"You must take order to draw up the pinnace that is left with you under the fort, and take her sails and anchors ashore, all but a small kedge to ride by, lest some ill-disposed persons slip away with her."
The document contains many other excellent suggestions and directions, two or three of which will suffice for the purposes of our narrative.
Build your town carefully.
"Seeing order is at the same price with confusion it shall be advisably done to set your houses even and by a line, that your streets may have a good breadth and be carried square about your market-place, and every street's end opening into it, that from thence with a few field-pieces you may command every street throughout....
Do not send home any discouraging news.
"You shall do well to send a perfect relation by Captain Newport of all that is done, what height you are seated, how far into the land, what commodities you find, what soil, woods and their several kinds, and so of all other things else, to advertise particularly; and to suffer no man to return but by passport from the President and Council, nor to write [in] any letter of anything that may discourage others.
"Lastly and chiefly, the way to prosper and achieve good success is to make yourselves all of one mind for the good of your country and your own, and to serve and fear God, the Giver of all goodness, for every plantation which our Heavenly Father hath not planted shall be rooted out."
What Spain thought of it.
The allusion to the Florida tragedy, in this charming paper, was by no means ill considered. For in March, 1607, the King of Spain wrote from Madrid to Zuñiga in London as follows: "You will report to me what the English are doing in the matter of Virginia; and if the plan progresses which they contemplated, of sending men there and ships; and thereupon it will be taken into consideration here what steps had best be taken to prevent it."[34] A few days after this letter Philip III. held a meeting with his council to discuss measures which boded no good to Captain Newport's little company. We do not know just what was said and done, but we hardly need to be told that the temper of Spain was notably changed in the forty-two years since Menendez's deed of blood. How to ruin the Virginia enterprise without coming to blows with England was now the humbler problem for Spain to solve, and it was not an easy one.
A poet laureate's farewell blessing.