of the famines and epidemics. The walls of the magazine had been exposed by erosion. I brought away wrought nails, bits of glass grown iridescent from long burial, and an exploded bombshell of so small a caliber as to mark its antiquity. By the aid of a negro youth living on the farm I found the hearth bricks turned up in various places by the plow, and the arrangement, or rather lack of arrangement, of the town could thus be made out. My guide volunteered the information that Jamestown was "the first place discovered after the Flood." Some drawings made at the time were reproduced with an article on Nathaniel Bacon in the Century Magazine for July, 1890.
[Note 2, page 37.] Whether Smith was injured by gunpowder and required treatment, as he asserts, or was sent home under charges, has been matter of dispute. Both accounts are correct, as is shown by the testimony of an important manuscript at Petworth House, in Surrey, which I was allowed to examine by the courtesy of Lord Leconsfield. It is from the pen of George Percy, a brother of the Earl of Northumberland, who was chosen to succeed Smith on his departure from the colony. It is not the narrative from which Purchas makes extracts, but a sequel to it. The title is "A Trewe Relacyon of the pceedinge and Ocvrrentes of momente wch have hapned in Virginia from the Tyme Sr Thomas Gates was shipwrackde vpon the Bermudes Ano. 1609 vntill my depture ovtt of the country wch was in Ano Dni 1612." It is a quarto of forty-one pages. Percy was a man of courage, but his own narrative in this little book shows that he had no qualification for the office of governor except the rank of his family. His ill health is made an excuse for his inefficiency, but Dale's letter of May 25, 1611, shows that even the horrible events of Percy's first government had not taught him to plant corn when again left in charge. Percy naturally resents Smith's boastfulness, and bluntly accuses him of laying claim to credit that was not his. The charge that Smith, unable to control the unruly settlers at the Falls under West, advised the Indians to attack them, is supported by Percy; and a very different charge, that he stirred up the Indians to assassinate West himself, appears at a later time in Spelman's Relation, a tract that bears abundant internal evidence of the writer's mental inability to speak the truth. Percy himself relates that the Indians were already hostile to West's party, and that they had wounded and killed some of West's men in resentment of their wanton outrages. See also the account in the Oxford Tract, with the signatures of Pots and Phettiplace, for Smith's version of the affair. "Bloody-mindedness" seems not to have been a trait of Smith. But the exigency was a terrible one, for death by starvation was already impending, and only the restoration of discipline at any cost could have saved the colony from the horrible fate it met. Such a course would not have done much violence to the notions of the time, and would have found precedents in the various plots against the lives of Smith, Wingfield, and others in the colony. It is quite probable, however, that there is no truth in the story. The violent hatred of the factions will account for the suspicion.
[Note 3, page 38.] Captain Smith's True Relation was sent from Virginia and was printed in London in 1608. In 1612 he published what is commonly referred to as the Oxford Tract. Its proper title is very long. The first part of it is as follows: "Map of Virginia, with a description of the Covntry, the Commodities, People, Government, and Religion. Written by Captain Smyth, sometime Governor of the Covntry. And wherevnto is annexed the proceedings of those colonies since their first departure from England," etc. The second part of the book professes to be taken from the writings of eight of the colonists, whose names are given, and to have been edited by W. S.—that is, the Reverend Dr. Symonds. The Generall Historie was first proposed in a well-considered and rather elegant speech by Captain Smith at a meeting of the Virginia Company, April 12, 1621, while the new patent which was to be submitted to Parliament was under discussion. He suggested the writing of a history to preserve the memory of the worthies of Virginia, dead and living, and gave it as his opinion that no Spanish settlement of the same age afforded matter more interesting. "Which worthy speech," says the record, "had of the whole court a very great applause as spoken freely to a speciall purpose, and therefore thought fitt to be considered and put in practice in his due time. And for which also Mr. Smyth as preferring allwaies mocions of speciall consequence was exceedingly commended." MS. Records of the Virginia Company, i, 197-200. A first edition of the Generall Historie appeared in 1624, the last two editions in 1632. The book is a compilation of Smith's earlier works, somewhat expanded, not to say inflated. The later portions are mostly made up from the official and quasi-official pamphlets. Just what was Dr. Symonds's part in the preparation of the Oxford Tract and the Generall Historie it would be interesting to know. The latter work was in some sense by authority of the company, and liable to the peculiar suspicion that hangs about writings designed to advance the colony and not primarily to record history. Its descriptive portions are of high value, and we are now able to control its historical errors to a certain extent. Besides these three works on Virginia, Smith published a Description of New England, 1616, New England's Trials, 1620, and Advertisements for the Unexperienced Planters of New England or Elsewhere, in 1631, the year of his death. These all contain valuable matter relating to Virginia. He also published in 1627 two works on seamanship, a Sea Grammar, and the Accidence or Pathway to Experience necessary for a Young Seaman. In 1630 he published his True Travels, a book which contains an account of his own adventures previous to his going to Virginia. More than a quarter of a century had elapsed between the occurrence of these adventures and their publication. Smith's vivid imagination had meantime no doubt greatly magnified his own exploits. It is quite impossible at this day to sift what truth there is in the True Travels from the exaggerations. Travelers in that time were not held to a very rigid account, and their first obligation seems to have been to amuse their readers. No distinct line had yet been drawn in literature between fact and fiction.