The houses.
Labourers.
Indians.
Resuming our pilgrimage through the Virginia of 1624, we find no walls of massive masonry with frowning turrets encompassing these rudimentary boroughs, but at the most exposed points we meet with stout wooden blockhouses and here and there a row of palisades. At some places there are wharves for the convenient shipping of tobacco, but now and then, if the tide is not just right, we may be in danger of wetting our feet in going ashore, about which that ill-disposed Captain Butler has lately made so much fuss. The wooden frame houses, having been built without regard to æsthetic effects, with beams here and there roughly hewn and boards not always smoothly planed, are not so attractive in outward appearance as they might be, but they are roomy and well-aired, and the settlers already point to them with some degree of pride as more comfortable than the houses of labouring men in England. These houses usually stand at wide intervals, and nowhere, perhaps, except at Henricus and Jamestown, would one see them clustering in a village with streets. Here and there one might come across a handsomer and more finished mansion, like an English manor house, with cabins for servants and farm buildings at some distance. Of negroes scarcely any are to be seen, only twenty-two all told, in this population of perhaps 4,000 souls. Cheap labour is supplied by white servants, bound to their masters by indentures for some such term as six or seven years; they are to some extent a shiftless and degraded set of creatures gathered from the slums and jails of English seaport towns, but many of them are of a better sort. Of red men, since the dreadful massacre of two years ago, one sees but few; they have been driven off to the frontier, the alliance cemented by the marriage of Pocahontas is at an end, and no more can white men be called Powhatans. On this point the statute book speaks in no uncertain tones: "Ffor the Indians we hould them our irrecosileable enimies," and it is thought fit that if any of them be found molesting cattle or lurking about any plantation, "then the commander shall have power by virtue of this act to rayse a sufficient partie and fall out uppon them, and persecute them as he shall finde occasion."[110]
Agriculture, etc.
In the plantations, thus freed from the presence of Indians, European domestic animals have become plenty. Horses, indeed, are not yet so much in demand as boats and canoes, but oxen draw the plough, the cows are milked night and morning, sheep and goats browse here and there, pigs and chickens are innumerable. Pigeons coo from the eves, and occasionally one comes upon a row of murmurous bee-hives. The broad clearings are mostly covered with the cabbage-like tobacco plant, but there are also many fields of waving wheat and barley, and many more of the tasselled Indian corn. John Smith's scheme for manufacturing glass and soap has not yet been abandoned; the few workmen from Poland, brought here by him, have remained, or else others have come in place of them, for we find the House of Burgesses passing a statute admitting them to the franchise and other privileges of English citizenship, because of their value to the commonwealth in these branches of industry. Skilled workmen of another sort have been sent over by Nicholas Ferrar from France, for since mulberries grow in Virginia it has been thought that silk-worms might be profitably raised here, but such hopes are not destined to be realized.
Tobacco.
Such was the outward aspect of things along the banks of the James River in the year when, amid general grief and forebodings, the London Company was dissolved; and such it continued to be for many a year to come, save that the cultivated area increased in extent and the settlers in number, and that in spite of divers efforts to check it, the raising of tobacco encroached more and more upon all other forms of industry, tending to crush them out of existence, while at the same time the plantations grew larger and the demand for cheap labour was vastly increased. For some time the cultivation of Indian corn assumed considerable proportions, so that not only was there enough for home consumption, but in 1634 more than ten thousand bushels were exported to Winthrop's new colony on Massachusetts Bay. Nevertheless the encroachments of tobacco went on without cessation, until the features of social life in old Virginia came to be those of a wealthy and powerful community economically based upon one single form of agricultural industry.
Literature.
In the Virginia of 1624 one could not look for any highly developed forms of social recreation, or for means of education or literary attainment. Various episodes of farm work, such as the harvesting of the crops, or now and then the raising of the frame of a house or barn, seem to have been occasions for a gathering of neighbours with some sort of merrymaking, very much as in other primitive rural communities. Among the leading colonists were men of university education who brought with them literary tastes, and in their houses might have been found ponderous tomes of controversial theology, as well as those little thin quarto tracts of political discussion that nowadays often fetch such fabulous prices. Captain John Smith was spending his last years quietly in England, making maps and writing or editing books. His "General History of Virginia," published in 1624, can hardly fail to have been read with interest in the colony; and the same ship that brought it may well have brought the first folio edition of Shakespeare's complete works, which came from the press in the preceding year. Literary production of a certain sort went on in the colony. Such tracts as Ralph Hamor's "True Discourse" and Whitaker's "Good News from Virginia," though books of rare interest and value, will perhaps hardly come under the category of pure literature. But the translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses by George Sandys, youngest brother of Sir Edwin, has been well known and admired by scholars from that time to our own. George Sandys came to Virginia in 1621 as treasurer of the colony, fortified with some rather dull verses from the poet laureate, Michael Drayton:—