From these characters, which only shine in the full noonday of prosperity, we gladly turn to Sir Francis Drake, who, as early as 1586, did not hesitate to divide his last crust with the feeble and struggling colony of Roanoke Island, succoring them by timely aid, and not sucking from them the little feeble strength which short crops and long watchings against wary foes had left them. Although born in England, Drake had a soul which compassed the world, around whose waist he passed the second girdle which had ever belted it.
Drake with his Fleet sails round the World.
(p. 94)
CHAPTER II.
THE SETTLEMENTS OF VIRGINIA, DELAWARE, MARYLAND, THE CAROLINAS, AND GEORGIA.
Colored Views whitened.—Blue Ridges and Black Welts in Virginia.—Virginia, smothered up in Infancy by Charters, survives Royal nursing.—Her Vigilance against her Suitors.—Cotton introduced.—How the World managed previously.—Charles I. and his numerous Autographs.—Georgia and Oglethorpe.—Charleston set up.—A Point on Old Point Comfort.—Tobacco first piped about.—Unmarried Girls as Articles of Import.—Estimated in, if not by, Pounds.—The Fancy Constitution of John Locke for North Carolina.—Its own Length, but Short Life.—South Carolina Rivers do not run up.—Popular Errors corrected.—John Wesley.—Singular Effect of his Preaching on the Indians.—Maryland as a Duck of a Colony canvassed.
Colored views are too apt to be given and taken of these six States, shading down from the dead African black, through every gradation of tint, to a hue almost unimpeach-ably Caucasian.
It is true that Virginia carried on her bosom a Blue Ridge, as in later times some of her progeny have borne on their backs darker ridges; but until 1620 no welts of the latter character stood out on her fair shoulders; and these, be it said to his shame, were raised by the master of a Dutch man-of-war who, on the very day in August that the Pilgrim party embarked in the Mayflower, at Delft-Haven, in his own country, landed twenty negroes for sale on the banks of the James River, leaving a black mark which two hundred and forty-five years have barely succeeded in washing out. In her very cradle, in 1606, Virginia was loaded down and half smothered with that royal blanket, a charter. Not content with this comforter, the royal nurses from London kept piling other blankets of the same kind upon the vigorous infant, and because it was vigorous, until within the short space of fourteen years no less than four were heaped upon her. These were far from being counter-panes, but on the contrary served in that warm climate to distress the child, and eventually to bring out eruptions. Under the second of these, in 1609, Maryland was tucked up in the same bed with Virginia; but in 1621, not finding the company agreeable, she was taken out by Lord Baltimore, and put into a pleasant and comfortable trundle-bed of her own; the chivalrous young lord naming the baby after Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I., and daughter of the gallant Henry of Navarre, afterwards Henry IV. of France. The year 1621 was emphasized in the infant settlement of Virginia by the introduction of cotton and the first written constitution,—two prolific American seeds that have each borne large harvests. Considering the varied uses to which the former is now applied in clothing human bodies and habitations, and the latter in padding political addresses and lawsuits, we are puzzled to conceive how the world got on, and especially how congressmen managed to make speeches, or lawyers to live, prior to those great discoveries,—discoveries more important in some aspects than those of iron, the Reformation, Illinois divorces, gunpowder, steam, the doctrine of legal insanity, Brandreth’s pills, and others, without which of course no well-ordered or well-digesting family can long proceed.
Seven years later Charles I. contracted to take the entire tobacco crop of Virginia; hoping probably by the free use of this narcotic to drug the alarmed political conscience of England.
The ship that took the first Maryland emigrants up the Potomac to their new settlement was called the Ark and the Dove, and carried in its beak the olive-branch of religious toleration.
In 1630, the same liberality in disposing of broad strips of American territory was shown by King Charles I. in granting a deed, embracing North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, to Sir Robert Heath; but in 1663 his son, the second Charles, desirous of improving his own handwriting, which had been somewhat neglected from his eighth year, in consequence of the necessarily active business life Cromwell had obliged him to lead, put his signature, early one foggy morning, to a paper which somebody laid in his way, and which, when brought out to the light, proved to be a grant to Lord Clarendon and several other pleasant, gentlemanly fellows, of this same small North American farm. This select little knot of farmers, after building a few barns on their farm, discovered that it was not large enough for their purposes. Like the Irishman who wanted an additional sixpence to drink the health of the gentleman who had generously given him a five-dollar bill, they desired a back field to dump manure on; and they finally obtained a second autograph from the obliging Charles to a bit of paper, allowing them to use forever the small patch lying westward to the Pacific. The farm was kept together until 1729, when it was divided up by George II. into two parts, called North and South Carolina; the latter half being, three years later, again split into two, and the lower part named, after the burly old landlord, Georgia. Nearly fifty years, however, before this division, upon a tongue of land called Oyster Point, and bivalved between the Ashley and Cooper Rivers, Charleston was first set upon its uneasy foundations. Whether affected by the contiguity of Folly Island, by the use of too much pepper—always cheap in warm regions—upon the native oysters, or whether unduly exhilarated by too exclusive a contemplation of the cotton seed, which seems to have enlarged its dilated and dilating pupils, the place, although but seven feet above high tide, has always been given to high notions, and subject to a certain vertigo. An admirable ingredient, the Protestant Huguenot element, tossed out of France by the revoked edict of Nantes, was infused into the young settlement of South Carolina in 1685. The plant of liberty, however, early struck its anchoring roots close by the side of the cotton-plant; and although the governors, sent out by the royal proprietors from England, continually hacked into its smooth trunk, it still grew apace, and its bracing tonic odors filled not only the regions watered by the Santee and Pedee, but were wafted northwards and over the sister Colonies.