A new era now began for Virginia: peace was made with the Indians, and cemented by the marriage of the far-famed Pocahontas with an Englishman named John Rolfe, who in 1616 visited England with his bride. The story goes that Pocahontas, whose heart had long ago been given to John Smith, was only induced to marry Rolfe after being carried off from her home by force by a Captain Argall; and that, on her presentation at the court of King James, she caught sight of her old hero among the crowd, covered her face with her hands, and burst into tears. However that may be, it seems certain that Pocahontas was converted to Christianity, and baptized under the name of Rebecca, before she left Virginia. She remained in England for a year, and died—after giving birth to a son, from whom some of the best families in Virginia claim descent—just as she was about to embark on her return to her native country.
After the arrival of Lord De la Warre in Virginia, in 1610, the colony enjoyed a long period of prosperity. The mouth of the river, named after its first governor, was discovered by the Captain Argall already mentioned, in one of many exploring expeditions up the coast; while inland, the huts of the colonists gradually replaced the wigwams of the natives on the Potomac, the Ohio, the Shenandoah, the Rappahannock, etc. In 1619 took place two events, pregnant in results, not only to Virginia, but to the whole of the future Republic of America—the first cargo of slaves was landed at Jamestown, and the first Legislative Assembly met in the same town. In 1622, the growth of the colony was suddenly checked by a terrible disaster, in the shape of a general massacre of the whites at the instigation of the chief Opechancanough, who had then succeeded his brother Powhatan as the leader of the dusky tribes whose homes had been appropriated by the English intruders.
No suspicion of the awful fate awaiting them appears to have dawned upon the unlucky colonists, who, scattered up and down in their farms, were engaged in their usual peaceful avocations, when, on the morning of the 22d March, 1622, the house of every white man was visited by a few armed savages, who, having put to death with horrible tortures all its inmates, sparing neither age nor sex, passed on to aid their brethren in the same terrible work elsewhere. One alone of the many Indians who had been apparently converted to Christianity was true to his adopted creed, and, instead of murdering, warned his master in time for him to make his own escape, and carry the tidings of the approach of the red men to Jamestown.
In a little open boat the two sped down the river, arriving at the capital of the colony in time to avert much bloodshed. Messages were sent to the outlying settlements; and the Indians, finding themselves outwitted, would have retired to their woods, had not the whites cut off their retreat, and in their turn slain without mercy all who fell into their hands. Throughout the length and breadth of the land desolation now replaced the former plenty, and it soon became evident to the natives that in their wild rising they had sounded their own death-knell. Taught by experience not to trust in the promises of the Indians, the Virginians now gathered more closely together, building large towns, in which the first owners of the soil were only admitted as servants, until at last the fact that they had ever been any thing else passed from the memory of their oppressors.
In 1629, Jamestown was visited, from his little colony of Ferryland, in Newfoundland, by Lord Baltimore, a distinguished Catholic nobleman, who was so charmed with the scenery round Chesapeake Bay, that he asked for and obtained an extensive grant of land on its shores from King Charles I. of England. He died before he could himself take possession of his new territories, but his patent was renewed in 1632 to his son Cecilius, who endeavored to established himself on the south of James River. So bitter, however, was the opposition he met with from the English already in possession of Virginia, that he persuaded King Charles to give him the land on the north instead of the south of the original colony. Here, in that “irregular triangle” formed by the fortieth degree of latitude, the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay, the second Lord Baltimore planted a little colony of English Roman Catholics, naming their new home Maryland, in honor of Queen Henrietta Maria.
The new emigrants, numbering some three hundred in all, landed on one of the islands at the mouth of the Potomac, now reduced to a mere strip of sand, on the 25th March, 1634, and, after celebrating mass on the beach, planted a cross on the loftiest point within reach, round which a second solemn service was held. From the island, excursions were then made up the river by Leonard Calvert—brother to Lord Baltimore, and first governor of the colony—and a few picked men, with a view to selecting the best spot for a first settlement, resulting in the selection of an Indian village which Calvert succeeded in purchasing from the Indians, with whom also he made an offensive and defensive treaty. To the village thus chosen the name of St. Mary’s was given, and to the neck of land in which it was situated that of St. Mary’s Point. With truly marvelous rapidity a town of comfortable houses gathered about the native wigwams, and the colony seemed likely shortly to rival in prosperity that of its older neighbor, Virginia, when that neighbor, which had from the first viewed its very existence with jealousy, picked a quarrel with its governor, which finally developed into a bitter war, extending over many years.
As will readily be imagined, this unhappy state of things was terribly detrimental to the progress of an infant community; but in 1635, peace was so far restored that we find Lord Baltimore making extensive grants of land to new settlers, and in 1637 reference is made in historical documents to the “hundreds” into which the country of St. Mary’s had been divided. The loss of the MS. records of Maryland, to which early writers of the colony refer the reader for full details of its growth, renders it impossible to trace the gradual exploration of the country contained within its present boundaries; but enough has, we trust, been said to account for the presence of the Roman Catholic element in the Southern States of America, and to fit the story of Maryland into that mere outline of the early history of the colonies which is all that the nature of our subject requires. For many touching anecdotes of the ways of the Indians we are indebted to the Jesuit Father White, who, after long ministering to the spiritual necessities of his fellow-countrymen in St. Mary’s, wandered about in the wild and beautiful districts on the northern banks of the Potomac, striving to instruct the savages in the mysteries of the Roman Catholic religion. But whatever the discoveries made by him in the various phases of human nature with which he came in contact, he added nothing to our geographical knowledge, and we must, leaving his work and that of many another noble missionary to be recorded elsewhere, turn from the two youngest of the Southern States to tell the romantic story of the planting of sister communities along the rocky shores so long known under the general name of New England.
CHAPTER V.
EARLY SETTLEMENTS IN NEW ENGLAND, NEW NETHERLAND, AND NEW SWEDEN.