A convivial governor.
The commission of Yeardley in 1626 named Sir John Harvey as his successor. When Yeardley died in 1627, Harvey had not arrived upon the scene, and needed to be notified. In such cases it was the business of the council to appoint a governor ad interim, and the council appointed one of the oldest and most honoured settlers, Francis West, brother of the late Lord Delaware. After one year of service business called West to England, and his place was taken by Dr. John Pott, who held the government until Sir John Harvey's arrival in March, 1630. This Dr. Pott is described as "a Master of Arts, ... well practised in chirurgery and physic, and expert also in distilling of waters, [besides] many other ingenious devices."[119] It seems that he was likewise very fond of tasting distilled waters, and at times was more of a boon companion than quite comported with his dignity, especially after he had come to be governor. A letter of George Sandys to a friend in London says of Dr. Pott, "at first he kept company too much with his inferiors, who hung upon him while his good liquor lasted. After, he consorted with Captain Whitacres, a man of no good example, with whom he has gone to Kecoughtan."[120] What was done by the twain at Kecoughtan is not matter of record, but we are left with a suggestion of the darkest possibilities of a carouse.
After Harvey's arrival ex-Governor Pott was arrested, and held to answer two charges: one was for having abused the powers entrusted to him by pardoning a culprit who had been convicted of wilful murder; the other was for stealing cattle. The first charge was a matter of common notoriety; on the second Dr. Pott was tried by a jury and found guilty. The ex-governor was not only a pardoner of felony, but a felon himself. The affair reads like a scene in comic opera. Some reluctance was felt about inflicting vulgar punishment upon an educated man of good social position; so he was not sent to jail but confined in his own house, while Sir John Harvey wrote to the king for instructions in the matter. He informed the king that Dr. Pott was by far the best physician in the colony, and indeed the only one "skilled in epidemicals," and recommended that he should be pardoned. Accordingly the doctor was set free and forthwith resumed his practice.
Growth of Virginia.
Other colonies.
Soon it was Governor Harvey's turn to get into difficulties. How he was "thrust out" from his government in 1635 and restored to it by Charles I. in 1637 will best be told in a future chapter in connection with the affairs of Maryland. After Harvey's final departure in 1639, Sir Francis Wyatt was once more governor for three years, and then came the famous Sir William Berkeley, who remained for five-and-thirty years the most conspicuous figure in Virginia. When Berkeley arrived upon the scene, in 1642, on the eve of the great Civil War, he received from Wyatt the government of a much greater Virginia than that over which Wyatt was ruling in 1624. Those eighteen years of self-government had been years of remarkable prosperity and progress. Instead of 4,000 English and 22 negroes, the population now numbered 15,000 English and 300 negroes. Moreover, Virginia was no longer the only English colony. In 1624 there were no others, except the little band of about 200 Pilgrims at Plymouth. In 1642 the population of New England numbered 26,000, distributed among half-a-dozen self-governing colonies. There was also a community of Dutchmen laying claim to the whole region between the Mohawk valley and Delaware Bay, with a flourishing town on Manhattan Island in the finest commercial situation on the whole Atlantic coast. The Virginians did not relish the presence of these Dutchmen, for they too laid claim to that noble tract of country. The people of Virginia had made the first self-supporting colony and felt that they had established a claim upon the middle zone. The very name Virginia had not yet ceased to cling to it. In books of that time one may read of the town of New Amsterdam upon the island of Manhattan in Virginia. In 1635 a party of Virginians went up to the Delaware River and took possession of an old blockhouse there, called Fort Nassau, which the Dutch had abandoned; but a force from New Amsterdam speedily took them prisoners and sent them back to Virginia,[121] with a polite warning not to do so any more. They did not.
Still nearer at hand, by the waters of the Potomac and Susquehanna, other rivals and competitors, even more unwelcome to the Virginians, had lately come upon the scene. The circumstances of the founding of Maryland, with its effects upon the kingdom of Virginia, will be recounted in the two following chapters.