Writings of John Fiske

A HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES FOR SCHOOLS. With Topical Analysis, Suggestive Questions and Directions for Teachers, by Frank A. Hill.

CIVIL GOVERNMENT IN THE UNITED STATES. Considered with some Reference to its Origins. With Questions on the Text by Frank A. Hill, and Bibliographical Notes.

THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE. In Riverside Literature Series, No. 62.

THE DISCOVERY AND SPANISH CONQUEST OF AMERICA. With Maps.

OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS.

THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW ENGLAND or, The Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty.

The Same. Illustrated Edition. Containing Portraits, Maps, Facsimiles, Contemporary Views, Prints, and Other Historic Materials.

THE DUTCH AND QUAKER COLONIES. 2 vols. crown 8vo.

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. 2 vols.

The Same. Illustrated Edition. Containing Portraits, Maps, Facsimiles, Contemporary Views, Prints, and Other Historic Materials. 2 vols.

THE CRITICAL PERIOD OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 1783-1789.

The Same. Illustrated Edition. Containing Portraits, Maps, Facsimiles, Contemporary Views, Prints, and Other Historic Materials.

THE DESTINY OF MAN, viewed in the Light of His Origin.

THE IDEA OF GOD, as affected by Modern Knowledge. A Sequel to "The Destiny of Man."

THROUGH NATURE TO GOD.

MYTHS AND MYTH-MAKERS. Old Tales and Superstitions interpreted by Comparative Mythology.

OUTLINES OF COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. Based on the Doctrine of Evolution, with Criticisms on the Positive Philosophy.

THE UNSEEN WORLD, and other Essays.

EXCURSIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST.

DARWINISM, and Other Essays.

AMERICAN POLITICAL IDEAS.

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

Boston, New York, and Chicago

MAP OF TIDEWATER VIRGINIA

OLD VIRGINIA
AND HER NEIGHBOURS

BY
JOHN FISKE

Οὐ λίθοι, οὐδὲ ξύλα, οὐδὲ
Τέχνη τεκτόνων αἱ πόλεις εἶσιν
Ἀλλ' ὅπού ποτ' ἂν ὦσιν ἌΝΔΡΕΣ
Αὑτοὺς σώζειν εἰδότες,
Ἐνταῦθα τείχη καὶ πόλεις.
Alcæus

IN TWO VOLUMES
VOLUME I
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge

COPYRIGHT 1897 BY JOHN FISKE
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

To
MY OLD FRIEND AND COMRADE

JOHN KNOWLES PAINE

COMPOSER OF ST. PETER, OEDIPUS TYRANNUS, THE "SPRING"
AND C MINOR SYMPHONIES, AND OTHER NOBLE WORKS

I dedicate this book

"Long days be his, and each as lusty-sweet
As gracious natures find his song to be;
May age steal on with softly-cadenced feet
Falling in music, as for him were meet
Whose choicest note is harsher-toned than he!"

PREFACE.

In the series of books on American history, upon which I have for many years been engaged, the present volumes come between "The Discovery of America" and "The Beginnings of New England." The opening chapter, with its brief sketch of the work done by Elizabeth's great sailors, takes up the narrative where the concluding chapter of "The Discovery of America" dropped it. Then the story of Virginia, starting with Sir Walter Raleigh and Rev. Richard Hakluyt, is pursued until the year 1753, when the youthful George Washington sets forth upon his expedition to warn the approaching Frenchmen from any further encroachment upon English soil. That moment marks the arrival of a new era, when a book like the present—which is not a local history nor a bundle of local histories—can no longer follow the career of Virginia, nor of the southern colonies, except as part and parcel of the career of the American people. That "continental state of things," which was distinctly heralded when the war of the Spanish Succession broke out during Nicholson's rule in Virginia, had arrived in 1753. To treat it properly requires preliminary consideration of many points in the history of the northern colonies, and it is accordingly reserved for a future work.

It will be observed that I do not call the present work a "History of the Southern Colonies." Its contents would not justify such a title, inasmuch as its scope and purpose are different from what such a title would imply. My aim is to follow the main stream of causation from the time of Raleigh to the time of Dinwiddie, from its sources down to its absorption into a mightier stream. At first our attention is fixed upon Raleigh's Virginia, which extends from Florida to Canada, England thrusting herself in between Spain and France. With the charter of 1609 (see below, vol. i. p. 145) Virginia is practically severed from North Virginia, which presently takes on the names of New England and New Netherland, and receives colonies of Puritans and Dutchmen, with which this book is not concerned.

From the territory of Virginia thus cut down, further slices are carved from time to time; first Maryland in 1632, then Carolina in 1663, then Georgia in 1732, almost at the end of our narrative. Colonies thus arise which present a few or many different social aspects from those of Old Virginia; and while our attention is still centred upon the original commonwealth as both historically most important and in personal detail most interesting, at the same time the younger commonwealths claim a share in the story. A comparative survey of the social features in which North Carolina, South Carolina, and Maryland differed from one another, and from Virginia, is a great help to the right understanding of all four commonwealths. To Maryland I find that I have given 107 pages, while the Carolinas, whose history begins practically a half century later, receive 67 pages; a mere mention of the beginnings of Georgia is all that suits the perspective of the present story. The further development of these southern communities will, it is hoped, receive attention in a later work.

As to the colonies founded in what was once known as North Virginia, I have sketched a portion of the story in "The Beginnings of New England," ending with the accession of William and Mary. The remainder of it will form the subject of my next work, already in preparation, entitled "The Dutch and Quaker Colonies in America;" which will comprise a sketch of the early history of New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, with a discussion of the contributions to American life which may be traced to the Dutch, German, Protestant French, and Scotch-Irish migrations previous to the War of Independence.

To complete the picture of the early times and to "make connections" with "The American Revolution," still another work will be needed, which shall resume the story of New England at the accession of William and Mary. With that story the romantic fortunes of New France are inseparably implicated, and in the course of its development one colony after another is brought in until from the country of the Wabenaki to that of the Cherokees the whole of English America is involved in the mightiest and most fateful military struggle which the eighteenth century witnessed. The end of that conflict finds thirteen colonies nearly ripe for independence and union.

The present work was begun in 1882, and its topics have been treated in several courses of lectures at the Washington University in St. Louis, and elsewhere. In 1895 I gave a course of twelve such lectures, especially prepared for the occasion, at the Lowell Institute in Boston. But the book cannot properly be said to be "based upon" lectures; the book was primary and the lectures secondary.

The amount of time spent in giving lectures and in writing a schoolbook of American history has greatly delayed the appearance of this book. It is more than five years since "The Discovery of America" was published; I hope that "The Dutch and Quaker Colonies" will appear after a much shorter interval.

Cambridge, October 10, 1897.

CONTENTS.

VOLUME I.

CHAPTER I.

THE SEA KINGS.

CHAPTER II

A DISCOURSE OF WESTERN PLANTING

CHAPTER III

THE LAND OF THE POWHATANS

CHAPTER IV.

THE STARVING TIME.

CHAPTER V.

BEGINNINGS OF A COMMONWEALTH.

CHAPTER VI.

A SEMINARY OF SEDITION.

CHAPTER VII.

THE KINGDOM OF VIRGINIA.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE MARYLAND PALATINATE.

CHAPTER IX.

LEAH AND RACHEL.

MAPS.

CHAPTER I.

THE SEA KINGS.

Tercentenary of the Discovery of America, 1792.

When one thinks of the resounding chorus of gratulations with which the four hundredth anniversary of the Discovery of America was lately heralded to a listening world, it is curious and instructive to notice the sort of comment which that great event called forth upon the occasion of its third centenary, while the independence of the United States was as yet a novel and ill-appreciated fact. In America very little fuss was made. Railroads were as yet unknown, and the era of world's fairs had not begun. Of local celebrations there were two; one held in New York, the other in Boston; and as in 1892, so in 1792, New York followed the Old Style date, the twelfth of October, while Boston undertook to correct the date for New Style. This work was discreditably bungled, however, and the twenty-third of October was selected instead of the true date, the twenty-first. In New York the affair was conducted by the newly founded political society named for the Delaware chieftain Tammany, in Boston by the Massachusetts Historical Society, whose founder, Dr. Jeremy Belknap, delivered a thoughtful and scholarly address upon the occasion. Both commemorations of the day were very quiet and modest.[1]

Abbé Raynal.

In Europe little heed was paid to America and its discovery, except in France, which, after taking part in our Revolutionary War, was at length embarking upon its own Revolution, so different in its character and fortunes. Without knowing much about America, the Frenchmen of that day were fond of using it to point a moral and adorn a tale. In 1770 the famous Abbé Raynal had published his "Philosophical and Political History of the Establishments and Commerce of the Europeans in the Two Indies," a book in ten volumes, which for a time enjoyed immense popularity. Probably not less than one third of it was written by Diderot, and more than a dozen other writers contributed to its pages, while the abbé, in editing these various chapters and adding more from his own hand, showed himself blissfully ignorant of the need for any such thing as critical judgment in writing history. In an indescribably airy and superficial manner the narrative flits over the whole vast field of the intercourse of Europeans with the outlying parts of the earth discovered since the days of Columbus and Gama; and at length, in the last chapter of the last volume, we are confronted with the question, What is all this worth? Our author answers confidently, Nothing! worse than nothing! the world would have been much better off if America had never been discovered and the ocean route to Asia had remained unknown!

Was the discovery of America a blessing or a curse to mankind?

Abbé Genty.

Quinine.

This opinion seems to have been a favourite hobby with the worthy Raynal; for in 1787, in view of the approaching tercentenary, we find him proposing to the Academy of Lyons the offer of a prize of fifty louis for the best essay upon the question whether the discovery of America had been a blessing or a curse to mankind. It was furthermore suggested that the essay should discuss the most practicable methods of increasing the benefits and diminishing the ills that had flowed and continued to flow from that memorable event. The announcement of the question aroused considerable interest, and a few essays were written, but the prize seems never to have been awarded. One of these essays was by the Marquis de Chastellux, who had served in America as major-general in the army of Count Rochambeau. The accomplished author maintains, chiefly on economic grounds, that the discovery has been beneficial to mankind; in one place, mindful of the triumph of the American cause in the grand march upon Yorktown wherein he had himself taken part, he exclaims, "O land of Washington and Franklin, of Hancock and Adams, who could ever wish thee non-existent for them and for us?" To this Baron Grimm[2] replied, "Perhaps he will wish it who reflects that the independence of the United States has cost France nearly two thousand million francs, and is hastening in Europe a revolutionary outbreak which had better be postponed or averted." To most of these philosophers no doubt Chastellux seemed far too much of an optimist, and the writer who best expressed their sentiments was the Abbé Genty, who published at Orleans, in 1787, an elaborate essay, in two tiny volumes, entitled "The Influence of the Discovery of America upon the Happiness of the Human Race." Genty has no difficulty in reaching the conclusion that the influence has been chiefly for the bad. Think what a slaughter there had been of innocent and high-minded red men by brutal and ruthless whites! for the real horrors described by Las Casas were viewed a century ago in the light of Rousseau's droll notions as to the exalted virtues of the noble savage. Think, too, how most of the great European wars since the Peace of Westphalia had grown out of quarrels about colonial empire! Clearly Columbus had come with a sword, not with an olive branch, and had but opened a new chapter in the long Iliad of human woe. Against such undeniable evils, what benefits could be alleged except the extension of commerce, and that, says Genty, means merely the multiplication of human wants, which is not in itself a thing to be desired.[3] One unqualified benefit, however, Genty and all the other writers freely admit; the introduction of quinine into Europe and its use in averting fevers. That item of therapeutics is the one cheery note in the mournful chorus of disparagement, so long as our attention is confined to the past. In the future, perhaps, better things might be hoped for. Along the Atlantic coast of North America a narrow fringe of English-speaking colonies had lately established their political independence and succeeded in setting on foot a federal government under the presidency of George Washington. The success of this enterprise might put a new face upon things and ultimately show that after all the discovery of the New World was a blessing to mankind.[4] So says the Abbé Genty in his curious little book, which even to-day is well worth reading.

Spanish and English America.

If now, after the lapse of another century, we pause to ask the question why the world was so much more interested in the Western hemisphere in 1892 than in 1792, we may fairly say that it is because of the constructive work, political and social, that has been done here in the interval by men who speak English. Surely, if there were nothing to show but the sort of work in colonization and nation-making that characterized Spanish America under its Old Régime, there would be small reason for celebrating the completion of another century of such performance. During the present century, indeed, various parts of Spanish America have begun to take on a fresh political and social life, so that in the future much may be hoped for them. But the ideas and methods which have guided this revival have been largely the ideas and methods of English-speaking people, however imperfectly conceived and reproduced. The whole story of this western hemisphere since Genty wrote gives added point to his opinion that its value to mankind would be determined chiefly by what the people of the United States were likely to do.

Precious metals.

The smile with which one regards the world-historic importance accorded to the discovery of quinine is an index of the feeling that there are broad ways and narrow ways of dealing with such questions. To one looking through a glass of small calibre a great historical problem may resolve itself into a question of food and drugs. Your anti-tobacco fanatic might contend that civilized men would have been much better off had they never become acquainted with the Indian weed. An economist might more reasonably point to potatoes and maize—to say nothing of many other products peculiar to the New World—as an acquisition of which the value can hardly be overestimated. To reckon the importance of a new piece of territory from a survey of its material productions is of course the first and most natural method. The Spanish conquerors valued America for its supply of precious metals and set little store by other things in comparison. But for the discovery of gold mines in 1496 the Spanish colony founded by Columbus in Hispaniola would probably have been abandoned. That was but the first step in the finding of gold and silver in enormous quantities, and thenceforth for a long time the Spanish crown regarded its transatlantic territories as an inexhaustible mine of wealth. But the value of money to mankind depends upon the uses to which it is put; and here it is worth our while to notice the chief use to which Spain applied her American treasure during the sixteenth century.

Aims of Columbus.

The relief of the church from threatening dangers was in those days the noblest and most sacred function of wealth. When Columbus aimed his prow westward from the Canaries, in quest of the treasures of Asia, its precious stones, its silk-stuffs, its rich shawls and rugs, its corals and dye-woods, its aromatic spices, he expected to acquire vast wealth for the sovereigns who employed him and no mean fortune for himself. In all negotiations he insisted upon a good round percentage, and could no more be induced to budge from his price than the old Roman Sibyl with her books. Of petty self-seeking and avarice there was probably no more in this than in commercial transactions generally. The wealth thus sought by Columbus was not so much an end as a means. His spirit was that of a Crusader, and his aim was not to discover a New World (an idea which seems never once to have entered his head), but to acquire the means for driving the Turk from Europe and setting free the Holy Sepulchre. Had he been told upon his melancholy death-bed that instead of finding a quick route to Cathay he had only discovered a New World, it would probably have added fresh bitterness to death.

Spain and the Protestant revolt.

