Sir Humphrey Gilbert.
Thomas Cavendish had been with Grenville in the voyage of 1585 to
Virginia. Frobisher's attempts inspired him with the ambition of the
age. In 1586 he, too, sailed through the Straits of Magellan, burning
and plundering Spanish ships, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and reached
Plymouth in 1588, having been gone about two years and fifty days.
Sir Walter Raleigh.
From a portrait attributed to Zuccaro
in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
[1584]
These half-piratical attempts against Spain led continually into
American waters, till the notion of forming a permanent outpost here as
base for such adventures suggested to Sir Humphrey Gilbert the plan,
which he failed to realize, of founding an American settlement. Gilbert
visited our shores in 1579, and again in 1583, but was lost on his
return from the latter voyage.
In 1584 Sir Walter Raleigh sent two captains, Amidas and Barlow, to
inspect the coast off what is now North Carolina. They reported so
favorably that he began, next year, a colony on Roanoke Island. England
was now a Protestant land, and no longer heeded Spanish claims to the
transatlantic continent, save so far as actual settlements had been
made.
[1586]
Sir Richard Grenville commanded this expedition, but was to return on
seeing the one hundred and eight colonists who accompanied him well
established. Queen Elizabeth gave the name VIRGINIA to the new country.
Drake, tending homeward from one of his raids on the Spanish coast, in
1586, offered the settlers supplies, but finding them wholly
discouraged, he carried them back to England.
Queen Elizabeth.
[1587]
Determined to plant an agricultural community, Raleigh next time, l587,
sent men with their families. A daughter to one of these, named Dare,
was the first child of English parents born in America. Becoming
destitute, the colony despatched its governor home for supplies. He
returned to find the settlement deserted, and no tidings as to the fate
of the poor colonists have ever been heard from that day to our own. The
Jamestown settlers mentioned in the next chapter found among their
Indian neighbors a boy whose whitish complexion and wavy hair induced
the interesting suspicion that he was descended from some one of these
lost colonists of Roanoke.
Thus Sir Walter's enterprise had to be abandoned. In the 40,000 pounds
spent upon it his means were exhausted. Besides, England was now at war
with Spain, and the entire energies of the nation were in requisition
for the overthrow of the Spanish Armada.
CHAPTER IV.
THE PLANTING OF VIRGINIA
[1606]
We have now arrived at the seventeenth century. In 1606 King James I.
issued the first English colonial charter. It created a first and a
second Virginia Company, the one having its centre in London, and coming
to be known as the London Company; the other made up of Bristol, Exeter,
and Plymouth men, and gradually taking the title of the Plymouth
Company. This latter company, the second, or Plymouth Company,
authorized to plant between 38 degrees and 45 degrees north, effected a
settlement in 1607 at the mouth of the Kennebec River. Little came of it
but suffering, the colonists, after a severe winter, returning to
England.
King James I. Mr. Henry Irving's Collection.
[1607]
A colony of one hundred and five planters sent out by the first or
London Company, proceeded, also in 1607, to Chesapeake Bay, entering
James River, to which they indeed gave this name, and planted upon its
banks Jamestown, the first permanent English colony on the continent.
This London Company consisted of a council in England, appointed by the
king, having the power to name the members of a local council which was
to govern the colony, the colonists themselves having no voice.
It is well known that the very earliest population of the Old Dominion
was not of the highest, but predominantly idle and thriftless. Vagabonds
and homeless children picked up in the streets of London, as well as
some convicts, were sent to the colony from England to be indented as
servants, permanently, or for a term of years. Persons of the better
class, to be sure, came as well, and the quality of the population, on
the whole, improved year by year. Settlement here followed a centrifugal
tendency, except as this was repressed by fear of the Indians. In 1616
the departments of Virginia were Henrico, up the James above the
Appomattox mouth, West and Shirley Hundreds, Jamestown, Kiquoton, and
King's Gift on the coast near Cape Charles--a wide reach of territory to
be covered by a total population of only three hundred and fifty.
[1608]
A little exporting was immediately begun. So early as May 20, 1608,
Jamestown sent to England a ship laden with iron ore, sassafras, cedar
posts, and walnut boards. Another followed on June 2d, with a cargo all
of cedar wood. This year or the next, small quantities of pitch, tar,
and glass were sent. From 1619 tobacco was so common as to be the
currency. About 1650 it was largely exported, a million and a half
pounds, on the average, yearly. The figure had risen to twelve million
pounds by 1670. At the middle of the century, corn, wheat, rice, hemp,
flax, and fifteen varieties of fruit, as well as excellent wine were
produced. A wind-mill was set up about 1620, the first in America. It
stood at Falling Creek on the James River. The pioneer iron works on the
continent were in this colony, hailing from about the date last named.
Community of property prevailed at Jamestown in all the earliest years,
as it did at Plymouth. After the event noted by John Rolfe: "about the
last of August [1619] came in a Dutch man of warre that sold us twenty
Negars," slavery was a continual and increasing curse, as is attested
by the laws concerning slaves. It encouraged indolence and savagery of
habit and nature. Virginian slaves, however, were better treated than
those farther south. They were tolerably clothed, fed, and housed.
Tobacco Plant.