[278] The editor of the tract, “J. H.,” in his preface, says: “Some of the books were printed under the name of Thomas Watson, by whose occasion I know not, unlesse it were the ouer-rashnesse or mistakinge of the workmen.”
The words “by a gentleman” got also through ignorance of the real authorship into the titles of some copies as author, there being four varieties of titles. It is sometimes quoted (by Purchas for instance) by the running head-line Newes from Virginia. Mr. Deane edited an edition of it at Boston in 1866. There are eight copies of it known to be in America: one each belonging to Harvard College, S. L. M. Barlow, and the Carter-Brown Library; two in the New York Historical Society, and three in the Lenox Library. (Magazine of American History, i. 251.) The text is the same in all cases, and those copies in which Smith’s name is given have an explanatory preface acknowledging the mistake. Mr. Payne Collier, in his Rarest Books in the English Language, 1865, is of the opinion that Watson was the true author, which Mr. Deane shows to be an error. An earlier, very inaccurate reprint was made in the Southern Literary Messenger, February, 1845, from the New York Historical Society’s copy. Use is also made of it in Pinkerton’s Voyages, vol. xiii. [Mr. Deane suggests that the reason Smith omitted this tract in his Generall Historie, substituting for it the Map of Virginia, is to be found in the greater ease with which the narratives of others in the latter tracts would take on the story of Pocahontas, which his own words in the True Relation might forbid.
Tyler, History of American Literature, i. 26, calls this tract of Smith’s the earliest contribution to American literature. The latest copy sold which we have noted was in the Ouvry Sale, London, March, 1882, no. 1,535 of its Catalogue, which brought £57.—Ed.]
[279] A portrait of “Captaine George Percy,” copied in 1853 by Herbert L. Smith from the original at Syon House, the seat of the Duke of Northumberland, at the instance of Conway Robinson, Esq., then visiting England, is among the valuable collection of portraits of the Virginia Historical Society at Richmond. Its frame, of carved British oak, was a present to the Society from William Twopenny, Esq., of London, the solicitor of the Duke of Northumberland. Percy (born Sept. 4, 1586, died unmarried in March, 1632) was “a gentleman of honor and resolution.” He had served with distinction in the wars of the Low Countries, and his soldierly qualities were evidenced in the colony, as well as his administrative ability as the successor of John Smith. A mutilated hand represented in the portrait, it is said, was a memorial of a sanguinary encounter with the savages of Virginia. The head from this portrait is given on an earlier page.
[280] The author of the “Relatyon,” etc., was identified by the late Hon. William Green, LL.D., of Richmond, as Captain Gabriel Archer. [Newport’s connection with the colony is particularly sketched in Neill’s Virginia and Virginiola, 1878. Neill describes the MS. which is in the Record office as “a fair and accurate description of the first Virginia explorations.” Mr. Hale later made some additions to his original notes (Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., Oct. 21, 1864), where some supplemental notes by Mr. Deane will also be found as to the origin of the name Newport-News as connected with Captain Newport. See H. B. Grigsby in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc. x. 23; also Hist. Mag. iii. 347.—Ed.]
[281] Preface to Deane’s True Relation, p. xxxiii. [Wingfield’s Discourse was first brought to the attention of students in 1845 by the citations from the original MS. at Lambeth made by Mr. Anderson in his History of the Church of England in the Colonies.—Ed.]
[282] [The MS. was bought at Dawson Turner’s Sale in 1859 by Lilly, the bookseller, who announced that he would print an edition of fifty copies. (Deane’s ed. True Relation, p. xxxv; Hist. Mag., July, 1861, p. 224; Aspinwall Papers, i. 21, note.) It was only partly put in type, and the MS. remained in the printer’s hands ten years, when Mr. Henry Stevens bought it for Mr. Hunnewell, who caused a small edition (two hundred copies) to be printed privately at the Chiswick Press.—Ed.]
[283] Brinley Catalogue, no. 3,800.
[284] This was reprinted in Force’s Tracts, i., and by Sabin, edited by F. L. Hawks, New York, 1867.
[285] Sabin, vii. 323; Rich (1832), £1 8s.; Ouvry Sale, 1882, no. 1,582, a copy with the autograph, “W. Ralegh, Turr, Lond.”