But if this lofty and ill-understood enthusiast failed in his search for the treasures of Cathay, it was at all events not long before Cortes and Pizarro succeeded in finding the treasures of Mexico and Peru, and the crusading scheme of Columbus descended as a kind of legacy to the successors of Ferdinand and Isabella, the magnanimous but sometimes misguided Charles, the sombre and terrible Philip. It remained a crusading scheme, but, no longer patterned after that of Godfrey and Tancred, it imitated the mad folly which had once extinguished in southern Gaul the most promising civilization of its age. Instead of a Spanish crusade which might have expelled the most worthless and dangerous of barbarians from eastern Europe, it became a Spanish crusade against everything in the shape of political and religious freedom, whether at home or abroad. The year in which Spanish eyes first beheld the carved serpents on Central American temples was the year in which Martin Luther nailed his defiance to the church door at Wittenberg. From the outworn crust of mediævalism the modern spirit of individual freedom and individual responsibility was emerging, and for ninety years all Europe was rent with the convulsions that ensued. In the doubtful struggle Spain engaged herself further and further, until by 1570 she had begun to sacrifice to it all her energies. Whence did Philip II. get the sinews of war with which he supported Alva and Farnese, and built the Armada called Invincible? Largely from America, partly also from the East Indies, since Portugal and her colonies were seized by Philip in 1580. Thus were the first-fruits of the heroic age of discovery, both to east and to west of Borgia's meridian, devoted to the service of the church with a vengeance, as one might say, a lurid vengeance withal and ruthless. By the year 1609, when Spain sullenly retired, baffled and browbeaten, from the Dutch Netherlands, she had taken from America more gold and silver than would to-day be represented by five thousand million dollars, and most of this huge treasure she had employed in maintaining the gibbet for political reformers and the stake for heretics. In view of this grewsome fact, Mr. Charles Francis Adams has lately asked the question whether the discovery of America was not, after all, for at least a century, fraught with more evil than benefit to mankind. One certainly cannot help wondering what might have been the immediate result had such an immense revenue been at the disposal of William and Elizabeth rather than Philip.

Nations are made wealthy, not by inflation but by production.

Such questions are after all not so simple as they may seem. It is not altogether clear that such a reversal of the conditions from the start would have been of unmixed benefit to the English and Dutch. After the five thousand millions had been scattered to the winds, altering the purchasing power of money in all directions, it was Spain that was impoverished while her adversaries were growing rich and strong. A century of such unproductive expenditure went far toward completing the industrial ruin of Spain, already begun in the last Moorish wars, and afterward consummated by the expulsion of the Moriscos. The Spanish discovery of America abundantly illustrates the truths that if gold were to become as plentiful as iron it would be worth much less than iron, and that it is not inflation but production that makes a nation wealthy. In so far as the discovery of America turned men's minds from steady industry to gold-hunting, it was a dangerous source of weakness to Spain; and it was probably just as well for England that the work of Cortes and Pizarro was not done for her.

Deepest significance of the discovery of America.

But the great historic fact, most conspicuous among the consequences of the discovery of America, is the fact that colonial empire, for England and for Holland, grew directly out of the long war in which Spain used American and East Indian treasure with which to subdue the English and Dutch peoples and to suppress the principles of civil and religious liberty which they represented. The Dutch tore away from Spain the best part of her East Indian empire, and the glorious Elizabethan sea kings, who began the work of crippling Philip II. in America, led the way directly to the English colonization of Virginia. Thus we are introduced to the most important aspect of the discovery of America. It opened up a fresh soil, enormous in extent and capacity, for the possession of which the lower and higher types of European civilization and social polity were to struggle. In this new arena the maritime peoples of western Europe fought for supremacy; and the conquest of so vast a field has given to the ideas of the victorious people, and to their type of social polity, an unprecedented opportunity for growth and development. Sundry sturdy European ideas, transplanted into this western soil, have triumphed over all competitors and thriven so mightily as to react upon all parts of the Old World, some more, some less, and thus to modify the whole course of civilization. This is the deepest significance of the discovery of America; and a due appreciation of it gives to our history from its earliest stages an epic grandeur, as the successive situations unfold themselves and events with unmistakable emphasis record their moral. In the conflict of Titans that absorbed the energies of the sixteenth century, the question whether it should be the world of Calderon or the world of Shakespeare that was to gain indefinite power of future expansion was a question of incalculable importance to mankind.

The beginnings of the history of English-speaking America are thus to be sought in the history of the antagonism between Spain and England that grew out of the circumstances of the Protestant Reformation. It was as the storehouse of the enemy's treasure and the chief source of his supplies that America first excited real interest among the English people.

Voyages of the Cabots.

English ships had indeed crossed the Atlantic many years before this warfare broke out. The example set by Columbus had been promptly followed by John Cabot and his young son Sebastian, in the two memorable voyages of 1497 and 1498, but the interest aroused by those voyages was very short-lived. In later days it suited the convenience of England to cite them in support of her claim to priority in the discovery of the continent of North America; but many years elapsed before the existence of any such continent was distinctly known and before England cared to put forth any such claim. All that contemporaries could see was that the Cabots had sailed westward in search of the boundless treasures of Cathay, and had come home empty-handed without finding any of the cities described by Marco Polo or meeting any civilized men. So little work was found for Sebastian Cabot that he passed into the service of Spain, and turned his attention to voyages in the South Atlantic. Such scanty record was kept of the voyages of 1497 and 1498 that we cannot surely tell what land the Cabots first saw; whether it was the bleak coast of northern Labrador or some point as far south as Cape Breton is still a matter of dispute. The case was almost the same as with the voyage of Pinzon and Vespucius, whose ships were off Cape Honduras within a day or two after Cabot's northern landfall, and who, after a sojourn at Tampico, passed between Cuba and Florida at the end of April, 1498. In the one case, as in the other, the expeditions sank into obscurity because they found no gold.

The Newfoundland fisheries.

The triumphant return of Gama from Hindustan, in the summer of 1499, turned all men's eyes to southern routes, and little heed was paid to the wild inhospitable shores visited by John Cabot and his son. The sole exception to the general neglect was the case of the fisheries on the banks of Newfoundland. From the beginning of the sixteenth century European vessels came almost yearly to catch fish there, but at first Englishmen took little or no part in this, for they had long been wont to get their fish in the waters about Iceland, and it took them some years to make the change. On the bright August day of 1527 when Master John Rut sailed into the bay of St. John, in Newfoundland, he found two Portuguese, one Breton, and eleven Norman ships fishing there. Basques also came frequently to the spot. Down to that time it is not likely that the thought of the western shores of the Atlantic entered the heads of Englishmen more frequently than the thought of the Antarctic continent, discovered sixty years ago, enters the heads of men in Boston to-day.

Earliest English references to America.

The lack of general interest in maritime discovery is shown by the fact that down to 1576, so far as we can make out, only twelve books upon the subject had been published in England, and these were in great part translations of works published in other countries. The earliest indisputable occurrence of the name America in any printed English document is in a play called "A new interlude and a mery of the nature of the iiii elements," which was probably published in 1519.[5] About the same time there appeared from an Antwerp press a small book entitled "Of the newe landes and of y^e people found by the messengers of the Kynge of Portugal;" in it occurs the name Armenica, which is probably a misprint for America, since the account of it is evidently taken from the account which Vespucius gives of the natives of Brazil, and in its earliest use the name America was practically equivalent to Brazil. With the exception of a dim allusion to Columbus in Sebastian Brandt's "Ship of Fools," these are the only references to the New World that have been found in English literature previous to 1553.

The Muscovy Company.

Richard Eden.

The youthful Edward VI., who died that year, had succeeded in recalling Sebastian Cabot from Spain, and under the leadership of that navigator was formed the joint-stock company quaintly entitled, "The Mysterie and Companie of the Merchant Adventurers for the Discoverie of Regions, Dominions, Islands, and Places unknown." It was the first of that series of sagacious and daring combinations of capital of which the East India Company has been the most famous. It was afterwards more briefly known as the Muscovy Company. Under its auspices, on the 21st of May, 1553, an English fleet of exploration, under Sir Hugh Willoughby, set sail down the Thames while the cheers of thronging citizens were borne through the windows of the palace at Greenwich to the ears of the sick young king. The ill-fated expedition, seeking a northeasterly passage to Cathay, was wrecked on the coast of Lapland, and only one of the ships got home, but the interest in maritime adventure grew rapidly. A few days before Edward's death, Richard Eden published his "Treatyse of the Newe India," which was largely devoted to the discoveries in America. Two years later, in 1555, Eden followed this by his "Decades of the Newe World," in great part a version of Peter Martyr's Latin. This delightful book for the first time made the English people acquainted with the results of maritime discovery in all quarters since the great voyage of 1492. It enjoyed a wide popularity; poets and dramatists of the next generation read it in their boyhood and found their horizon wondrously enlarged. In its pages doubtless Shakespeare found the name of that Patagonian deity Setebos, which Caliban twice lets fall from his grotesque lips. Three years after Eden's second book saw the light the long reign of Queen Elizabeth began, and with it the antagonism, destined year by year to wax more violent and deadly, between England and Spain.

John Hawkins and the African slave-trade.

Meanwhile English mariners had already taken a hand in the African slave-trade, which since 1442 had been monopolized by the Portuguese. It is always difficult to say with entire confidence just who first began anything, but William Hawkins, an enterprising merchant of Plymouth, made a voyage on the Guinea coast as early as 1530, or earlier, and carried away a few slaves. It was his son, the famous Captain John Hawkins, who became the real founder of the English trade in slaves. In this capacity Americans have little reason to remember his name with pleasure, yet it would be a grave mistake to visit him with unmeasured condemnation. Few sturdier defenders of political freedom for white men have ever existed, and among the valiant sea kings who laid the foundations of England's maritime empire he was one of the foremost. It is worthy of notice that Queen Elizabeth regarded the opening of the slave-trade as an achievement worthy of honourable commemoration, for when she made Hawkins a knight she gave him for a crest the device of a negro's head and bust with the arms tightly pinioned, or, in the language of heraldry, "a demi-Moor proper bound with a cord." Public opinion on the subject of slavery was neatly expressed by Captain Lok, who declared that the negroes were "a people of beastly living, without God, law, religion, or commonwealth,"[6] so that he deemed himself their benefactor in carrying them off to a Christian land where their bodies might be decently clothed and their souls made fit for heaven. Exactly three centuries after Captain Lok, in the decade preceding our Civil War, I used to hear the very same defence of slavery preached in a Connecticut pulpit; so that perhaps we are not entitled to frown too severely upon Elizabeth's mariners. It takes men a weary while to learn the wickedness of anything that puts gold in their purses.

Hawkins and Laudonnière.

It was in 1562 that John Hawkins made his first famous expedition to the coast of Guinea, where he took three hundred slaves and carried them over to San Domingo. It was illicit traffic, of course, but the Spanish planters and miners were too much in need of cheap labour to scrutinize too jealously the source from which it was offered. The Englishman found no difficulty in selling his negroes, and sailed for home with his three ships loaded with sugar and ginger, hides and pearls. The profits were large, and in 1564 the experiment was repeated with still greater success. On the way home, early in August, 1565, Hawkins stopped at the mouth of the St. John's River in Florida, and found there a woebegone company of starving Frenchmen. They were the party of René de Laudonnière, awaiting the return of their chief commander, Jean Ribaut, from France. Their presence on that shore was the first feeble expression of the master thought that in due course of time originated the United States of America, and the author of that master thought was the great Admiral Coligny. The Huguenot wars had lately broken out in France, but already that far-sighted statesman had seen the commercial and military advantages to be gained by founding a Protestant state in America. After an unsuccessful attempt upon the coast of Brazil, he had sent Jean Ribaut to Florida, and the little colony was now suffering the frightful hardships that were the lot of most new-comers into the American wilderness. Hawkins treated these poor Frenchmen with great kindness, and his visit with them was pleasant. He has left an interesting account of the communal house of the Indians in the neighbourhood, an immense barn-like frame house, with stanchions and rafters of untrimmed logs, and a roof thatched with palmetto leaves. Hawkins liked the flavour of Indian meal, and in his descriptions of the ways of cooking it one easily recognizes both "hasty pudding" and hoe-cake. He thought it would have been more prudent in the Frenchmen if they had raised corn for themselves instead of stealing it from the Indians and arousing a dangerous hostility. For liquid refreshment they had been thrown upon their own resources, and had contrived to make a thousand gallons or more of claret from the native grapes of the country. A letter of John Winthrop reminds us that the Puritan settlers of Boston in their first summer also made wine of wild grapes,[7] and according to Adam of Bremen the same thing was done by the Northmen in Vinland in the eleventh century,[8] showing that in one age and clime as well as in another thirst is the mother of invention.

Massacre of Huguenots: the painter Le Moine.

As the Frenchmen were on the verge of despair, Hawkins left them one of his ships in which to return to France, but he had scarcely departed when the long expected Ribaut arrived with reinforcements, and soon after him came that terrible Spaniard, Menendez, who butchered the whole company, men, women, and children, about 700 Huguenots in all. Some half dozen escaped and were lucky enough to get picked up by a friendly ship and carried to England. Among them was the painter Le Moine, who became a friend of Sir Philip Sidney, and aroused much interest with his drawings of American beasts, birds, trees, and flowers. The story of the massacre awakened fierce indignation. Hostility to Spain was rapidly increasing in England, and the idea of Coligny began to be entertained by a few sagacious heads. If France could not plant a Protestant state in America, perhaps England could. A little later we find Le Moine consulted by the gifted half-brothers, Humphrey Gilbert and Walter Raleigh.

Francis Drake.

The affair of San Juan de Ulua.

Meanwhile, in 1567, the gallant Hawkins went on an eventful voyage, with five stout ships, one of which was commanded by a very capable and well educated young man, afterwards and until Nelson's time celebrated as the greatest of English seamen. Francis Drake was a native of Devonshire, son of a poor clergyman who had been molested for holding Protestant opinions. The young sea king had already gathered experience in the West Indies and on the Spanish Main; this notable voyage taught him the same kind of feeling toward Spaniards that Hannibal cherished toward Romans. After the usual traffic among the islands the little squadron was driven by stress of weather to seek shelter in the port of San Juan de Ulua, at the present site of Vera Cruz. There was no force there fit to resist Hawkins, and it is droll to find that pious hero, such a man of psalms and prayers, pluming himself upon his virtue in not seizing some Spanish ships in the harbour laden with what we should call five million dollars' worth of silver. The next day a fleet of thirteen ships from Spain arrived upon the scene. Hawkins could perhaps have kept them from entering the harbour, but he shrank from the responsibility of bringing on a battle in time of peace; the queen might disapprove of it. So Hawkins parleyed with the Spaniards, a solemn covenant of mutual forbearance was made and sworn to, and he let them into the harbour. But the orthodox Catholic of those days sometimes entertained peculiar views about keeping faith with heretics. Had not his Holiness Alexander VI. given all this New World to Spain? Poachers must be warned off; the Huguenots had learned a lesson in Florida, and it was now the Englishmen's turn. So Hawkins was treacherously attacked, and after a desperate combat, in which fireships were used, three of his vessels were destroyed. The other two got out to sea, but with so scanty a larder that the crews were soon glad to eat cats and dogs, rats and mice, and boiled parrots. It became necessary to set 114 men ashore somewhere to the north of Tampico. Some of these men took northeasterly trails, and mostly perished in the woods, but David Ingram and two companions actually made their way across the continent and after eleven months were picked up on the coast of Nova Scotia by a friendly French vessel and taken back to Europe. About seventy, led by Anthony Goddard, less prudently marched toward the city of Mexico, and fell into the clutches of the Inquisition; three were burned at the stake and all the rest were cruelly flogged and sent to the galleys for life. When the news of this affair reached England a squadron of Spanish treasure-ships, chased into the Channel by Huguenot cruisers, had just sought refuge in English harbours, and the queen detained them in reprisal for the injury done to Hawkins.

