But it was too small for a home. The Ark was left at anchor, while Leonard Calvert went exploring with the Dove. Up the Potomac some distance he went, but at the last he wisely determined to choose for their first town a site nearer the sea. The Dove turned and came back to the Ark, and both sailed on down the stream from St. Clement's Isle. Before long they came to the mouth of a tributary stream flowing in from the north. The Dove, going forth again, entered this river, which presently the party named the River St. George. Soon they came to a high bank with trees tinged with the foliage of advancing spring. Here upon this bank the English found an Indian village and a small Algonquin group, in the course of extinction by their formidable Iroquois neighbors, the giant Susquehannocks. The white men landed, bearing a store of hatchets, gewgaws, and colored cloth. The first Lord Baltimore, having had opportunity enough for observing savages, had probably handed on to his sagacious sons his conclusions as to ways of dealing with the natives of the forest. And the undeniable logic of events was at last teaching the English how to colonize. Englishmen on Roanoke Island, Englishmen on the banks of the James, Englishmen in that first New England colony, had borne the weight of early inexperience and all the catalogue of woes that follow ignorance. All these early colonists alike had been quickly entangled in strife with the people whom they found in the land.
First they fell on their knees,
And then on the Aborigines.
But by now much water had passed the mill. The thinking kind, the wiser sort, might perceive more things than one, and among these the fact that savages had a sense of justice and would even fight against injustice, real or fancied.
The Calverts, through their interpreter, conferred with the inhabitants of this Indian village. Would they sell lands where the white men might peaceably settle, under their given word to deal in friendly wise with the red men? Many hatchets and axes and much cloth would be given in return.
To a sylvan people store of hatchets and axes had a value beyond many fields of the boundless earth. The Dove appeared before them, too, at the psychological moment. They had just discussed removing, bag and baggage, from the proximity of the Iroquois. In the end, these Indians sold to the English their village huts, their cleared and planted fields, and miles of surrounding forest. Moreover they stayed long enough in friendship with the newcomers to teach them many things of value. Then they departed, leaving with the English a clear title to as much land as they could handle, at least for some time to come. Later, with other Indians, as with these, the Calverts pursued a conciliatory policy. They were aided by the fact that the Susquehannocks to the north, who might have given trouble, were involved in war with yet more northerly tribes, and could pay scant attention to the incoming white men. But even so, the Calverts proved, as William Penn proved later, that men may live at peace with men, honestly and honorably, even though hue of skin and plane of development differ.
Now the Ark joins the Dove in the River St. George. The pieces of ordnance are fired; the colonists disembark; and on the 27th of March, 1634, the Indian village, now English, becomes St. Mary's.
On the whole how advantageously are they placed! There is peace with the Indians. Huts, lodges, are already built, fields already cleared or planted. The site is high and healthful. They have at first few dissensions among themselves. Nor are they entirely alone or isolated in the New World. There is a New England to the north of them and a Virginia to the south. From the one they get in the autumn salted fish, from the other store of swine and cattle. Famine and pestilence are far from them. They build a "fort" and perhaps a stockade, but there are none of the stealthy deaths given by arrow and tomahawk in the north, nor are there any of the Spanish alarms that terrified the south. From the first they have with them women and children. They know that their settlement is "home." Soon other ships and colonists follow the Ark and the Dove to St. Mary's, and the history of this middle colony is well begun.
In Virginia, meantime, there was jealousy enough of the new colony, taking as it did territory held to be Virginian and renaming it, not for the old, independent, Protestant, virgin queen, but for a French, Catholic, queen consort—even settling it with believers in the Mass and bringing in Jesuits! It was, says a Jamestown settler, "accounted a crime almost as heinous as treason to favour, nay to speak well of that colony." Beside the Virginian folk as a whole, one man, in particular, William Claiborne, nursed an individual grievance. He had it from Governor Calvert that he might dwell on in Kent Island, trading from there, but only under license from the Lord Proprietor and as an inhabitant of Maryland, not of Virginia. Claiborne, with the Assembly at Jamestown secretly on his side, resisted this interference with his rights, and, as he continued to trade with a high hand, he soon fell under suspicion of stirring up the Indians against the Marylanders.
At the time, this quarrel rang loud through Maryland and Virginia, and even echoed across the Atlantic. Leonard Calvert had a trading-boat of Claiborne's seized in the Patuxent River. Thereupon Claiborne's men, with the shallop Cockatrice, in retaliation attacked Maryland pinnaces and lost both their lives and their boat. For several years Maryland and Kent Island continued intermittently to make petty war on each other. At last, in 1638, Calvert took the island by main force and hanged for piracy a captain of Claiborne's. The Maryland Assembly brought the trader under a Bill of Attainder; and a little later, in England, the Lords Commissioners of Foreign Plantations formally awarded Kent Island to the Lord Proprietor. Thus defeated, Claiborne, nursing his wrath, moved down the bay to Virginia.