A "Virginia Dare" Vineyard.
Another fact that should be enshrined in the hearts and perpetuated in the memorials of the nation, is that on Roanoak Island the first Christian baptism in the United States was administered. By order of Sir Walter Raleigh, Manteo, the friendly Indian chief, was baptized soon after the arrival of the colony under Governor White, and the following Sunday Virginia Dare, the granddaughter of Governor White, was baptized, both events being officially reported to Raleigh. In this day of religious freedom any enforced adoption of religious forms shocks our pious instincts. Yet baptism has always been considered necessary to salvation, and in the past the zeal of Christians for the salvation of their fellow-men often assumed the form of mild force. We read where the Spaniards, always religious fanatics, administered the Holy Sacrament to thousands in Central America and Mexico at the point of the sword; their zeal misleading them to force upon those less enlightened than themselves the hope of that heaven which they believed to be accessible only through certain Christian rites. So to order the baptism of an Indian chief seems a simple, kindly thing, and most probably Manteo desired it done. The only other Indian who received baptism in those early settlements was Pocahontas, in 1614. She was a captive at the time and held as a hostage to induce Powhatan to comply with certain demands of the colonists at Jamestown.
Despite the fact that Virginia Dare was baptized twenty-seven years earlier than Pocahontas, yet it is the Indian Princess who is figured in the painting on the walls of the dome of the Capitol at Washington as receiving the first baptism in the colonies. Buried in the annals of that time lies the fact that twenty-seven years before any colonist even came to Jamestown, Virginia Dare was born and baptized, as the sequence of Christian birth and as the child of Christian parents. Virginia Dare was not a myth. She was a living, breathing reality, a human creature of good English descent, the granddaughter of the governor of the colonies, the daughter of the assistant governor, and a sharer in the mysterious fate of Raleigh's Lost Colony. The historical facts of her life and the legend of her fate and death are contained in the pages of "The White Doe."
Her baptism would not have been mentioned in the records if it had not been official and proper. In a new land, surrounded by dangers and difficulties, with strange environment to divert the mind to other channels, it would have been easy and natural for her baptism to have been delayed if not altogether neglected amid the stress of events. Her prompt baptism and the official report of the event to Sir Walter Raleigh is convincing testimony to the presence of a chaplain at Roanoak.
THE FIRST BAPTISM IN THE WILDS OF AMERICA!
How naturally the scene rises before us. The young mother, her heart thrilling with the mysteries of love and life, and elated with the joy of motherhood, alert to the dangers of the new land, and suspicious of the strange people among whom her blue-eyed treasure must live, yet yielding cheerfully to the busy smiling English women who had crossed the ocean with her, and now with womanly intuition ministered to her needs. We can picture them making tidy the confused household, and stilling the cries of the infant as they prepare her to receive the sign of the cross. We can almost picture them deliberating over a choice from among their limited supply of vessels of one worthy to become the receptacle of the water to be used. It was on the Sabbath-Day, and the dedication to God of the wee creature who had so newly come among them was a fitting observance of the day. The solemn words of the ritual of the English Church, never before spoken in that primeval forest, must have awakened mysterious vibrations which linger yet and give to Roanoak Island that atmosphere of perpetual repose which envelops it. There must have come to those who witnessed the scene that holy Sabbath-Day, just as it comes now to those who view it from afar, a deep realization that the God of the English and the Great Spirit of the Indian are one and the same, then, now, and evermore. The One God to whom in baptism Virginia Dare was brought and in whose name Manteo the savage was signed with the cross and given the promise of salvation, and who remains the God of the millions of English-speaking people who now worship in the land which was then and there dedicated to the service of Christ.
The mist of oblivion fades before the light of Truth, and Virginia Dare will be a shining jewel in the Chaplet of Memories which some day Christian America will place upon the tomb of the Past.