Since destiny doth call me from thy shore.”
—Marlowe, in Dido, Queen of Carthage.
At Croatan the springs ran freely, and the soil, being naturally irrigated, bore sufficient crops for all. This the English sowers learned gladly, after inspecting the work of their uncivilized brethren with admiration for the bountiful result, if not for the crude and irksome methods of cultivation. Here men, women, and children were alike tillers of the soil, and although, with needless exertion, sticks were used instead of ploughs and holes dug instead of furrows, the wide fields beyond the town’s encircling strip of woodland showed an abundance of maize, or guinea wheat; beans, pease, and tobacco. About a third of the forest was composed of walnut-trees, from which the nuts were plucked by the natives, to be used as seasoning in spoon-meat. Chestnuts, which strewed the ground, were also gathered and made into a kind of bread.
The recent rains appeared to have reawakened nature; for not only had all the crops of fruit and vegetables been revivified, but animal life as well. Wild geese and turkeys, immense flocks of waterfowl and penguins, swans, crows, and magpies, being affrighted now and then by some unaccustomed sound, as a trumpet-call or accidental musket-shot, would rise with a concerted flutter and whir like a great wind above the forest. At these moments the varied clamor of their cries would fill the air with an alarum so loud as to seem almost human in tone and power.
Beasts of the field, great and small, were also near neighbors of the tribesmen. Black bear, deer, rabbits, opossums, wild hog, and foxes abounded on every side. Thus all manner of palatable meat was to be had for a single day’s hunting.
In life and custom the English soon became half Indian, the Indians half English.
Yet, with all the outward sign of harmony, and despite the genuine friendliness, a hope, deep down in the English hearts, strove to believe that this condition was in no way final. The barrier of race was too strong so soon to be removed. The Indians were on their own soil, surrounded by their intimate kinsmen, and living much as they had always lived; but the English were in exile. Thoughts of England haunting them at moments brought restless longings. That which had been born and bred in the bone must die with it. As the grave is the only portal to a life divine, so Death is the sole power by which a new country is forced to yield itself in full before the influx of aliens. The earthly land of promise is for sons, not fathers. With the first generation it is a trust, and only with the second a possession.
Many of the colonists, despite their new-found comfort and prosperity, were yet unsatisfied. Their hearts yearned for England. Gradually they went from bad to worse. Their turbulence, vice, and incontinence ran riot as never before. Only a few labored steadily for the common good. On these the others lived as parasites. Yet the minority averted the colony’s dissolution. Eleanor Dare, for one, by a daily example of fortitude, a never-failing sympathy, a detailed attention to the little ills and troubles of her fellows, served, through her influence upon the women, to maintain the industry of the men. While, however, it was she who thus gradually turned sorrowful resignation to contentment, it was Vytal who, by personal and continual contact with the planters, dominated their wills and held them fast to duty.
The control of these two superior spirits, one feminine, the other masculine, and each the other’s need, formed an almost perfect diarchy, by which the colonists of Virginia were governed for many years.
The influence of a third dominant spirit is more difficult to define, being that of Christopher Marlowe, whose temperament, ever varying and mystical, was understood by few.