The first was granted to a company of “knights, gentlemen and merchants of the west of England, incorporated as the Plymouth Company;” the second to a company of “noblemen, gentlemen and merchants, mostly resident in London,” and which was called the London Company. The intermediate district, included in neither patent, was open to both companies, yet neither were permitted to extend their settlement within a hundred miles of the other.
The conditions of the charter were homage and rent, the rent being one-fifth of the net produce of gold and silver, and of copper one-fifteenth. The supreme government was vested in a council residing in England; local government alone was permitted to the colonists themselves. The members of the supreme council were nominated by the king, and even over the colonial councils the king preserved a control, being able to nominate and remove according to his royal pleasure. In all respects the king was the supreme head; the legislative and executive power lay in his hands; the colonists had no power of self-government. This first charter granted to an English-American colony was merely a simple charter for commercial purposes. The English government cherished through the whole scheme the hope of a considerable revenue from its colonies in Virginia; a duty to be levied on vessels trading to the harbours was to be applied to the use of the colony for one and twenty years, after which time it should lapse to the king. The code of laws also for the colony was drawn up by the king; religion was strictly enjoined to be according to the teachings of the English church; no emigrant might withdraw his allegiance from the king nor dissent from the royal creed. Dangerous tumults and seditions were punishable by death, as well as murder, manslaughter, and adultery. All civil causes involving corporal punishment, fine or imprisonment, were to be determined by the president and council, who were appointed by the king. There was not an element of popular liberty in the whole stipulated form of government. It was, however, worthy of the peddling, narrow policy and kingcraft of the British Solomon. The only element of enlightenment which it contained was the injunction of kindness to the savage, and the employment of all proper means for his conversion.
The Plymouth company, on receiving their grant, despatched a vessel of discovery, which, however, was taken by the Spaniards. A second went out, and returning, made the most favourable report of the country; the following year, therefore, 1607, a hundred colonists were despatched under the command of George Popham. They landed at the mouth of Kennebec River, west of the Penobscot, and about one hundred and thirty miles north-east of where Boston now stands. Here they erected a few rude huts, threw up slight fortifications, and built a storehouse. The settlement was called St. George. They had landed in the autumn, and the winter was intensely severe; their sufferings were extreme, not only from the severity of the climate and the season, but from want of provisions, their storehouse having been destroyed by fire. Their president also died; and in the following year, disheartened by so disastrous a beginning, they returned to England. This terminated the efforts of the Plymouth company.
The London company despatched a little squadron of three ships, on the 19th of December, 1606, one hundred and nine years after the discovery of this northern portion of the New World by Cabot. The largest vessel did not exceed one hundred tons burden; and the number of colonists was one hundred and five men. England was as yet new to the subject of colonisation, and the party sent out were injudiciously selected; out of the hundred and five persons emigrating to a wilderness where were no homes and no cultivated land, there were only twelve labourers, very few mechanics, and only four carpenters, the rest were gentlemen of fortune, persons with no occupation, many of them of dissolute habits, who had joined the expedition in the hope of gain. Neither were there any men with families. King James had also commanded the names and instructions of the future councillors of the government to be sealed up in a tin box, to be opened only on their arrival in Virginia; none, therefore, on the voyage were possessed of authority—envy and jealousy arose among them, which produced dissension. Besides this, the voyage was long and tedious, owing to Newport, the commander, adhering to the old route by the Canaries and West India islands. The voyage was as long as a slow voyage to Australia in these days. The intention of the colonists had been to establish themselves at the old settlement of Raleigh, but a severe storm fortunately prevented the execution of this design, and drove them into the magnificent Bay of Chesapeake. The headlands at the entrance of the bay were named Cape Henry and Cape Charles, after the sons of the king, which appellation they still retain; and the ships soon afterwards coming into deep water “put the emigrants,” says Smith’s narrative, “into good comfort,” and that name was bestowed on the northern point of a broad river near the estuary of which they lay. The emigrants were greatly pleased by the aspect of the country around them. “Heaven and earth,” says Smith, “seemed never to have agreed better to frame a place for man’s commodious and delightful habitation.” They entered the noble river, which they called after King James, and spent seventeen days in exploring the banks, during which time they encountered a company of hostile natives, and two of their number were wounded. With another tribe of Indians they smoked the calumet of peace. A fine situation, fifty miles above the mouth of the river, was selected for their settlement, the place receiving the name of Jamestown. Here was formed the first permanent English settlement in the New World.