Growing hostility to Spain in England.

News had lately arrived of the bloody vengeance wreaked by Dominique de Gourgues upon the Spaniards in Florida, while the cruelties of Alva were fast goading the Netherlands into rebellion. Next year, 1570, on a fresh May morning, the Papal Bull "declaring Elizabeth deposed and her subjects absolved from their allegiance was found nailed against the Bishop of London's door,"[9] and when the rash young gentleman who had put it there was discovered he was taken back to that doorstep and quartered alive. Two years later came the Paris Matins on the day of St. Bartholomew, and the English ambassador openly gave shelter to Huguenots in his house. Elizabeth's policy leaned more and more decidedly toward defiance of the Catholic powers until it culminated in alliance with the revolted Netherlands in January, 1578. Meanwhile the interest in America quickly increased. Those were the years when Martin Frobisher made his glorious voyages in the Arctic Ocean, soon to be followed by John Davis. Almost yearly Drake crossed the Atlantic and more than once attacked and ravaged the Spanish settlements in revenge for the treachery at San Juan de Ulua. Books and pamphlets about America began to come somewhat frequently from the press.

Size and strength of Elizabeth's England.

How the sea became England's field of war.

It is worth our while here to pause for a moment and remark upon the size and strength of the nation that was so soon to contend successfully for the mastery of the sea. There is something so dazzling in the brilliancy of the age of Queen Bess, it is so crowded with romantic incidents, it fills so large a place in our minds, that we hardly realize how small England then was according to modern standards of measurement. Two centuries earlier, in the reign of Edward III., the population of England had reached about 5,000,000, when the Black Death at one fell swoop destroyed at least half the number. In Elizabeth's time the loss had just about been repaired. Her England was therefore slightly less populous, and it was surely far less wealthy, than either New York or Pennsylvania in 1890. The Dutch Netherlands had perhaps somewhat fewer people than England, but surpassed her in wealth. These two allies were pitted against the greatest military power that had existed in Europe since the days of Constantine the Great. To many the struggle seemed hopeless. For England the true policy was limited by circumstances. She could send troops across the Channel to help the Dutch in their stubborn resistance, but to try to land a force in the Spanish peninsula for aggressive warfare would be sheer madness. The shores of America and the open sea were the proper field of war for England. Her task was to paralyze the giant by cutting off his supplies, and in this there was hope of success, for no defensive fleet, however large, could watch all Philip's enormous possessions at once. The English navy, first permanently organized under Henry VIII., grew rapidly in Elizabeth's reign under the direction of her incomparable seamen; and the policy she adopted was crowned with such success that Philip II. lived to see his treasury bankrupt.

Loose ideas of international law.

Bold advice to Elizabeth.

This policy was gradually adopted soon after the fight at San Juan de Ulua, and long before there was any declaration of war. The extreme laxness of that age, in respect of international law, made it possible for such things to go on to an extent that now seems scarcely comprehensible. The wholesale massacre of Frenchmen in Florida, for example, occurred at a time of profound peace between France and Spain, and reprisal was made, not by the French government but by a private gentleman who had to sell his ancestral estate to raise the money. It quite suited Elizabeth's tortuous policy, in contending against formidable odds, to be able either to assume or to disclaim responsibility for the deeds of her captains. Those brave men well understood the situation, and with earnest patriotism and chivalrous loyalty not only accepted it, but even urged the queen to be allowed to serve her interests at their own risk. In a letter handed to her in November, 1577, the writer begs to be allowed to destroy all Spanish ships caught fishing on the banks of Newfoundland, and adds, "If you will let us first do this we will next take the West Indies from Spain. You will have the gold and silver mines and the profit of the soil. You will be monarch of the seas and out of danger from every one. I will do it if you will allow me; only you must resolve and not delay or dally—the wings of man's life are plumed with the feathers of death."[10] The signature to this bold letter has been obliterated, but it sounds like Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and is believed to be his.

The sea kings were not buccaneers.

In connection with this it should be remembered that neither in England nor elsewhere at that time had the navy become fully a national affair as at present. It was to a considerable extent supported by private speculation, and as occasion required a commercial voyage or a voyage of discovery might be suddenly transformed into a naval campaign. A flavour of buccaneering pervades nearly all the maritime operations of that age and often leads modern writers to misunderstand or misjudge them. Thus it sometimes happens that so excellent a man as Sir Francis Drake, whose fame is forever a priceless possession for English-speaking people, is mentioned in popular books as a mere corsair, a kind of gentleman pirate. Nothing could show a more hopeless confusion of ideas. In a later generation the warfare characteristic of the Elizabethan age degenerated into piracy, and when Spain, fallen from her greatness, became a prey to the spoiler, a swarm of buccaneers infested the West Indies and added another hideous chapter to the lurid history of those beautiful islands. They were mere robbers, and had nothing in common with the Elizabethan heroes except courage. From the deeds of Drake and Hawkins to the deeds of Henry Morgan, the moral distance is as great as from slaying your antagonist in battle to murdering your neighbour for his purse.

Why Drake carried the war into the Pacific Ocean.

It was Drake who first put into practice the policy of weakening Philip II. by attacking him in America. It served the direct purpose of destroying the sinews of war, and indirectly it neutralized for Europe some of Spain's naval strength by diverting it into American waters for self-defence. To do such work most effectively it seemed desirable to carry the warfare into the Pacific Ocean. The circumstances of its discovery had made Spanish America almost more of a Pacific than an Atlantic power. The discoverers happened to approach the great double continent where it is narrowest, and the hunt for precious metals soon drew them to the Cordilleras and their western slopes. The mountain region, with its untold treasures of gold and silver, from New Mexico to Bolivia, became theirs. In acquiring it they simply stepped into the place of the aboriginal conquering tribes, and carried on their work of conquest to completion. The new rulers conducted the government by their own Spanish methods, and the white race was superposed upon a more or less dense native population. There was no sort of likeness to colonies planted by England, but there were some points of resemblance to the position of the English in recent times as a ruling race in Hindustan. Such was the kind of empire which Spain had founded in America. Its position, chiefly upon the Pacific coast, rendered it secure against English conquest, though not against occasional damaging attacks. In South America, where it reached back in one or two remote points to the Atlantic coast, the chief purpose was to protect the approach to the silver mines of Bolivia by the open route of the river La Plata. It was this military need that was met by the growth of Buenos Ayres and the settlements in Paraguay, guarding the entrance and the lower reaches of the great silver river.

Drake upon a peak in Darien.

Voyage of the Golden Hind.

A noble banquet room.

Soon after the affair of San Juan de Ulua, Drake conceived the idea of striking at this Spanish domain upon its unguarded Pacific side. In 1573, after marching across the isthmus of Darien, the English mariner stood upon a mountain peak, not far from where Balboa sixty years before had stood and looked down upon the waste of waters stretching away to shores unvisited and under stars unknown. And as he looked, says Camden, "vehemently transported with desire to navigate that sea, he fell upon his knees and implored the divine assistance that he might at some time sail thither and make a perfect discovery of the same." On the 15th of November, 1577, Drake set sail from Plymouth, on this hardy enterprise, with five good ships. It was a curious coincidence that in the following July and August, while wintering on the Patagonia coast at Port St. Julian, Drake should have discovered symptoms of conspiracy and felt obliged to behead one of his officers, as had been the case with Magellan at the same place. By the time he had passed the straits in his flagship, the Golden Hind,[11] he had quite lost sight of his consorts, who had deserted him in that watery labyrinth, as Gomez had stolen away from Magellan. For men of common mould a voyage in the remote South Sea still had its terrors; but the dauntless captain kept on with his single ship of twenty guns, and from Valparaiso northward along the Peruvian coast dashed into seaports and captured vessels, carrying away enormous treasures in gold and silver and jewels, besides such provisions as were needed for his crew. With other property he meddled but little, and no acts of wanton cruelty sullied his performances. After taking plunder worth millions of dollars, this corsair-work gave place to scientific discovery, and the Golden Hind sailed far northward in search of a northeast passage into the Atlantic. Drake visited a noble bay, which may have been that of San Francisco, and sailed some distance along that coast, which he called New Albion. It is probable, though not quite certain, that he saw some portion of the coast of Oregon. Not finding any signs of a northeast passage, he turned his prow westward, crossed the Pacific, and returned home by way of the Cape of Good Hope, arriving at Plymouth in September, 1580. Some time afterward he went up the Thames to Deptford, where the queen came to dinner on board the Golden Hind, and knighted on his own quarter-deck the bold captain who had first carried the English flag around the world. The enthusiastic chronicler Holinshed wished that in memory of this grand achievement the ship should be set upon the top of St. Paul's Cathedral, "that being discerned farre and neere, it might be noted and pointed at of people with these true termes: Yonder is the barke that hath sailed round about the world."[12] A different career awaited the sturdy Golden Hind; for many a year she was kept at Deptford, a worthy object of popular admiration, and her cabin was made into a banquet room wherein young and old might partake of the mutton and ale of merry England; until at last, when the venerable ship herself had succumbed to the tooth of Time, a capacious chair was carved from her timbers and presented to the University of Oxford, where it may still be seen in the Bodleian Library. In it sat Abraham Cowley when he wrote the poem in which occur the following verses:—

"Drake and his ship could not have wished from Fate
A happier station or more blest estate.
For lo! a seat of endless rest is given
To her in Oxford and to him in heaven."

Voyage of Gilbert and Raleigh.

Shipwreck of Gilbert.

Meanwhile in the autumn of 1578, while the coasts of Chili were echoing the roar of the Golden Hind's cannon, a squadron of seven ships sailed from England, with intent to found a permanent colony on the Atlantic coast of North America. Its captain was one of the most eminent of Devonshire worthies, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and one of the ships was commanded by his half-brother, Walter Raleigh, a young man of six-and-twenty who had lately returned from volunteer service in the Netherlands. The destination of the voyage was "Norumbega," which may have meant any place between the Hudson and Penobscot rivers, but was conceived with supreme vagueness, as may be seen from Michael Lok's map of 1582.[13] This little fleet had at least one savage fight with Spaniards, and returned to Plymouth without accomplishing anything. In 1583 Gilbert sought a favourable place for settlement on the southern coast of Newfoundland, probably with a view to driving the Spaniards away from the fishing grounds, but an ill fate overtook him. On the American coast his principal vessel crushed its bows against a sunken rock and nearly all hands were lost. With two small ships the captain soon set sail for home, but his own tiny craft foundered in a terrible storm near Fayal. As she sank, Gilbert cheerily shouted over the tafferel to his consort, "The way to heaven is as near by sea as by land," a speech, says his chronicler, "well beseeming a soldier resolute in Jesus Christ, as I can testify he was."

Gilbert's patent granted to Raleigh.

It was not Raleigh's fault that he did not share the fate of his revered half-brother, for the queen's mind had been full of forebodings and she had refused to let him go on the voyage. It was since the former disastrous expedition that Raleigh had so quickly risen in favour at court; that he had thrown down his velvet cloak as a mat for Elizabeth's feet and had written on a window-pane the well-known verse which that royal coquette so cleverly capped. He became Captain of the Queen's Guard and Lord Warden of the Stannaries, and was presented with the confiscated estates of traitors in England and Ireland. In 1584, when his late half-brother's patent for land in America expired, it was renewed in Raleigh's name. On March 25th was sealed the document that empowered him to "hold by homage remote heathen and barbarous lands, not actually possessed by any Christian prince, nor inhabited by Christian people, which he might discover within the next six years."[14] As had been the custom with Spanish and Portuguese grants to explorers, one fifth of the gold and silver to be obtained was to be reserved for the crown. The heathen and barbarous land which Raleigh had in view was the Atlantic coast of North America so far as he might succeed in occupying it. He knew that Spain claimed it all as her own by virtue of the bull of Pope Alexander VI., but Elizabeth had already declared in 1581 that she cared nothing for papal bulls and would recognize no Spanish claims to America save such as were based upon discovery followed by actual possession.[15] Raleigh's attention had long been turned toward Florida. In youth he had served in France under Coligny, and had opportunities for hearing that statesman's plan for founding a Protestant state in America discussed. We have seen Le Moine, the French artist who escaped from the Florida massacre, consorting with Raleigh and with Sir Philip Sidney. Upon those men fell the mantle of Coligny, and the people of the United States may well be proud to point to such noble figures standing upon the threshold of our history.

Promise of self-government.

One provision in the Gilbert patent, now renewed for Raleigh, is worth especial mention. It was agreed that the English colonies which should be planted in America "should have all the privileges of free denizens and persons native of England, in such ample manner as if they were born and personally resident in our said realm of England," and that any law to the contrary should be of no effect; furthermore, that the people of those colonies should be governed by such statutes as they might choose to establish for themselves, provided that such statutes "conform as near as conveniently may be with those of England, and do not oppugn the Christian faith, or anyway withdraw the people of those lands from our allegiance." A more unequivocal acknowledgment of the rights of self-government which a British government of two centuries later saw fit to ignore, it would be hard to find. Gilbert and Raleigh demanded and Elizabeth granted in principle just what Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams demanded and George III. refused to concede.

Voyage of Amidas and Barlow, 1584.

The wealthy Raleigh could act promptly, and before five weeks had elapsed two ships, commanded by Philip Amidas and Arthur Barlow, had started on a reconnoitring voyage. On the 4th of July, 1584, they reached the country now known as North Carolina, at some point not far from Cape Lookout. Thence a northerly run of over a hundred miles brought them to the New Inlet, through which they passed into Pamlico Sound and visited Roanoke Island. They admired the noble pine-trees and red cedars, marvelled at the abundance of game, and found the native barbarians polite and friendly. Their attempt to learn the name of the country resulted as not uncommonly in such first parleys between strange tongues. The Indian of whom the question was asked had no idea what was meant and uttered at random the Ollendorfian reply, "Win-gan-da-coa," which signified, "What pretty clothes you wear!" So when Amidas and Barlow returned to England they said they had visited a country by the name of Wingandacoa; but the queen, with a touch of the euphuism then so fashionable, suggested that it should be called, in honour of herself, Virginia.

Ralph Lane's expedition, 1585.

Rescue of Lane by Sir Francis "the Dragon."

In the spring of 1585 Raleigh, who had lately been knighted, sent out a hundred or more men commanded by Ralph Lane, to make the beginnings of a settlement. They were convoyed by Raleigh's cousin, Sir Richard Grenville, with seven well-armed ships. They entered Pamlico Sound through Ocracoke Inlet, and trouble with the natives at once began. One of the Indians stole a silver cup, and Grenville unwisely retaliated by setting fire to their standing corn. Having thus sown the seeds of calamity he set the colonists ashore upon Roanoke Island and went on his way. The sagacious and energetic Lane explored the neighbouring mainland for many miles along the coast and for some distance into the interior, and even tried to find a waterway into the Pacific Ocean. He made up his mind that the country was not favourable for a new colony, and he gathered sundry bits of information which seemed to point to Chesapeake Bay as a much better place. The angry Indians made much trouble, and after a year had passed the colonists were suffering from scarcity of food, when all at once Sir Francis Drake appeared on the scene with a superb fleet of three-and-twenty ships. War between Spain and England had been declared in July, 1585, when Sidney and Drake were about ready to execute a scheme that contemplated the founding of an American colony by Sidney. But the queen interfered and sent Sidney to the Netherlands, where he was so soon to die a noble death. The terrible Drake, whom Spaniards, punning upon his name, had begun to call "Dragon," gave them fresh cause to dread and revile him. He had captured 20 ships with 250 cannon, he had taken and sacked Cartagena, St. Domingo, and St. Augustine, and on his way home looked in at Roanoke Island, in time to take Lane and his starving party on board and carry them back to England. They had not long been gone when Grenville arrived with supplies, and was astonished at finding the island deserted. Knowing nothing of Lane's change of purpose, and believing that his party must still be somewhere in the adjacent country, Grenville left a guard of fifteen men on the island, with ample supplies, and sailed away.

