Alexander Whitaker’s Good Newes from Virginia was printed in 1613. He was minister of Henrico Parish, and had been in the country two years. The preface is by W. Crawshawe, the divine.[294] Ralph Hamor the younger, “late secretary of that colony,” printed in London in 1615 his True Discourse of the present state of Virginia, bringing the story down to June 18, 1614. It contains an account of the christening of Pocahontas and her marriage to Rolfe. It was reprinted in 1860 at Albany (200 copies) for Charles Gorham Barney, of Richmond.[295] Rolfe’s Relation of Virginia, a MS. now in the British Museum, was abbreviated in the 1617 edition of Purchas’s Pilgrimage, and printed at length in the Southern Literary Messenger, 1839, and in the Virginia Historical Register, i. 102. (See also Neill’s Virginia Company, ch. vi.) There are various other early printed tracts, besides those already mentioned, reprinted by Force, which are necessary to a careful study of Virginian history.[296]
Fortunately a copy of the records of the Company[297] from April 28, 1619, to June 7, 1624, is preserved. This copy was made from the originals, which are not now known to exist, at a time when the King gave sign of annulling their charter. Nicholas Ferrar (see the Memoir of Nicholas Ferrar by Peter Peckard, London, 1790, a volume throwing much light on early Virginian history, and compare Palfrey’s New England, i. 192), with the aid of Collingwood the secretary, seems to have procured the transcription at the house of Sir John Danvers, in Chelsea, an old mansion associated with Sir Thomas More’s memory. Collingwood compared each folio, signed it,—the work being completed only three days before judgment was pronounced against the Company,—and gave the whole into the hands of the Earl of Southampton for safe keeping, from whom the records passed to his son Thomas, Lord High Treasurer, after whose death, in 1667, William Byrd, of Virginia, bought them for sixty guineas, and it was from the Byrd family, at Westover, that Stith obtained them, to make use of in his History. By some means Stith’s brother-in-law, Peyton Randolph, got them, and at his death in 1775 his library was sold, when Jefferson bought it, and found these records among the books. Jefferson’s library afterwards becoming the property of the United States, these records in two volumes (pp. 354 and 387 respectively) passed into the Library of Congress, where they now are.
In May, 1868, Mr. Neill, who had used these records while working on his Terra Mariæ, memorialized Congress, explaining their value, and offering, without compensation, to edit the MS., under the direction of the Librarian of Congress.[298] The question of their publication had already been raised by Mr. J. Wingate Thornton ten years earlier, in a paper in the Historical Magazine, February, 1858, p. 33, and in a pamphlet, The First Records of Anglo-American Colonization, Boston, 1859. In these the history of their transmission varies a little from the one given above, which follows Neill’s statements.[299] Being thwarted in his original purpose, Mr. Neill made the records the basis of a History of the Virginia Company of London, Albany, 1869, which, somewhat changed, appeared in an English edition as English Colonization in America in the Seventeenth Century.[300] Of considerable importance among the papers transmitted to our time is the collection which had in large part belonged to Chalmers, and been used by him in his Political Annals; when passing to Colonel William Aspinwall,[301] they were by him printed in the Mass. Hist. Coll. 4th series, vols. ix. and x., with numerous notes, particularly concerning the earlier ones, beginning in 1617, in which the careers of Gates, Pory,[302] and Argall are followed.
Mr. Deane, True Relation, p. 14, quotes as in Mr. Bancroft’s hands a copy from a paper in the English State-Paper Office entitled “A Briefe Declaration of the Plantation of Virginia during the first twelve years when Sr Thomas Smyth was Governer of the Companie [1606-1619], and downe to the present tyme [1624], by the Ancient Planters now remaining alive in Virginia.” Mr. Noël Sainsbury, in his Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, London, 1860, etc., has opened new stores of early Virginian as well as of general Anglo-American history, between 1574 and 1660. The work of the Public Record Office has been well supplemented by the Reports of the Historical Commission, which has examined the stores of historical documents contained in private depositaries in Great Britain. Their third Report of 1872 and the appendix of their eighth Report are particularly rich in Virginian early history, covering documents belonging to the Duke of Manchester. The Index to the Catalogue of MSS. in the British Museum discloses others.
In 1860 the State of Virginia sent Colonel Angus W. McDonald to London to search for papers and maps elucidating the question of the Virginia bounds with Maryland, Tennessee, and North Carolina, which resulted in the accumulation of much documentary material, and a report to the Governor in March, 1861, Document 39 (1861), which was printed. See Hist. Mag. ix. 13.
Matter of historical interest will be found in other of the documents of this boundary contest: Document 40, Jan. 9, 1860; Senate Document, Report of Commissioners, Jan. 17, 1872, with eleven maps, including Smith’s; Final Report, 1874; Senate Document No. 21, being reprints in 1874 of Reports of Jan. 9, 1860, and March 9, 1861; House Document No. 6, Communication of the Governor, Jan. 9, 1877. There were also publications by the State of Maryland relating to the contest.[303]
In 1874 there was published, as a State Senate Document, Colonial Records of Virginia, quarto, which contains the proceedings of the first Assembly, convened in 1619 at Jamestown,[304] with other early papers, and an Introduction and Notes by the late Hon. Thomas H. Wynne. Attention was first called in America to these proceedings by Conway Robinson, Esq. (who had inspected the original manuscript in the State-Paper Office, London), in a Report made as chairman of its Executive Committee, at an annual meeting of the Virginia Historical Society, held at Richmond, Dec. 15, 1853, and published in the Virginia Historical Reporter, i. 7. They were first published in the Collections of the New York Historical Society, 1857, with an Introduction by George Bancroft.[305]
Abstracts from the English State-Paper Office have been furnished the State Library of Virginia by W. Noël Sainsbury, to Dec. 30, 1730.
There are various papers on the personnel of the colony in the lists of passengers for Virginia of 1635, which Mr. H. G. Somerby printed in the N. E. Hist. and Geneal. Reg. ii. 111, 211, 268; iii. 184, 388; iv. 61, 189, 261; v. 61, 343; and xv. 142; and in the collection of such documents, mostly before published, which are conveniently grouped in Hotten’s Original Lists (1600-1700), London, 1874 and 1881; and in S. G. Drake’s Researches among the British Archives, 1860.