The important sealed-box was opened, and the names of Wingfield, Newport, Gosnold, Smith, and three others, were found nominated to the council. But the dissensions and jealousies which had broken out on the voyage here assumed a more determined aspect. Smith, almost the only man amongst them of superior character and powers of mind, had become an object of jealousy to his fellows, and the council having elected Wingfield as their president, proceeded to exclude Smith from their council, under pretence of his harbouring a design to murder the council, and establish himself as king of Virginia. Smith, however, who had a sincere friend in Robert Hunt, the clergyman, insisted on trial by jury, which he had a right to demand, and was not only acquitted, but restored to his station.
Whilst timber was being felled, wherewith to freight the ships for their homeward voyage, Newport, Smith, and some others, ascended the river to the falls, and were well received by Powhatan, the great Indian chieftain, called “the emperor of the country,” whose residence, a village of twelve wigwams, was near the present city of Richmond, the capital of the present State of Virginia. Powhatan, “a tall, sour, and athletic man, about sixty years old,” was from the first disposed to favour the English. When his people murmured at the intrusion of the strangers, he replied, “they hurt you not; they take but a little waste land.” Powhatan evidently did not possess the prophetic gift of the wise Indians who, twenty years before, on the very same shores, foretold that “there were more of the English generation yet to come, to kill theirs and take their places!”
Newport set sail for England in June, carrying with him a favourable report; but scarcely was he gone, when a change came over the aspect of all things. Disease broke out among the settlers; their provisions were not abundant, the water was bad: the glorious country around them, in the beauty of which they had at first rejoiced, became an appalling wilderness; the rank luxuriance of the soil needed clearance before new harvests could be expected, but the colonists were unused to and disinclined for labour; discontent gave place to despair; distress of mind added to disease of body, and within a fortnight after the departure of the ships, it is related that scarcely ten men out of the whole number were able to stand; the fortifications could scarcely be completed, and no ground tilled. The fort by autumn was filled with the groans of the sick, whose outcries night and day for six weeks rent the hearts of those who could afford no relief. Frequently three or four died in a night. Fifty had perished before the close of the autumn, and among these the brave and excellent Bartholomew Gosnold, the projector of the enterprise, and one of the few whose influence had preserved some degree of concord in the council.
To add to the misery of the time, Wingfield, their president, a selfish, unprincipled man, was found to have appropriated the best stores to his own use, himself living luxuriously, whilst the others were starving. On his detection, he attempted to escape to the West Indies, in a bark which had been left for the use of the colonists, but was prevented and expelled from the council. A new president was appointed, but one wholly inadequate to the exigencies of the colony, and by a sort of law of necessity, rather than by general consent, the management of all fell into the hands of Smith, the only man whose wisdom and energy were sufficient to retrieve their desperate affairs.
Smith was possessed of a spirit of heroic daring. He had set out on brave adventures when a boy, and though not yet thirty, had been a champion in the service of humanity and Christianity. In his youth he had fought for the independence of the Batavian republic, in the wars of the Low Countries. He had travelled through France, had visited Egypt, and returned by Italy. Again, eager for action and glory, he had fought against the followers of Mahomet on the borders of Hungary, and during these combats had distinguished himself, both with the Christians and infidels, by his magnanimity and bravery. His extraordinary courage had attracted the notice and gained for him the favour of the unfortunate Sigismund Bathori, Prince of Transylvania. At length, being overcome in a sudden skirmish among the wild valleys of Wallachia, he was left on the field of battle severely wounded. Being now taken captive he was sold as a slave in Constantinople. But here his romantic fortune by no means deserted him. A Turkish lady had compassion on his youth and sufferings, and wishing to befriend him sent him to a fortress in the Crimea. The intentions of his protectress were, however, defeated for some time; he fell into the hands of a savage taskmaster, whom however he killed, and then seizing a horse, gallopped away to freedom on the confines of Russia. Here again, the kindness of woman aided him in his extreme need; and thence, travelling across the country to Transylvania, he bade farewell to his brothers in arms, resolving to return “to his own country.” On his way home, however, tidings of civil war in northern Africa drew his steps aside, and he had many a perilous adventure in the realms of Morocco.
Reaching England, he heard of the projected colonisation of North America, a scheme so entirely consonant with his nature, that he entered into it at once, with all the energy and enthusiasm of his character. And now here he was, as we have seen, in the autumn of 1607, the sole hope and support of the infant colony of Virginia, which, without his integrity and force of character, his cheerful temperament and sagacity, must have miserably perished.