MAPS.
| Tidewater Virginia, from a sketch by the author | [Frontispiece] |
| Michael Lok's Map, 1582, from Hakluyt's Voyages to America | [60] |
| The Palatinate of Maryland, from a sketch by the author | [274] |
CHAPTER I.
THE SEA KINGS.
Tercentenary of the Discovery of America, 1792.
When one thinks of the resounding chorus of gratulations with which the four hundredth anniversary of the Discovery of America was lately heralded to a listening world, it is curious and instructive to notice the sort of comment which that great event called forth upon the occasion of its third centenary, while the independence of the United States was as yet a novel and ill-appreciated fact. In America very little fuss was made. Railroads were as yet unknown, and the era of world's fairs had not begun. Of local celebrations there were two; one held in New York, the other in Boston; and as in 1892, so in 1792, New York followed the Old Style date, the twelfth of October, while Boston undertook to correct the date for New Style. This work was discreditably bungled, however, and the twenty-third of October was selected instead of the true date, the twenty-first. In New York the affair was conducted by the newly founded political society named for the Delaware chieftain Tammany, in Boston by the Massachusetts Historical Society, whose founder, Dr. Jeremy Belknap, delivered a thoughtful and scholarly address upon the occasion. Both commemorations of the day were very quiet and modest.[1]
Abbé Raynal.
In Europe little heed was paid to America and its discovery, except in France, which, after taking part in our Revolutionary War, was at length embarking upon its own Revolution, so different in its character and fortunes. Without knowing much about America, the Frenchmen of that day were fond of using it to point a moral and adorn a tale. In 1770 the famous Abbé Raynal had published his "Philosophical and Political History of the Establishments and Commerce of the Europeans in the Two Indies," a book in ten volumes, which for a time enjoyed immense popularity. Probably not less than one third of it was written by Diderot, and more than a dozen other writers contributed to its pages, while the abbé, in editing these various chapters and adding more from his own hand, showed himself blissfully ignorant of the need for any such thing as critical judgment in writing history. In an indescribably airy and superficial manner the narrative flits over the whole vast field of the intercourse of Europeans with the outlying parts of the earth discovered since the days of Columbus and Gama; and at length, in the last chapter of the last volume, we are confronted with the question, What is all this worth? Our author answers confidently, Nothing! worse than nothing! the world would have been much better off if America had never been discovered and the ocean route to Asia had remained unknown!