Cavendish's voyage around the world, 1586-88.

Drake "singes the beard" of Philip II.

The stirring days of the Armada were approaching. When Lane arrived in England, his services were needed there, and after a while we find him a member of the Council of War. One of this first American colonizing party was the wonderful Suffolk boy, Thomas Cavendish, aged two-and-twenty, who had no sooner landed in England than he set sail in command of three ships, made his way into the Pacific Ocean, and repeated the exploits of Drake from Chili to California, captured one of Spain's finest galleons, and then in two years more completed the circumnavigation of the globe. While the pupil was thus nobly acquitting himself, the master in the spring of 1587 outdid all former achievements. Sailing into the harbour of Cadiz, Drake defeated the warships on guard there, calmly loaded his own vessels with as much Spanish spoil as could safely be carried, then set fire to the storeships and cut their cables. More than a hundred transports, some of them 1,500 tons in burthen, all laden with stores for the Armada, became a tangled and drifting mass of blazing ruin, while amid the thunder of exploding magazines the victor went forth on his way unscathed and rejoicing. Day after day he crouched under the beetling crags of Cintra, catching and sinking every craft that passed that lair, then swept like a tempest into the bay of Coruña and wrought similar havoc to that of Cadiz, then stood off for the Azores and captured the great carrack on its way from the Indies with treasure reckoned by millions. Europe stood dumb with amazement. What manner of man was it that could thus "singe the King of Spain's beard"? "Philip one day invited a lady of the court to join him in his barge on the Lake of Segovia. The lady said she dared not trust herself on the water, even with his Majesty," for fear of Sir Francis Drake.[16] Philip's Armada had to wait for another year, while by night and day the music of adze and hammer was heard in English shipyards.

White's colony on Roanoke Island, 1587.

Just as "the Dragon" returned to England another party of Raleigh's colonists was approaching the American coast. There were about 150, including 17 women. John White, a man deft with water-colours, who had been the artist of Lane's expedition, was their governor. Their settlement was to be made on the shore of Chesapeake Bay, but first they must stop at Roanoke Island and pick up the fifteen men left on watch by Grenville. Through some carelessness or misunderstanding or bad faith on the part of the convoy, the people once landed were left in the lurch with only one small vessel, and thus were obliged to stay on that fatal Roanoke Island. They soon found that Grenville's little guard had been massacred by red men. It was under these gloomy circumstances that the first child of English parents was born on the soil of the United States. The governor's daughter Eleanor was wife of Ananias Dare, and their little girl, born August 18, 1587, was named Virginia. Before she was ten days old her grandfather found it necessary to take the ship and return to England for help.

The Invincible Armada, 1588.

But the day of judgment for Spain and England was at hand, and lesser things must wait. Amid the turmoil of military preparation, Sir Walter was not unmindful of his little colony. Twice he fitted out relief expeditions, but the first was stopped because all the ships were seized for government service, and the second was driven back into port by Spanish cruisers. While the anxious governor waited through the lengthening days into the summer of 1588, there came, with its imperious haste, its deadly agony and fury, its world-astounding triumph, the event most tremendous, perhaps, that mankind have witnessed since the star of the Wise Men stood over the stable at Bethlehem. Then you might have seen the sea kings working in good fellowship together,—Drake and Hawkins, Winter and Frobisher, with Howard of Effingham in the Channel fleet; Raleigh and Grenville active alike in council and afield; the two great ministers, Burghley and Walsingham, ever crafty and vigilant; and in the background on her white palfrey the eccentric figure of the strangely wayward and wilful but always brave and patriotic Queen. Even after three centuries it is with bated breath that we watch those 130 black hulks coming up the Channel, with 3,000 cannon and 30,000 men on board, among them ninety executioners withal, equipped with racks and thumbscrews, to inaugurate on English soil the accursed work of the Inquisition. In camp at Dunkirk the greatest general of the age, Alexander Farnese, with 35,000 veterans is crouching for a spring, like a still greater general at Boulogne in later days; and one wonders if the 80,000 raw militia slowly mustering in the busy little towns and green hamlets of England can withstand these well-trained warriors.

Defeat of the Invincible Armada.

Battle of Cadiz, 1596.

In the English fleet there were about as many ships as the enemy had, much smaller in size and inferior in weight of metal, but at the same time far more nimble in movement. Of cannon and men the English had scarcely half as many as the Spaniards, but this disparity was more than offset by one great advantage. Our forefathers had already begun to display the inventive ingenuity for which their descendants in both hemispheres have since become preëminent. Many of their ships were armed with new guns, of longer range than any hitherto known, and this advantage, combined with their greater nimbleness, made it possible in many cases to pound a Spanish ship to pieces without receiving any serious hurt in return. In such respects, as well as in the seamanship by which the two fleets were handled, it was modern intelligence pitted against mediæval chivalry. Such captains as served Elizabeth were not reared under the blighting shadow of the Escurial. With the discomfiture of the Invincible Armada before Dunkirk, the army of Farnese at once became useless for invading England. Then came the awful discovery that the mighty fleet was penned up in the German Ocean, for Drake held the Strait of Dover in his iron grip. The horrors of the long retreat through northern seas have never been equalled save when Napoleon's hosts were shattered in Russia. In the disparity of losses, as in the immensity of the issues at stake, we are reminded of the Greeks and Persians at Salamis; of Spaniards more than 20,000 perished, but scarcely 100 Englishmen. The frightful loss of ships and guns announced the overthrow of Spanish supremacy, but the bitter end was yet to come. During the next three years the activity of the sea kings reached such a pitch that more than 800 Spanish ships were destroyed.[17] The final blow came soon after the deaths of Drake and Hawkins in 1596, when Raleigh, with the Earl of Essex and Lord Thomas Howard, destroyed the Spanish fleet in that great battle before Cadiz whereof Raleigh wrote that "if any man had a desire to see Hell itself, it was there most lively figured."[18]

Mystery of the fate of White's colony.

It was not until March, 1591, that Governor White succeeded in getting to sea again for the rescue of his family and friends. He had to go as passenger in a West Indiaman. When he landed, upon the return voyage, at Roanoke Island, it was just in time to have celebrated his little grandchild's fourth birthday. It had been agreed that should the colonists leave that spot they should carve upon a tree the name of the place to which they were going, and if they should add to the name a cross it would be understood as a signal of distress. When White arrived he found grass growing in the deserted blockhouse. Under the cedars hard by five chests had been buried, and somebody had afterwards dug them up and rifled them. Fragments of his own books and pictures lay scattered about. On a great tree was cut in big letters, but without any cross, the word Croatan, which was the name of a neighbouring island. The captain of the ship was at first willing to take White to Croatan, but a fierce storm overtook him and after beating about for some days he insisted upon making for England in spite of the poor man's entreaties. No more did White ever hear of his loved ones. Sixteen years afterward the settlers at Jamestown were told by Indians that the white people abandoned at Roanoke had mingled with the natives and lived with them for some years on amicable terms until at the instigation of certain medicine-men (who probably accused them of witchcraft) they had all been murdered, except four men, two boys, and a young woman, who were spared by request or order of a chief. Whether this young woman was Virginia Dare, the first American girl, we have no means of knowing.[19]

Significance of the defeat of the Armada.

Nothing could better illustrate than the pathetic fate of this little colony how necessary it was to destroy the naval power of Spain before England could occupy the soil of North America. The defeat of the Invincible Armada was the opening event in the history of the United States. It was the event that made all the rest possible. Without it the attempts at Jamestown and Plymouth could hardly have had more success than the attempt at Roanoke Island. An infant colony is like an army at the end of a long line of communications; it perishes if the line is cut. Before England could plant thriving states in America she must control the ocean routes. The far-sighted Raleigh understood the conditions of the problem. When he smote the Spaniards at Cadiz he knew it was a blow struck for America. He felt the full significance of the defeat of the Armada, and in spite of all his disappointments with Virginia, he never lost heart. In 1602 he wrote to Sir Robert Cecil, "I shall yet live to see it an English nation."

In the following chapters we shall see how Raleigh's brave words came true.

CHAPTER II.

A DISCOURSE OF WESTERN PLANTING.

Sixteenth century maps.

In all the history of human knowledge there is no more fascinating chapter than that which deals with the gradual expansion of men's geographical ideas consequent upon the great voyages of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is not a tale so written that he who runs may read it, but its events have rather to be slowly deciphered from hundreds of quaint old maps, whereon islands and continents, mountains and rivers, are delineated with very slight resemblance to what we now know to be the reality; where, for instance, Gog and Magog show a strong tendency to get mixed up with Memphremagog, where the capital of China stands a few hundred miles north of the city of Mexico, and your eye falls upon a river which you feel sure is the St. Lawrence until you learn that it is meant for the Yang-tse-Kiang. In the sixteenth century scarcely any intellectual stimulus could be found more potent than the sight of such maps, revealing unknown lands, or cities and rivers with strange names, places of which many marvels had been recounted and almost anything might be believed.

Richard Hakluyt.

One afternoon in the year 1568, the lawyer Richard Hakluyt was sitting at his desk in the Middle Temple, with a number of such maps and sundry new books of cosmography spread out before him, when the door opened and his young cousin and namesake, then a boy of sixteen studying at Westminster School, came into the room. The elder Richard opened the Bible at the 107th Psalm, and pointed to the verses which declare that "they which go downe to the sea in ships and occupy by the great waters, they see the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep;" then he called the lad's attention to the maps, in which he soon became absorbed. This incident determined the career of the younger Richard Hakluyt, and led to his playing an important part in the beginnings of the United States of America. A learned and sagacious writer upon American history, Mr. Doyle, of All Souls College, Oxford, has truly said that it is "hard to estimate at its full value the debt which succeeding generations owe to Richard Hakluyt."[20] In 1570 he became a student at Christ Church, Oxford, and took his master's degree in 1577. His book called "Divers Voyages," dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney, was published in 1582. From 1583 to 1588 he was chaplain of the English legation at Paris, and before his return he was appointed canon of Bristol, an office which he held till 1605. Thus for many years he lived in the city of the Cabots, the cradle of the new era of maritime adventure. He came to be recognized as one of the foremost geographers of the age and the greatest living English authority on matters relating to the New World. The year following the defeat of the Armada witnessed the publication of his book entitled "Principal Voyages," which Froude well calls "the prose epic of the modern English nation."[21] In 1605 he was made a prebendary of Westminster, and eleven years later was buried with distinguished honours beneath the pavement of the great Abbey.

Adventures of a manuscript.

The book of Hakluyt's which here most nearly concerns us is the "Discourse of Western Planting," written in 1584, shortly before the return of the ships of Amidas and Barlow from Roanoke Island. It was not published, nor was immediate publication its aim. It was intended to influence the mind of Queen Elizabeth. The manuscript was handed to her about September, 1584, and after a while was lost sight of until after a long period of oblivion it turned up in the library of Sir Peter Thomson, an indefatigable collector of literary treasures, who died in 1770. It was bought from his family by Lord Valentia, after whose death it passed into the hands of the famous bibliophile Henry Stevens, who sold it to Sir Thomas Phillips for his vast collection of archives at Thirlestane House, Cheltenham. In 1869 a copy of it was made for Dr. Leonard Woods, President of Bowdoin College, by whom it was ably edited for the Maine Historical Society; and at length, in 1877, after a sleep of nearly three centuries, it was printed at our New England Cambridge, at the University Press, and published with valuable notes by the late Dr. Charles Deane.

Reasons for planting English colonies in America.

English trade with the Netherlands.

Hakluyt wrote this document at the request of Raleigh, who wished to persuade the queen to invest money in a colonizing expedition to the New World. Such an enterprise, he felt, was too great for any individual purse and needed support from government. No one had studied the subject so thoroughly as Hakluyt, and so Raleigh enlisted his services. In twenty-one brief chapters Hakluyt sets forth the various reasons why England should plant colonies on the coast of North America. The chief reasons are that such colonies will enlarge the occasions and facilities for driving Spanish ships from the Newfoundland fisheries and capturing Spanish treasure on its way from Mexico and the isthmus of Darien; they will be serviceable as stations toward the discovery and use of the northwest passage to Cathay; after a while they will furnish a valuable market for the products of English industry, especially woollen and linen cloths; they will increase the royal revenue by customs duties; they will afford new material for the growth of the navy; and in various ways they will relieve England of its idlers and vagrants by finding occupation for them abroad. In his terse quaint way, the writer emphasizes these points. As for the Spanish king, "if you touche him in the Indies you touche the apple of his eye; for take away his treasure, which is nervus belli, and which he hath almoste [all] out of his West Indies, his olde bandes of souldiers will soone be dissolved, his purposes defeated, ... his pride abated, and his tyranie utterly suppressed." "He shall be left bare as Æsop's proude crowe." With regard to creating a new market he says: "Nowe if her Majestie take these westerne discoveries in hande, and plant there, yt is like that in short time wee shall vente as greate a masse of clothe yn those partes as ever wee did in the Netherlandes, and in tyme moche more." In this connection he gives a striking illustration of the closeness of the commercial ties which had been knit between England and the Low Countries in the course of the long alliance with the House of Burgundy. In 1550, when Charles V. proposed to introduce the Spanish Inquisition into the Netherlands, it was objected that all English merchants would then quit the country, and the English trade would be grievously diminished. At this suggestion, "search was made what profite there came and comoditie grewe by the haunte of the Englishe marchantes. Then it was founde by searche and enquirie, that within the towne of Antwerpe alone there were 14,000 persons fedde and mayneteyned onlye by the workinge of English commodities, besides the gaines that marchantes and shippers with other in the said towne did gett, which was the greatest part of their lyvinge, which were thoughte to be in nomber halfe as many more; and in all other places of his Netherlandes by the indraping of Englishe woll into clothe, and by the working of other Englishe comodities, there were 30,000 persons more mayneteyned and fedd; which in all amounteth to the nomber of 51,000 persons." When this report was given to Charles V. it led him to pause and consider, as well it might.

An American market.

The change from tillage to pasturage.

Growth of pauperism.

