—Marlowe, in The Jew of Malta.
“The 8th we weighed anchor at Plymouth, and departed thence for Virginia.”
With this terse statement of fact an old-time traveller is content to record the beginning of a memorable voyage.
It was on the 8th of May, 1587, that two ships—one known as the Admiral, of a hundred and twenty tons, the other a fly-boat—set sail westward from the coast of England. There was also a pinnace of small burden carried on board the larger vessel, and ready to be manned for the navigation of shallow waters; but this, like a child in arms, was a thing of promise rather than present ability.
The aim of the voyage is briefly outlined: to establish an English colony in Virginia, where previous attempts at settlement had resulted in desertion and no success; to find fifteen men who had been left the year before to hold the territory for England; to plant crops; to produce and manufacture commodities for export; to extend commerce and dominions; to demand the lion’s share between possessions of France and Spain—the great central portion of a continent; and thus in all ways first and last to uphold the supremacy and majesty of England and the queen.
The ships had been provisioned at Portsmouth and Cowes, where many of the colonists embarked, including among the notable ones two Indians, Manteo and Towaye by name, who, several years before, had been brought to England from Roanoke by Arthur Barlow. At Portsmouth, among others, three soldiers came aboard, booted and spurred as though from a recent journey in the saddle; the one slim, tall, and bronzed by the sun; another no shorter, but broad and heavy in proportion; the third laughable in aspect, being fat, as if, like a stage buffoon, he had stuffed a pillow in his doublet, and leading, much to the astonishment of the passengers, a bear-cub that copied his own waddling gait, and followed on a chain of bondage with remarkable fidelity.
In the evening one of these soldiers stood alone on the Admiral’s high stern, a motionless figure, clean-cut against the sky. His eyes, blue like the deep sea, looked back toward the receding coastline, fixed on the dissolving land with a resigned fatality and regret.
With the sun, westward, the two ships went down slowly over the horizon, leaving England a memory behind—a memory, yet very real, while the haven, far ahead, somewhere beneath the crimson sky, seemed but a dream that could not shape itself—a dream, a picture, bright, alluring, undetailed, like the golden painting of the sun. Tall and erect as a naked fir-tree the man stood on the top deck in the stern—still stood when night came and there was not even a melting horizon to hold his gaze—still stood as though to turn would be to wake forever from a vision beside which all things actual must seem unreal. But at last he turned resolutely and, drawing his cloak about him, glanced off toward the darkening west; then, with a word to one and another as he passed his fellow-voyagers, he sought the ship’s master to discuss plans for the maintenance and general welfare of the colony.
As he was about to enter the main cabin a soldier accosted him. “The die is cast, captain.”