According to Hakluyt an English colony in America would soon afford as good a market for English labour as the Netherlands. He was impressed with the belief that the population of England was fast outrunning its means of subsistence. Now if the surplus of population could be drawn to America it would find occupation in raising the products of that new soil to exchange for commodities from England, and this exchange in its turn would increase the demand for English commodities and for the labour which produced them, so that fewer people in England would be left without employment. Such is Hakluyt's idea, though he nowhere states it quite so formally. It is interesting because there is no doubt that he was not alone in holding such views. There was in many quarters a feeling that, with its population of about 5,000,000, England was getting to be over-peopled. This was probably because for some time past the supply of food and the supply of work had both been diminishing relatively to the number of people. For more than a century the wool trade had been waxing so profitable that great tracts of land which had formerly been subject to tillage were year by year turned into pastures for sheep. This process not only tended to raise the price of food, but it deprived many people of employment, since sheep-farming requires fewer hands than tilling the soil. Since the accession of Henry VIII. there had been many legislative attempts to check the conversion of ploughed land into grassy fields, but the change still continued to go on.[22] The enormous increase in the quantity of precious metals had still further raised the price of food, while as people were thrown out of employment the labour market tended to become overstocked so that wages did not rise. These changes bore with especial severity upon the class of peasants. The condition of the freeholding yeomanry was much improved during the sixteenth century. Stone houses with floors had taken the place of rude cabins with rushes carpeting the ground; meat was oftener eaten, clothes were of better quality. But it was otherwise with the peasants who held by servile tenures. In the abolition of mediæval serfdom which had been going on for two centuries and was completed in England so much earlier than in any other part of Europe, it was not all gain for the lowest grades of labourers. Some through energy and good fortune rose to recruit the ranks of freeholders, but many others became paupers and thieves. The change from tillage to pasturage affected this class more than any other, for it turned many out of house and home; so that, in the words of an old writer, they "prowled about as idle beggars or continued as stark thieves till the gallows did eat them."[23] The sudden destruction of the monasteries by Henry VIII. deprived the pauper of such scanty support as he had been wont to get from the vast wealth of the Church, and besides it had let loose upon society a vast number of persons with their old occupations gone and set aside.[24] In Elizabeth's reign, therefore, for the various reasons here mentioned, the growth of pauperism began to attract especial attention as a lamentable if not formidable evil, and the famous "poor law" of 1601 marks a kind of era in the social history of England. Under such circumstances, for men disheartened by poverty and demoralized by idleness, struggling for life in a community that had ceased to need the kind of labour they could perform, the best chance of salvation seemed to lie in emigration to a new colony where the demand for labour was sure to be great, and life might be in a measure begun anew. So thought the good Hakluyt, and the history of the seventeenth century did much to justify his opinion. The prodigious development of the English commercial and naval marine, to which the intercourse with the new and thriving American colonies greatly contributed, went far toward multiplying the opportunities for employment and diminishing the numbers of the needy and idle class. Many of the sons of the men who had been driven from their farms by sheep-raising landlords made their home upon the ocean, and helped to secure England's control of the watery pathways. Many of them found new homes in America, and as independent yeomen became more thrifty than their peasant fathers.

Opposition to Hakluyt.

The queen's penuriousness.

While there were many people who espoused Hakluyt's views, while preachers might be heard proclaiming from the pulpit that "Virginia was a door which God had opened for England," on the other hand, as in the case of all great enterprises, loud voices were raised in opposition. To send parties of men and women to starve in the wilderness, or be murdered by savages or Spaniards, was a proceeding worthy of severe condemnation for its shocking cruelty, to say nothing of its useless extravagance. Then, as usual, the men who could see a few inches in front of their noses called themselves wise and practical, while they stigmatized as visionary theorizers the men whose imaginations could discern, albeit in dim outlines, the great future. As for the queen, who clearly approved in her innermost heart the schemes of Raleigh and Hakluyt, not much was to be expected from her when it came to a question of spending money. Elizabeth carried into the management of public affairs a miserly spirit inherited, perhaps, from her grandfather, Henry VII. When the Armada was actually entering the Channel she deemed it sound economy to let her sailors get sick with sour ale rather than throw it away and buy fresh for them. Such a mind was not likely to appreciate the necessity for the enormous immediate outlay involved in planting a successful colony. That such a document as Hakluyt's should be laid away and forgotten was no more than natural. To blame Elizabeth unreservedly, however, without making some allowance for the circumstances in which she was placed, would be crude and unfair. It was the public money that she was called upon to spend, and the military pressure exerted by Spain made heavy demands upon it. In spite of her pennywise methods, which were often so provoking, they were probably less ill suited to that pinching crisis than her father's ready lavishness would have been.

The beginnings of joint-stock companies.

That Raleigh should appeal to the sovereign for aid in his enterprise was to have been expected. It was what all explorers and colonizers had been in the habit of doing. Since the days of Prince Henry the Navigator the arduous work of discovering and subduing the heathen world outside of Europe had been conducted under government control and paid from the public purse whenever the plunder of the heathen did not suffice. In some cases the sovereign was unwilling to allow private capital to embark in such enterprises; as for example in the spring of 1491, when the Duke of Medina-Celi offered to fit out two or three caravels for Columbus and Queen Isabella refused to give him the requisite license, probably because she was "unwilling to have the duke come in for a large share of the profits in case the venture should prove successful."[25] Usually, however, such work was beyond the reach of private purses, and it was not until the middle of the sixteenth century, and in such commercial countries as the Netherlands and England, with comparatively free governments, that joint-stock companies began to be formed for such purposes. I have already alluded to the famous Muscovy Company, first formed in the reign of Edward VI., and from that time forth the joint-stock principle went on rapidly gaining strength until its approach to maturity was announced by the creation of the English East India Company in 1600 and the Dutch East India Company in 1602. The latter was "the first great joint-stock company whose shares were bought and sold from hand to hand,"[26] and these events mark the beginning of a new era in European commerce.

This substitution of voluntary coöperation among interested individuals for compulsory action under government control was one of the most important steps taken toward bringing in the modern era. Americans have no reason to regret that the beginnings of English colonization in the New World were not made by an English sovereign. There can be no doubt that the very slight connection between these colonies and the Crown was from the first extremely favourable to their free and untrammelled development. Far better that the worthy Hakluyt's essay should get tucked away in a pigeon-hole than that it should have fired Elizabeth to such zeal for Virginia as Louis XIV. a century afterward showed for New France!

Raleigh's difficulties.

By 1589 Raleigh seems to have despaired of finding the queen disposed to act as a fairy godmother. He reckoned that he had already spent £40,000 on Virginia, although this sum may perhaps have included his contributions toward the Arctic voyages of John Davis. Such a sum would be equivalent to not less than $1,000,000 of our modern money, and no wonder if Raleigh began to feel more than ever that the undertaking was too great for his individual resources. In March, 1589, we find him, as governor of Virginia, assigning not his domain but the right to trade there to a company, of which John White, Thomas Smith, and Rev. Richard Hakluyt were the most prominent members. He reserved for himself a royalty of one fifth of all the gold and silver that should be obtained. The Company did not show much activity. We may well believe that it was too soon after the Armada. Business affairs had not had time to recover from that severe strain. But Raleigh never lost sight of Virginia. Southey's accusation that he sent out colonists and then abandoned them was ill-considered. We have already seen why it proved impossible to send help to John White's colony.

The great Spanish carrack.

The Mermaid Tavern.

King James I.

In the pursuit of his various interests the all-accomplished knight sometimes encountered strange vicissitudes. With all his flattery of the crowned coquette, Elizabeth Tudor, the true sovereign of his heart was one of the ladies of the court, the young and beautiful Elizabeth Throckmorton. To our prosaic modern minds the attitude of the great queen toward the favourite courtiers whom she could by no possibility dream of raising to the dignity of prince-consort seems incomprehensible. But after a due perusal of the English dramatists of the time, the romance of Sidney, the extravagances of Lyly, the poetry of Spenser and Ronsard, or some of those tales of chivalry that turned good Don Quixote's brain, we are beguiled into the right sort of atmosphere for understanding it. For any of Elizabeth's counsellors or favourites to make love to any other lady was apt to call down some manifestation of displeasure, and in 1592 some circumstances connected with Raleigh's marriage[27] led to his imprisonment in the Tower. But his evil star was not yet in the ascendant. Within a few weeks one of his captains, Christopher Newport, whom we shall meet again, brought into Dartmouth harbour the great Spanish carrack Madre de Dios, with treasure from the Indies worth nearly four millions of modern dollars. A large part of Raleigh's own share in the booty was turned over to his sovereign with that blithesome grace in which none could rival him, and it served as a ransom. In 1594 we find him commanding an expedition to Guiana and exploring the vast solitudes of the Orinoco in search of El Dorado. On his return to England he found a brief interval of leisure in which to write that fascinating book on Guiana which David Hume declared to be full of lies, a gross calumny which subsequent knowledge, gathered by Humboldt and since his time, has entirely refuted. Then came the great battle at Cadiz in 1596, already mentioned, and the capture of Fayal in 1597, when Raleigh's fame reached its zenith. About this time, or soon after, began those ambrosial nights, those feasts of the gods, at the Mermaid Tavern, where Selden and Camden, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson and Dr. Donne, sat around the table with Raleigh and Shakespeare. In that happy time the opportunity for colonizing Virginia seemed once more to have come, and in 1602 Raleigh sent out Samuel Mace on an expedition of which less is known than one could wish, save that renewed search was made for White's lost colony. Otherwise, says the historian Stith, this Mace "performed nothing, but returned with idle stories and frivolous allegations."[28] When he arrived in England in 1603, sad changes had occurred. The great queen—great and admirable with all her faults—had passed away, and a quaint pedantic little Scotchman, with uncouth figure and shambling gait and a thickness of utterance due partly to an ill-formed tongue and partly to excessive indulgence in mountain dew, had stepped into her place. A web of intrigue, basely woven by Robert Cecil and Henry Howard, had caught Raleigh in its meshes. He was hurried off to the Tower, while an attainder bereft him of his demesne of Virginia and handed it over to the crown.

Henry, Earl of Southampton.

Gosnold, Pring and Weymouth.

But other strong hands were taking up the work. That Earl of Southampton to whom Shakespeare ten years before had dedicated his "Venus and Adonis" had been implicated in Essex's rebellion and narrowly escaped with his life. The accession of James I., which was fraught with such ill for Raleigh, set Southampton free. But already in 1602, while he was still a prisoner in the Tower, an expedition organized under his auspices set sail for Virginia. It was commanded by one of Raleigh's old captains, Bartholomew Gosnold, and has especial interest as an event in the beginnings alike of Virginia and of New England. Gosnold came to a region which some persons called Norumbega, but was soon to be known for a few years as North Virginia, and always thereafter as New England. It was he who first wrote upon the map the names Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard, and the Elizabeth Islands in what we call Buzzard's Bay. His return to England was the occasion of a fresh and strong renewal of interest in the business of what Hakluyt called "western planting." The voyage of Martin Pring to North Virginia, at the expense of sundry Bristol merchants, followed in 1603, and at the same time Bartholomew Gilbert, son of Sir Humphrey, coasted the shores of Chesapeake Bay, and was slain by the Indians with several of his men. Early in 1605 Captain George Weymouth set out in a vessel equipped by the Earl of Southampton, Lord Arundel of Wardour, and Sir Ferdinando Gorges, governor of the garrison at Plymouth. After spending a month in North Virginia, Weymouth returned to England with five captive Indians, and the popular interest aroused by his arrival surpassed that which had been felt upon former occasions.

"Eastward Ho!"

The excitement over Virginia was promptly reflected upon the stage. The comedy of "Eastward Ho," written by Chapman and Marston, with contributions from Ben Jonson, was acted in 1605 and published in the autumn of that year. The title is a survival of forms of speech current when America was believed to be a part of the oriental world. Some extracts from this play will serve to illustrate the popular feeling. In the second act old Security, the money lender, is talking with young Frank Quicksilver about the schemes of Sir Petronel Flash. Quicksilver says, "Well, dad, let him have money; all he could anyway get is bestowed on a ship, nowe bound for Virginia." Security replies, "Now a frank gale of wind go with him, Master Frank! We have too few such knight adventurers. Who would not sell away competent certainties to purchase (with any danger) excellent uncertainties? Your true knight venturer ever does it." In the next act a messenger enters.

Messenger. Sir Petronel, here are three or four gentlemen desire to speak with you.

Petronel. What are they?

Quicksilver. They are your followers in this voyage, knight captain Seagull and his associates; I met them this morning and told them you would be here.

Petronel. Let them enter, I pray you....

Enter Seagull, Spendall, and Scapethrift.

Seagull. God save my honourable colonel!

Petronel. Welcome, good Captain Seagull and worthy gentlemen; if you will meet my friend Frank here and me at the Blue Anchor tavern, by Billingsgate, this evening, we will there drink to our happy voyage, be merry, and take boat to our ship with all expedition....

Act III., Scene 2. Enter Seagull, Spendall, and Scapethrift in the Blue Anchor tavern, with a Drawer.

Seagull. Come, drawer, pierce your neatest hogsheads, and let's have cheer,—not fit for your Billingsgate tavern, but for our Virginian colonel; he will be here instantly.

Drawer. You shall have all things fit, sir; please you have any more wine?

Spendall. More wine, slave! whether we drink it or no, spill it, and draw more.

Scapethrift. Fill all the pots in your house with all sorts of liquor, and let 'em wait on us here like soldiers in their pewter coats; and though we do not employ them now, yet we will maintain 'em till we do.

Drawer. Said like an honourable captain; you shall have all you can command, sir. [Exit Drawer.

Seagull. Come boys, Virginia longs till we share the rest of her....

Spendall. Why, is she inhabited already with any English?

Seagull. A whole country of English is there, bred of those that were left there in '79 [Here our dramatist's date is wrong; White's colony, left there in 1587, is meant]; they have married [continues Seagull] with the Indians ... [who] are so in love with them that all the treasure they have they lay at their feet.

Scapethrift. But is there such treasure there, Captain, as I have heard?

Seagull. I tell thee, gold is more plentiful there than copper is with us; and for as much red copper as I can bring I'll have thrice the weight in gold. Why, man, all their dripping-pans ... are pure gold; and all the chains with which they chain up their streets are massy gold; all the prisoners they take are fettered in gold; and for rubies and diamonds they go forth on holidays and gather 'em by the seashore to hang on their children's coats, and stick in their children's caps, as commonly as our children wear saffron-gilt brooches and groats with holes in 'em.

Scapethrift. And is it a pleasant country withal?

Seagull. As ever the sun shined on: temperate, and full of all sorts of excellent viands; wild boar is as common there as our tamest bacon is here; venison as mutton. And then you shall live freely there, without sergeants, or courtiers, or lawyers.... Then for your means to advancement, there it is simple and not preposterously mixed. You may be an alderman there, and never be scavenger; you may be any other officer, and never be a slave. You may come to preferment enough, ... to riches and fortune enough, and have never the more villainy nor the less wit. Besides, there we shall have no more law than conscience, and not too much of either; serve God enough, eat and drink enough, and enough is as good as a feast.

Spendall. Gods me! and how far is it thither?

Seagull. Some six weeks sail, no more, with any indifferent good wind. And if I get to any part of the coast of Africa, I'll sail thither with any wind; or when I come to Cape Finisterre, there's a fore-right wind continual wafts us till we come to Virginia. See, our colonel's come.

Enter Sir Petronel Flash with his followers.

Sir Petronel. We'll have our provided supper brought aboard Sir Francis Drake's ship that hath compassed the world, where with full cups and banquets we will do sacrifice for a prosperous voyage.[29]

Zuñiga's report to Philip III.

The great popularity of this play, both on the stage and in print,—for it went through four editions between September and Christmas,—is an indication of the general curiosity felt about Virginia. The long war with Spain had lately been brought to an end by the treaty of 1604. It had left Spain so grievously weakened that the work of encroaching upon her American demesnes was immeasurably easier than in the days when Hawkins began it and Elizabeth connived at it. In a cipher despatch from the Spanish ambassador Zuñiga to his sovereign, Philip III., dated London, March 16, 1606, N. S., mention is made of an unpalatable scheme of the English: "They also propose to do another thing, which, is to send five or six hundred men, private individuals of this kingdom, to people Virginia in the Indies, close to Florida. They sent to that country some small number of men in years gone by, and having afterwards sent again, they found a part of them alive."[30] In this reference to White's colony the Spaniard is of course mistaken; no living remnant was ever found. He goes on to say that the principal leader in this business is Sir John Popham, Lord Chief Justice of England, who is a terrible Puritan; and when reminded that this enterprise is an encroachment upon Spanish territory and a violation of the treaty, this astute judge says that he is only undertaking it in order to clear England of thieves and get them drowned in the sea. I have not yet complained of this to the king, says Zuñiga, but I shall do so.

ILLVSTRI VIRO, DOMINO PHILIPPO SIDNÆO
MICHAEL LOK CIVIS LONDINENSIS
HANC CHARTAM DEDICABAT 1582

First charter of Virginia, 1606.

The "Sea of Verrazano".

It was very soon after this despatch, on April 10, O. S., that James I. issued the charter under which England's first permanent colony was established. This memorable document begins by defining the territorial limits of Virginia, which is declared to extend from the 34th to the 45th parallel of latitude, and from the seashore one hundred miles inland. In a second charter, issued three years later, Virginia is described as extending from sea to sea, that is, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. It is not likely that the king and his advisers understood the westward extension of the grant, as here specified, to be materially different from that mentioned in the first charter. The width of the continent between Chesapeake Bay and the valley of the St. Lawrence was supposed to be no greater than from one to two hundred miles. It is true that before the middle of the sixteenth century the expeditions of Soto and Coronado had proved the existence of a continuous mass of land from Florida to California, but many geographers believed that this continental mass terminated at the 40th parallel or even some degrees lower, and that its northern coast was washed by an enormous bay of the Pacific Ocean, called on old maps the Sea of Verrazano. The coast land from Virginia to Labrador was regarded as a thin strip separating the two oceans after somewhat the same fashion as Central America, and hence the mouths and lower reaches of such broad rivers as the Hudson and the Delaware were mistaken for straits. After one has traced the slow development of knowledge through the curious mingling of fact with fancy in the maps of Baptista Agnese published in 1536, and that of Sebastian Münster in 1540, down to the map which Michael Lok made for Sir Philip Sidney in 1582, he will have no difficulty in understanding either the language of the early charters or the fact that such a navigator as Henry Hudson should about this time have entered New York harbour in the hope of coming out upon the Pacific Ocean within a few days. Without such study of the old maps the story often becomes incomprehensible.

Northern and southern limits of Virginia.

As for the northern and southern limits of Virginia, they were evidently prescribed with a view to arousing as little antagonism as possible on the part of Spain and France. Expressed in terms of the modern map, the 34th parallel cuts through the mouth of the Cape Fear River and passes just south of Columbia, the capital of South Carolina; while the 45th parallel is that which divides Vermont from Canada. English settlers were thus kept quite clear of the actual settlements of Spaniards in Florida, and would not immediately be brought into collision with the French friars and fur-traders who were beginning to find their way up the St. Lawrence.

The twin joint-stock companies, and the three zones.

The Virginia thus designated was to be open for colonization by two joint-stock companies, of which the immediate members and such as should participate with them in the enterprise should be called respectively the First Colony and the Second Colony. The First Colony was permitted to occupy the territory between the 34th and the 41st parallels, while the Second Colony was permitted to occupy the territory between the 38th and the 45th parallels. It will thus be observed that the strip between the 38th and 41st parallels was open to both, but it was provided that neither colony should make a plantation or settlement within a hundred miles of any settlement already begun by the other. The elaborate ingenuity of this arrangement is characteristic of James's little device-loving mind; its purpose, no doubt, was to quicken the proceedings by offering to reward whichever colony should be first in the field with a prior claim upon the intervening region. The practical result was the division of the Virginia territory into three strips or zones. The southern zone, starting from the coast comprised between the mouth of the Cape Fear River and the mouth of the Potomac, was secured to the First Colony. The northern zone, starting from the coast comprised between the Bay of Fundy and Long Island Sound, was secured to the Second Colony. The middle zone, from the lower reaches of the Hudson River down to the mouth of the Potomac, was left open to competition between the two, with a marked advantage in favour of the one that should first come to be self-supporting.

The three zones in American history.

It is a curious fact that, although the actual course taken by the colonization of North America was very different from what was contemplated in this charter, nevertheless the division of our territory into the three zones just mentioned has happened to coincide with a real and very important division that exists to-day. Of our original thirteen states, those of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut were founded in the northern zone, and within it their people have spread through central New York into the Far West. In the middle zone, with the exception of a few northerly towns upon the Hudson, were made the beginnings of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland. In the southern zone were planted Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. Between the three groups the differences in local government have had much significance in the history of the American people. In the northern zone the township system of local government has prevailed, and in the southern zone the county system, while in the middle zone the mixed township-and-county system has exhibited various phases, here and there reaching a very high stage of development.[31]

Government of the two colonies.

To return to King James's charter, the government which it provided for his two American colonies was such as he believed would prove of the two simple and efficient. A Royal Council of Virginia, consisting of thirteen persons, was created in London, and its members were to be appointed by the king. It was to exercise a general supervision over the two colonies, but the direct management of affairs in each colony was to be entrusted to local resident councils. Each local council was to consist of thirteen persons, of whom one was to be president, with a casting vote. The council in London was to give the wheels of government a start by appointing the first members of the two colonial councils and designating that member of each who should serve as president for the first year. After that the vehicle was to run of itself; the colonial council was to elect its president each year, and could depose him in case of misconduct; it could also fill its own vacancies, arising from the resignation, deposition, departure, or death of any of its members. Power was given to the colonial council to coin money for trade between the colonies and with the natives, to invite and carry over settlers, to drive out intruders, to punish malefactors, and to levy and collect duties upon divers imported goods. All lands within the two colonies were to be held in free and common socage, like the demesnes of the manor of East Greenwich, in the county of Kent and the settlers and their children forever were to enjoy all the liberties, franchises, and immunities enjoyed by Englishmen in England,—a clause which was practically nullified by the failure to provide for popular elections or any expression whatever of public opinion. The authority of the colonial councils was supreme within the colonies, but their acts were liable to a veto from the Crown.

This first English attempt at making an outline of government for an English colony can never fail to be of interest. It was an experimental treatment of a wholly new and unfamiliar problem, and, as we shall hereafter see, it was soon proved to be a very crude experiment, needing much modification. For the present we are concerned with the names and characters of the persons to whom this ever-memorable charter was granted.

Persons chiefly interested in the First Colony; the London Company.

The persons interested in the First Colony, in that southern zone which had been the scene of Raleigh's original attempts, were represented by some eminent citizens of London and its neighbourhood, so that they came afterward to be commonly known as the London Company. The names mentioned in the charter are four: the Rev. Richard Hakluyt, who had lately been made a prebendary of Westminster; Sir Thomas Gates, Sir George Somers, and Captain Edward Maria Wingfield. Gates was a Devonshire soldier who had been knighted in 1596 for brave conduct in the battle of Cadiz, and had afterward served in the Netherlands. Somers was a native of Dorsetshire, and had received knighthood for eminent services as commander in several naval expeditions against the Spaniards. Captain Edward Maria Wingfield, of Stoneley Priory, in Huntingdonshire, was of a very ancient and honourable Catholic family; Queen Mary Tudor and Cardinal Pole had been sponsors for his father, which accounts for the feminine middle name; he had served in the Netherlands and in Ireland; among his near relatives, or connections by marriage, were Shakespeare's Earl of Southampton, the lords Carew and Hervey, and John Winthrop, of Groton, afterwards governor of Massachusetts. But the name which, after Hakluyt's, has been perhaps most closely identified with the London Company is that of Sir Thomas Smith, the eminent London citizen who was its first treasurer. From the time of his student days at Oxford Smith felt a strong interest in "western planting," and we have already met with his name on the list of those to whom Raleigh in 1589 assigned his trading interests in Virginia. He was knighted in 1596 for gallantry at Cadiz, was alderman and sheriff of London, and first governor of the East India Company in 1600. He was at various times a member of Parliament, served as ambassador to Russia, and was especially forward in promoting Arctic discovery. He was one of those who sent Henry Hudson in 1610 upon his last fatal voyage, and it was under his auspices that William Baffin was sailing in 1616 when he discovered that remote strait leading to the Polar Sea which has ever since been known as Smith's Sound. Few men of that time contributed more largely in time and money to the London Company than Sir Thomas Smith.

Persons chiefly interested in the Second Colony; the Plymouth Company.

The persons interested in the Second Colony, in that northern zone to which attention had recently been directed by the voyages of Gosnold, Pring, and Weymouth, were represented by certain gentlemen connected with the western counties, especially by Ferdinando Gorges, governor of the garrison at Plymouth in Devonshire, who was afterwards to be Lord Proprietor of the Province of Maine, and to play a part of some importance in the early history of New England. This company came to be known as the Plymouth Company. The four names mentioned in the charter are Raleigh Gilbert, William Parker, Thomas Hanham, and George Popham. The name of the first of these gentlemen tells its own story; he was a younger son of Sir Humphrey Gilbert and named for his uncle. William Parker was son and heir of Lord Morley, and commonly known by his courtesy title as Lord Monteagle. It was he who received the anonymous letter which led to the detection of the Gunpowder Plot, in which his wife's brother was concerned. George Popham was a nephew,[32] and Thomas Hanham was a grandson, of Sir John Popham, Chief Justice of the King's Bench. They were a Somersetshire family. In securing the charter incorporating the London and Plymouth companies nobody was more active or influential than the chief justice, whom we have seen singled out for mention by the Spanish ambassador.

Other eminent persons interested in the scheme.

Among other persons especially interested in the colonization of Virginia, one should mention George Abbot, Master of University College, Oxford, one of the translators of the common version of the Bible, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury; and Sir Julius Cæsar, member of Parliament for Westminster and Chancellor of the Exchequer, son of Julius Cæsar Adelmare, Queen Elizabeth's Italian physician; his strong interest in maritime discovery and western planting may have been due to the fact that, after the death of his father and while he was still a child, his mother married the celebrated geographer, Dr. Michael Lok. We should not forget Sir Maurice Berkeley, two of whose sons we shall meet hereafter, one of them, Sir William Berkeley, the most conspicuous figure among the royal governors of Virginia, the other, Lord Berkeley of Stratton, one of the proprietors of Carolina. An important subscriber to the company was Sir Anthony Ashley, grandfather of the famous Earl of Shaftesbury, who was also one of the Carolina proprietors; another was William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, nephew of Sir Philip Sidney and devoted friend of Shakespeare; another was Sir Henry Cary, father of the pure and high-minded statesman, Lucius, Viscount Falkland. Of more importance for Virginian history than any of the foregoing was Sir Edwin Sandys, son of Edwin Sandys, Archbishop of York. Sir Edwin was a pupil of the great Richard Hooker, and learned from him principles of toleration little understood in that age. After his travels on the continent he published in 1605 a treatise entitled "Europæ Speculum, a relation of the state of religion in ... these Western Parts of the World;" its liberal opinions gave so much offence that about four months after its publication it was burned in St. Paul's Churchyard by order of the Court of High Commission. At that very time Sandys was one of the most admired and respected members of the House of Commons, and it was on his motion that the House first began keeping a regular journal of its transactions. He was associated with Sir Francis Bacon in drawing up the remonstrance against King James's behaviour toward Parliament. In later years he was an active friend of the Mayflower Pilgrims and gave them valuable aid in setting out upon their enterprise. But his chief title to historic fame consists in the fact that it was under his auspices and largely through his exertions that free representative government was first established in America. How this came about will be shown in a future chapter. For the present we may note that at least half a dozen of his immediate family were subscribers to the London Company; one of his brothers had for godfather Sir Thomas Lucy, of Charlecote Hall, the Puritan knight who figures as Justice Shallow in the "Merry Wives of Windsor;" there were at least two intermarriages between this Sandys family and that of Lawrence Washington, of Sulgrave, ancestor of George Washington. It is pleasant to trace the various connections, near and remote, whether in blood-relationship or in community of interests and purposes, between the different personages of a great era that has passed away; for the more we come to discern in its concrete details the intricate web of associations running in all directions among the men and events of the vanished age, the more vividly is that age reproduced in our minds, the closer does it come to the present, the more keenly does it enlist our sympathies. As we contemplate the goodly array here brought forward of personages concerned in the first planting of an English nation in America, the inquiry as to what sort of men they were, for intelligence and character, is one that can be answered with satisfaction.

Expedition of the Plymouth Company; failure of the Popham Colony.

In accordance with the provisions of the charter, both London and Plymouth companies made haste to organize expeditions for planting their colonies in the New World. The London Company was the first to be ready, but before we follow its adventures a word about the Plymouth Company seems called for. On the last day of May, 1607, two ships—the Gift of God, commanded by George Popham, and the Mary and John, commanded by Raleigh Gilbert—set sail from Plymouth with a hundred settlers In August, after some exploration of the coast, they selected a site by the mouth of the Kennebec River, and built there a rude fort with twelve guns, a storehouse and church, and a few cabins. They searched diligently but in vain for traces of gold or silver; the winter brought with it much hardship, their storehouse was burned down, and Captain Popham died. In the spring a ship which arrived with supplies from England brought the news of two deaths, that of Chief Justice Popham, and that of Gilbert's elder brother, to whose estates he was heir. The enterprise was forthwith abandoned and all returned to England with most discouraging reports. The further career of the Plymouth Company does not at present concern us. It never achieved any notable success. When the colonization of New England was at length accomplished it was in a manner that was little dreamed of by the king who granted or the men who obtained the charter of 1606.

Expedition of the London Company.

The expedition fitted out by the London Company was in readiness a little before Christmas 1606, and was placed under command of Captain Christopher Newport, the stout sailor who had brought in the great Spanish carrack for Raleigh. He was one of the most skilful and highly esteemed officers in the English navy. Of the three ships that were to go to Virginia his was the Susan Constant. The Godspeed was commanded by Bartholomew Gosnold, and the Discovery by John Ratcliffe. Besides their crews, the three ships carried 105 colonists. By some queer freak of policy the names of the persons appointed to the colonial council were carried in a sealed box, not to be opened until the little squadron should arrive at its destination. An important paper of instructions was drawn up for the use of the officers on landing. Hakluyt was commonly called upon to prepare such documents, and the style of this one sounds like him. The suggestions are those of a man who understood the business.[33]

Instructions to the colonists.

"When it shall please God to send you on the coast of Virginia, you shall do your best endeavour to find out a safe port in the entrance of some navigable river, making choice of such a one as runneth farthest into the land.... When you have made choice of the river on which you mean to settle, be not hasty in landing your victuals and munitions, but first let Captain Newport discover how far that river may be found navigable, that you make election of the strongest, most wholesome and fertile place, for if you make many removes, besides the loss of time, you shall greatly spoil your victuals and your casks.

Where to choose a site for a town.

"But if you choose your place so far up as a bark of 50 tons will float, then you may lay all your provisions ashore with ease, and the better receive the trade of all the countries about you in the land; and such a place you may perchance find a hundred miles from the river's mouth, and the further up the better, for if you sit down near the entrance, except it be in some island that is strong by nature, an enemy that may approach you on even ground may easily pull you out; and [i. e. but] if he be driven to seek you a hundred miles the [i. e. in] land in boats, you shall from both sides of the river where it is narrowest, so beat them with your muskets as they shall never be able to prevail against you."

That the enemy in the writer's mind was the Spaniard is clearly shown by the next paragraph, which refers expressly to the massacre of the Huguenot colony in Florida and the vengeance taken by Dominique de Gourgues.

Precautions against a surprise.

"And to the end that you be not surprised as the French were in Florida by Melindus [i. e. Menendez] and the Spaniard in the same place by the French, you shall do well to make this double provision: first erect a little store at the mouth of the river that may lodge some ten men, with whom you shall leave a light boat, that when any fleet shall be in sight they may come with speed to give you warning. Secondly, you must in no case suffer any of the native people to inhabit between you and the sea-coast, for you cannot carry yourselves so towards them but they will grow discontented with your habitation, and be ready to guide and assist any nation that shall come to invade you; and if you neglect this you neglect your safety.

You must try to find the Pacific Ocean.

"You must observe if you can whether the river on which you plant doth spring out of mountains or out of lakes. If it be out of any lake the passage to the other sea [i. e. the Pacific Ocean] will be the more easy; and [it] is like enough that out of the same lake you shall find some [rivers] spring which run the contrary way toward the East India Sea, for the great and famous rivers of Volga, Tanais, and Dwina have three heads near joined, and yet the one falleth into the Caspian Sea, the other into the Euxine Sea, and the third into the Polonian Sea.

Do not offend the natives, or put much trust in them.

"... You must have great care not to offend the naturals, if you can eschew it, and employ some few of your company to trade with them for corn and all other lasting victuals ..., and this you must do before that they perceive you mean to plant among them.... Your discoverers that pass over land with hired guides must look well to them that they slip not from them, and for more assurance let them take a compass with them, and write down how far they go upon every point of the compass, for that country having no way or path, if that your guides run from you in the great woods or desert, you shall hardly ever find a passage back. And how weary soever your soldiers be, let them never trust the country people with the carriage of their weapons, for if they run from you with your shot which they only fear, they will easily kill them [i. e. you] all with their arrows. And whensoever any of yours shoots before them, be sure that they be chosen out of your best marksmen, for if they see your learners miss what they aim at, they will think the weapon not so terrible, and thereby will be bold to assault you.

Conceal from them your weaknesses.

"Above all things, do not advertise the killing of any of your men [so] that the country people may know it. If they perceive that they are but common men, and that with the loss of many of theirs they may diminish any part of yours, they will make many adventures upon you.... You shall do well also not to let them see or know of your sick men, if you have any....

Beware of woodland converts.

"You must take especial care that you choose a seat for habitation that shall not be overburthened with woods near your town, for all the men you have shall not be able to cleanse twenty acres a year, besides that it may serve for a covert for your enemies round about.

Avoid malaria.

"Neither must you plant in a low or moist place, because it will prove unhealthful. You shall judge of the good air by the people, for some part of that coast where the lands are low have their people blear eyed, and with swollen bellies and legs, but if the naturals be strong and clean made it is a true sign of a wholesome soil.

Guard against desertion.

"You must take order to draw up the pinnace that is left with you under the fort, and take her sails and anchors ashore, all but a small kedge to ride by, lest some ill-disposed persons slip away with her."

The document contains many other excellent suggestions and directions, two or three of which will suffice for the purposes of our narrative.

Build your town carefully.

"Seeing order is at the same price with confusion it shall be advisably done to set your houses even and by a line, that your streets may have a good breadth and be carried square about your market-place, and every street's end opening into it, that from thence with a few field-pieces you may command every street throughout....

Do not send home any discouraging news.

"You shall do well to send a perfect relation by Captain Newport of all that is done, what height you are seated, how far into the land, what commodities you find, what soil, woods and their several kinds, and so of all other things else, to advertise particularly; and to suffer no man to return but by passport from the President and Council, nor to write [in] any letter of anything that may discourage others.

"Lastly and chiefly, the way to prosper and achieve good success is to make yourselves all of one mind for the good of your country and your own, and to serve and fear God, the Giver of all goodness, for every plantation which our Heavenly Father hath not planted shall be rooted out."

What Spain thought of it.

The allusion to the Florida tragedy, in this charming paper, was by no means ill considered. For in March, 1607, the King of Spain wrote from Madrid to Zuñiga in London as follows: "You will report to me what the English are doing in the matter of Virginia; and if the plan progresses which they contemplated, of sending men there and ships; and thereupon it will be taken into consideration here what steps had best be taken to prevent it."[34] A few days after this letter Philip III. held a meeting with his council to discuss measures which boded no good to Captain Newport's little company. We do not know just what was said and done, but we hardly need to be told that the temper of Spain was notably changed in the forty-two years since Menendez's deed of blood. How to ruin the Virginia enterprise without coming to blows with England was now the humbler problem for Spain to solve, and it was not an easy one.

A poet laureate's farewell blessing.

Meanwhile Newport's little fleet was half way on its voyage. It started down the Thames from Blackwall on the 19th of December, but by reason of "unprosperous winds" it was obliged to keep its moorings "all in the Downs," as in the ballad of "Black-eyed Susan," until New Year's Day, 1607, when it finally got under way. A farewell blessing was wafted to them in Michael Drayton's quaint stanzas:[35]—

"You brave heroic minds,
Worthy your country's name,
That honour still pursue,
Go and subdue,
Whilst loitering hinds
Lurk here at home with shame.

"Britons, you stay too long,
Quickly aboard bestow you,
And with a merry gale
Swell your stretched sail,
With vows as strong
As the winds that blow you.

"Your course securely steer,
West and by South forth keep;
Rocks, lee shores, nor shoals,
When Æolus scowls,
You need not fear,
So absolute the deep.

"And cheerfully at sea
Success you still entice,
To get the pearl and gold,
And ours to hold
Virginia,
Earth's only paradise!

"Where nature hath in store
Fowl, venison, and fish;
And the fruitfull'st soil
Without your toil,
Three harvests more.
All greater than you wish.

"And the ambitious vine
Crowns with his purple mass
The cedar reaching high
To kiss the sky,
The cypress, pine,
And useful sassafras.

"To whose, the Golden Age
Still nature's laws doth give;
No other cares that tend,
But them to defend
From winter's age,
That long there doth not live.

"When as the luscious smell
Of that delicious land,
Above the seas that flows
The clear wind throws
Your hearts to swell,
Approaching the dear strand.

"In kenning of the shore
(Thanks to God first given)
O you, the happiest men
Be frolic then;
Let cannons roar,
Frighting the wide heaven.

"And in regions farre,
Such heroes bring ye forth
As those from whom we came;
And plant our name
Under that star
Not known unto our north.

"And as there plenty grows
Of laurel everywhere,
Apollo's sacred tree,
You it may see,
A poet's brows
To crown, that may sing there.

"Thy voyages attend,
Industrious Hakluyt,
Whose reading shall inflame
Men to seek fame,
And much commend
To after times thy wit."

With rich omen sailed from merry England the men who were to make the beginnings of the United States of America. What they found and how they fared in the paradise of Virginia shall be the theme of our next chapter.

CHAPTER III.

THE LAND OF THE POWHATANS.

Captain John Smith.

While Captain Christopher Newport, with the ships of the London Company, is still in mid-ocean, and the seal of the king's casket containing the names of Virginia's first rulers is still unbroken, we may pause for a moment in our narrative, to bestow a few words upon the early career of the personage that is next to come upon the scene,—a man whose various and wild adventures have invested the homeliest of English names with a romantic interest that can never die. The life of Captain John Smith reads like a chapter from "The Cloister and the Hearth." It abounds in incidents such as we call improbable in novels, although precedents enough for every one of them may be found in real life. The accumulation of romantic adventures in the career of a single individual may sometimes lend an air of exaggeration to the story; yet in the genius for getting into scrapes and coming out of them sound and whole, the differences between people are quite as great as the differences in stature and complexion. John Smith evidently had a genius for adventures, and he lived at a time when one would often meet with things such as nowadays seldom happen in civilized countries. In these days of Pullman cars and organized police we are liable to forget the kind of perils that used to dog men's footsteps through the world. The romance of human life has by no means disappeared, but it has somewhat changed its character since the Elizabethan age, and is apt to consist of different kinds of incidents, so that the present generation has witnessed a tendency to disbelieve many stories of the older time. In the case of John Smith, for whose early life we have little else but his autobiography to go by, much incredulity has been expressed.[36] To set him down as an arrant braggadocio would seem to some critics essential to their reputation for sound sense. Such a judgment, however, may simply show that the critic has failed to realize all the conditions of the case. Queer things could happen in the Tudor times. Lord Campbell tells us that Sir John Popham, when he was a law-student in the Middle Temple, used after nightfall to go out with his pistols and take purses on Hounslow Heath, partly to show that he was a young man of spirit, partly to recruit his meagre finances, impaired by riotous living.[37] This amateur highwayman lived to become Chief Justice of England. The age in which such things could be done was that in which John Smith grew to manhood.

His early life.

A cruise in the Mediterranean.

A Latin entry in the parish register at Willoughby in Lincolnshire shows that he received infant baptism in the church there on the 9th of January, 1580. After the death of his parents, an irrepressible craving for adventure led him at an early age to France, where he served as a soldier for a while and afterward spent three years in the Netherlands fighting against the Spaniards. In the year 1600 he returned to Willoughby, "where within a short time, being glutted with too much company wherein he took small delight, he retired himself into a little woody pasture a good way from any town, environed with many hundred acres of woods. Here by a fair brook he built a pavilion of boughs where only in his clothes he lay. His study was Machiavelli's Art of War and Marcus Aurelius; his exercise a good horse, with lance and ring; his food was thought to be more of venison than anything else."[38] However, he adds, these hermit-like pleasures could not content him long. "He was desirous to see more of the world, and try his fortune against the Turks; both lamenting and repenting to have seen so many Christians slaughtering one another." In passing through France he was robbed of all he had about him, but his life was saved by a peasant who found him lying in the forest, half dead with hunger and grief and nearly frozen. He made his way to Marseilles, and embarked with a company of pilgrims for the Levant; but a violent storm arose, which they said was all because of their having this heretic on board, and so, like Jonah, the young adventurer was thrown into the sea. He was a good swimmer, however, and "God brought him," he says, to a little island with no inhabitants but a few kine and goats. Next morning he was picked up by a Breton vessel which carried him as far as Egypt and Cyprus. The commanding officer, Captain La Roche, who knew some of Smith's friends in France, treated him with great kindness and consideration. On their return voyage, at the entrance of the Adriatic Sea, a Venetian argosy fired upon them, and a hot fight ensued, until the Venetian struck her colours. The Bretons robbed her of an immense treasure in silks and velvets, besides Turkish gold and silver coin, as much as they could carry without overloading their own ship, and then let her go on her way. When the spoil was divided, Smith was allowed to share with the rest, and thus received £225 in coin besides a box of stuffs worth nearly as much more. After Captain La Roche, of whom he speaks with warm affection, had set him ashore in Piedmont, he made a comfortable journey through Italy as far as Naples, and seems to have learned much and enjoyed himself in "sight seeing," quite like a modern traveller. At Rome he saw Pope Clement VIII. with several cardinals creeping on hands and knees up the Holy Staircase. He called on Father Parsons, the famous English Jesuit; he "satisfied himself with the rarities of Rome;" he visited in like manner Florence and Bologna, and gradually made his way to Venice, and so on to Gratz in Styria, where he entered the service of the Emperor Rudolph II., and was presently put in command of a company of 250 cavalry with the rank of captain. On one occasion he made himself useful by devising a system of signals, and on another occasion by inventing a kind of rude missiles which he called "fiery dragons," which sorely annoyed the Turks by setting fire to their camp.

The three Turks' heads.

During the years 1601 and 1602 Smith saw much rough campaigning. The troop to which his company belonged passed into the service of Sigismund[39] Bathori, Prince of Transylvania; and now comes the most notable incident in Smith's narrative. The Transylvanians were besieging Regal, one of their towns which the Turks had occupied, and the siege made but little progress, so that the barbarians from the top of the wall hurled down sarcasms upon their assailants and complained of growing fat for lack of exercise. One day a Turkish captain sent a challenge, declaring that "in order to delight the ladies, who did long to see some court-like pastime, he did defy any captain that had the command of a company, who durst combat with him for his head." The challenge was accepted by the Christian army, it was decided to select the champion by lot, and the lot fell upon Smith. A truce was proclaimed for the single combat, the besieging army was drawn up in battle array, the town walls were crowded with veiled dames and turbaned warriors, the combatants on their horses politely exchanged salutes, and then rushed at each other with levelled lances. At the first thrust Smith killed the Turk, and dismounting unfastened his helmet, cut off his head, and carried it to the commanding general, Moses Tzekely, who accepted it graciously. The Turks were so chagrined that one of their captains sent a personal challenge to Smith, and next day the scene was repeated. This time both lances were shivered and recourse was had to pistols, the Turk received a ball which threw him to the ground, and then Smith beheaded him. Some time afterward our victorious champion sent a message into the town "that the ladies might know he was not so much enamoured of their servants' heads, but if any Turk of their rank would come to the place of combat to redeem them, he should have his also upon the like conditions, if he could win it." The defiance was accepted. This time the Turk, having the choice of weapons, chose battle-axes and pressed Smith so hard that his axe flew from his hand, whereat loud cheers arose from the rampart; but with a quick movement of his horse he dodged his enemy's next blow, and drawing his sword gave him a fearful thrust in the side which settled the affair; in another moment Smith had his head. At a later time, after Prince Sigismund had heard of these exploits, he granted to Smith a coat-of-arms with three Turks' heads in a shield.

The entry in the Heralds' College.

This story forcibly reminds us that the Middle Ages, which had completely passed away from France and Italy, the Netherlands and England, still survived at the beginning of the seventeenth century in the eastern parts of Europe. In the Middle Ages such "court-like pastime," in the intervals of relaxation from more serious warfare, was not unfashionable. Still, though the incidents are by no means incredible, the story has enough of the look of an old soldier's yarn to excuse a moment's doubt of it. Surely here if anywhere Smith may seem to be drawing the long bow. But at the Heralds' College in London, in the official register of grants of arms, there is an entry in Latin which does not sustain such a doubt. It is the record of a coat-of-arms granted by Sigismund Bathori, Prince of Transylvania, "to John Smith, captain of 250 soldiers, etc. ... in memory of three Turks' heads which with his sword before the town of Regal he did overcome, kill, and cut off, in the province of Transylvania."[40] The document on record, which contains this mention of the grant, is a letter of safe conduct dated December 9, 1603, signed by Sigismund at Leipsic and given by him to Smith. The entry is duly approved, and the genuineness of Sigismund's seal and signature certified, by Sir William Segar, Garter King at Arms. Some critics have suggested that Smith may have imposed upon Segar with a bogus document, and since the entry at the Heralds' College was made in 1625, it is urged that such a long delay in registering invests the whole affair with suspicion.

Farnese's manuscript history.

The document, however, cannot be thus summarily set aside. In the year 1625 Rev. Samuel Purchas published the second volume of his delightful Pilgrimes,[41] and in the course of it he devotes several pages to Captain Smith's adventures in the east of Europe, including the story of the three Turks as above given. Purchas's authority for the story was "a Booke intituled The Warres of Transylvania, Wallachi, and Moldavia," written in Italian by Francesco Farnese, secretary to Prince Sigismund. This history seems never to have been published in its original form, and the manuscript is now apparently lost,[42] but there can be no doubt that Purchas had it, or a copy of it, in his hands about 1623. Smith's own book entitled "True Travels" was not published until 1629, so that our original authority for this passage at arms is not Smith himself, but one of Prince Sigismund's secretaries, who first told the story of the English captain's exploit in a book written for Italian readers. To the flippant criticism which treats Smith as a vapouring braggart, this simple fact is a staggering blow between the eyes. Let me add that in his way of telling his tale there is no trace of boastfulness.[43] For freedom from egotistic self-consciousness Smith's writings remind me strongly of such books as the Memoirs of General Grant. Inaccuracies that are manifest errors of memory now and then occur, prejudices and errors of judgment here and there confront us, but the stamp of honesty I find on every page.

Smith is sold as a slave,

At the bloody battle of Rothenthurm, November 18, 1602, Smith was taken prisoner and sold into slavery. At Constantinople the lady Charatza Tragabigzanda, into the service of whose family he passed, was able to talk with him in Italian and treated him with kindness. One can read between the lines that she may perhaps have cherished a tender feeling for the young Englishman, or that he may have thought so. It would not have been strange. Smith's portrait, as engraved and published during his lifetime, is that of an attractive and noble-looking man. His brief narrative does not make it clear how he regarded the lady, or what relations they sustained to each other, but she left an abiding impression upon his memory. When in 1614 he explored the coast of New England he gave the name Tragabigzanda to the cape which Prince Charles afterwards named Cape Anne, and the three little neighbouring islands he called the Turks' Heads.

and cruelly treated.

His escape,

and return to England.

The narrative is far from satisfying us as to the reasons why Smith was sent away from Constantinople. To the east of the Sea of Azov, and bordering on the Cossack country, was a territory which Gerard Mercator calls Nalbrits, and Timour, the Pasha of Nalbrits, was brother to the lady Tragabigzanda. Thither she sent him, with a request that he should be well treated; but the rude Pasha paid no heed to his sister's message, and our young hero was treated as badly as the other slaves, of whom this tyrant had many. "Among these slavish fortunes," says Smith, "there was no great choice; for the best was so bad, a dog could hardly have lived to endure [it]." He was dressed in the skin of a wild beast, had an iron collar fastened around his neck, and was cuffed and kicked about until he grew desperate. One day, as he was threshing wheat in a lonely grange more than a league distant from Timour's castle, the Pasha came in and reviled and struck him, whereupon Smith suddenly knocked him down with his threshing-stick and beat his brains out. Then he stripped the body and hid it under the straw, dressed up in the dead man's clothes and mounted his horse, tied a sack of grain to his saddle-bow, and galloped off into the Scythian desert. The one tormenting fear was of meeting some roving party of Turks who might recognize the mark on his iron collar and either send him back to his late master's place or enslave him on their own account. But in sixteen days of misery he saw nobody; then he arrived at a Russian fortress on the Don and got rid of his badge of slavery. He was helped on his way from one Russian town to another, and everywhere treated most kindly. Through the Polish country he went, finding by the wayside much mirth and entertainment, and then through Hungary and Bohemia, until at length he reached Leipsic, where he found Prince Sigismund. It was then, in December, 1603, that he obtained the letter of safe conduct already mentioned. In the course of the next year Smith travelled in Germany, France, Spain, and Morocco, and after some further adventures made his way back to England in the nick of time for taking part in the enterprise projected by the London Company. Meeting with Newport and Gosnold, and other captains who had visited the shores of America, it was natural that his strong geographical curiosity should combine with his love of adventure to urge him to share in the enterprise.

The smoke of controversy.

The brevity of Smith's narrations now and then leaves the story obscure. Like many another charming old writer, he did not always consult the convenience of the historians of a later age. So much only is clear, that during the voyage across the Atlantic the seeds of quarrel were sown which bore fruit in much bitterness and wrangling after the colonists had landed. Indeed, after nearly three centuries some smoke of the conflict still hovers about the field. To this day John Smith is one of the personages about whom writers of history are apt to lose their tempers. In recent days there have been many attempts to belittle him, but the turmoil that has been made is itself a tribute to the potency and incisiveness of his character. Weak men do not call forth such belligerency. Amid all the conflicting statements, too, there comes out quite distinctly the contemporary recognition of his dignity and purity. Never was warrior known, says one old writer, "from debts, wine, dice, and oaths so free;"[44] a staunch Puritan in morals, though not in doctrine.

A tedious voyage.

Arrival in Chesapeake Bay.

Founding of Jamestown; Wingfield chosen president.

Captain Newport's voyage was a long one, for he followed the traditional route, first running down to the Canary Islands and then following Columbus's route, wafted by the trade-wind straight across to the West Indies. It seems strange that he should have done so, for the modern method of great-circle sailing,—first practised on a great scale by Americus Vespucius, in 1502, in his superb voyage of 4,000 miles in 33 days, from the ice-clad island of South Georgia to Sierra Leone,[45]—this more scientific method had lately been adopted by Captain Gosnold, who in 1602 crossed directly from the English Channel to Cape Cod. As Gosnold was now second in command in this expedition to Virginia, it would seem as if the shorter route might once more have been tried to advantage. So many weeks upon the ocean sadly diminished the stock of provisions. In the course of the voyage some trouble arose between Smith and Wingfield, and while they were stopping at Dominica, on the 24th of March, an accusation of plotting mutiny was brought against the former, so that he was kept in irons until the ships reached Virginia. After leaving the West Indies they encountered bad weather and lost their reckoning, but the 26th of April brought them to the cape which was forthwith named Henry, after the Prince of Wales, as the opposite cape was afterwards named for his younger brother, Prince Charles. A few of the company ventured on shore, where they were at once attacked by Indians and two were badly wounded with arrows. That evening the sealed box was opened, and it was found that Bartholomew Gosnold, Edward Wingfield, John Smith, John Ratcliffe, John Martin, and George Kendall were appointed members of the Council,—six in all, of whom the president was to have two votes. As the ships proceeded into Hampton Roads after so much stress of weather, they named the promontory at the entrance Point Comfort.[46] The name of the broad river which the voyagers now entered speaks for itself. They scrutinized the banks until they found a spot which seemed suited for a settlement, and there they landed on the 13th of May. It was such a place as the worthy Hakluyt (or whoever wrote their letter of instructions) had emphatically warned them against, low and damp, and liable to prove malarious.[47] At high tide the rising waters half covered the little peninsula, but in this there was an element of military security, for the narrow neck was easy to guard, and perhaps it may have been such considerations that prevailed. Smith says there was a dispute between Wingfield and Gosnold over the selection of this site. As soon as the company had landed here the members of the Council, all save Smith, were sworn into office, and then they chose Wingfield for their president for the first year. On the next day the men went to work at building their fort, a wooden structure of triangular shape, with a demi-lune at each angle, mounting cannon. They called it Fort James, but soon the settlement came to be known as Jamestown.[48] For a church they nailed a board between two trees to serve as a reading desk, and stretched a canvas awning over it, and there the Rev. Robert Hunt, a high-minded and courageous divine, first clergyman of English America, read the Episcopal service and preached a sermon twice on every Sunday.

The Powhatan tribe, confederacy, and head war-chief.

Smith's enemies were a majority in the Council and would not admit him as a member, but he was no longer held as a prisoner. Newport's next business was to explore the river, and Smith with four other gentlemen, four skilled mariners, and fourteen common sailors, went along with him, while the Jamestown fort was building. They sailed up about as far as the site of Richmond, frequently meeting parties of Indians on the banks or passing Indian villages. Newport was uniformly kind and sagacious in his dealings with the red men, and they seemed quite friendly. These were Algonquins, of the tribe called Powhatans, and the natives who had assaulted the English at Cape Henry belonged to a hostile tribe, so that that incident furnished a bond of sympathy between the Powhatans and the white men. After a few days they reached the village called Powhatan (i.e. "Falling Waters"), which Thomas Studley, the colonial storekeeper, describes as consisting of about a dozen houses "pleasantly seated on a hill." Old drawings indicate that they were large clan houses, with framework of beams and covering of bark, similar in general shape though not in all details to the long houses of the Iroquois. The Powhatans seem to have been the leading or senior tribe in a loose confederacy. Their principal village was called Werowocomoco, situated on the north side of the York River, about fifteen miles northeast from Jamestown as the crow flies. The place is now called Putin Bay, a name which is merely a corruption of Powhatan. At Werowocomoco dwelt the head war-chief of the tribe, by name Wahunsunakok, but much more generally known by his title as The Powhatan, just as the head of an Irish or Scotch clan is styled The O'Neill or The MacGregor. Newport and Smith, hearing that The Powhatan was a chief to whom other chiefs were in a measure subordinate, spoke of him as the emperor and the subordinate chiefs as kings, a grotesque terminology which was natural enough at that day but which in the interest of historical accuracy it is high time for modern writers to drop.[49]

When Newport and Smith returned to Jamestown, they found that it had been attacked by a force of 200 Indians. Wingfield had beaten them off, but one Englishman was killed and eleven were wounded. In the course of the next two weeks these enemies were very annoying; they would crouch in the tall grass about the fort and pick off a man with their barbed stone-tipped arrows. Hakluyt had warned the settlers against building near the edge of a wood;[50] it seems strange that bitter experience was needed to teach them that danger might lurk in long grass. Presently some of their new acquaintances from the Powhatan tribe came to the fort and told Newport that the assailants were from a hostile tribe against which they would willingly form an alliance; and they furthermore advised him to cut his grass, which seems to prove that they were sincere in what they said.

Newport sails for England June 22, 1607.

Suffering of the colonists.

Percy's account.

Smith now demanded a trial on the charges which had led to his imprisonment. In spite of objections from Wingfield a jury was granted, and Smith was acquitted of all the charges; so that on the 10th of June he was allowed to take his seat in the Council. On the 15th the fort was finished, and on the 22d Captain Newport sailed for England with a cargo of sassafras and fine wood for wainscoting. He took the direct route homeward, for need was now visibly pressing. He promised to be back in Virginia within twenty weeks, but all the food he could leave in the fort was reckoned to be scarcely enough for fifteen weeks, so that the company were put upon short rations. According to Studley, 105 persons were left at Jamestown, of whom besides the 6 councillors, the clergyman and the surgeon, there were mentioned by name 29 gentlemen, 6 carpenters, 1 mason, 2 bricklayers, 1 blacksmith, 1 sailor, 1 drummer, 1 tailor, 1 barber, 12 labourers, and 4 boys, with 38 whom he neither names or classifies but simply mentions as "divers others." The food left in store for this company was not appetizing. After the ship had gone, says Richard Potts, "there remained neither tavern, beer-house, nor place of relief but the common kettle; ... and that was half a pint of wheat and as much barley, boiled with water, for a man a day; and this, having fried some 26 weeks in the ship's hold, contained as many worms as grains.... "Our [only] drink was water.... Had we been as free from all sins as gluttony and drunkenness, we might have been canonized for saints."[51] Chickens were raised, but not enough for so many mouths, and as there were no cattle or sheep a nourishing diet of meat and milk was out of the question. Nor do we find much mention of game, though there were some who warded off the pangs of starvation by catching crabs and sturgeon in the river. With such inadequate diet, with unfamiliar kinds of labour, and with the frightful heat of an American summer, the condition of the settlers soon came to be pitiable. Disease soon added to their sufferings. Fevers lurked in the air of Jamestown. Before the end of September more than fifty of the company were in their graves. The situation is graphically described by one of the survivors, the Hon. George Percy, brother of the Earl of Northumberland: "There were neuer Englishmen left in a forreigne Countrey in such miserie as wee were in this new discouered Virginia. Wee watched euery three nights, lying on the bare ... ground, what weather soeuer came; [and] warded all the next day; which brought our men to bee most feeble wretches. Our food was but a small Can of Barlie sodden in water to fiue men a day. Our drink cold water taken out of the River; which was at a floud verie salt: at a low tide full of slime and filth; which was the destruction of many of our men. Thus we lived for the space of fiue months in this miserable distresse, not hauing fiue able men to man our Bulwarkes upon any occasion. If it had not pleased God to haue put a terrour in the Sauages hearts, we had all perished by those vild and cruell Pagans, being in that weake estate as we were; our men night and day groaning in every corner of the Fort most pittiful to heare. If there were any conscience in men, it would make their harts to bleed to heare the pitifull murmurings and outcries of our sick men without reliefe, euery night and day for the space of sixe weekes: some departing out of the World, many times three or foure in a night; in the morning their bodies being trailed out of their Cabines like Dogges, to be buried. In this sort did I see the mortalitie of diuers of our people,"[52]

Quarrels.

Wingfield deposed; Ratcliffe chosen president, Sept., 1607.

In such a state of things our colonists would have been more than human had they shown very amiable tempers. From the early wanderings of the Spaniards in Darien down to the recent marches of Stanley in Africa, men struggling with the wilderness have fiercely quarrelled. The fever at Jamestown carried off Captain Gosnold in August, and after his death the feud between Smith's friends and Wingfield's flamed up with fresh virulence. Both gentlemen have left printed statements, and in our time the quarrel is between historians as to which to believe. Perhaps it is Smith's detractors who are just at this moment the more impetuous and implacable, appealing as they do to the churlish feeling that delights in seeing long-established reputations assailed. Such writers will tell you as positively as if there could be no doubt about it, that Smith was engaged in a plot with two other members of the Council to depose Wingfield from his presidency and establish a "triumvirate" over that tiny woodland company. Others will assert, with equal confidence, that Wingfield was a tyrant whose ruthless rule became insupportable. A perusal of his "Discourse of Virginia," written in 1608 in defence of his conduct, should make it clear, I think, that he was an honourable gentleman, but ill fitted for the trying situation in which he found himself. To control the rations of so many hungry men was no pleasant or easy matter. It was charged against Wingfield that he kept back sundry dainties, and especially some wine and spirits for himself and a few favoured friends; but his quite plausible defence is that he reserved two gallons of sack for the communion table and a few bottles of brandy for extreme emergencies, but the other members of the Council, whose flasks were all empty, "did long for to sup up that little remnant!"[53] At length a suspicion arose that he intended to take one of the small vessels that remained in the river and abandon the colony. Early in September the Council deposed him and elected John Ratcliffe in his place. A few days later Wingfield was condemned to pay heavy damages to Smith for defaming his character. "Then Master Recorder," says poor Wingfield, "did very learnedly comfort me that if I had wrong I might bring my writ of error in London; whereat I smiled.... I tould Master President I ... prayed they would be more sparing of law vntill wee had more witt or wealthe."[54]

Execution of a member of the Council.

An awful dignity hedged about the sacred person of the president of that little colony of fifty men. One day President Ratcliffe beat James Reed, the blacksmith, who so far forgot himself as to strike back, and for that heinous offence was condemned to be hanged; but when already upon the fatal ladder, and, so to speak in extremis, like Reynard the Fox, the resourceful blacksmith made his peace with the law by revealing a horrid scheme of mutiny conceived by George Kendall, a member of the Council. Of the details of the affair nothing is known save that Kendall was found guilty, and instead of a plebeian hanging there was an aristocratic shooting. In telling the story Wingfield observes that if such goings-on were to be heard of in England, "I fear it would drive many well-affected myndes from this honourable action of Virginia."

Smith is captured by Opekankano,

Wingfield's pamphlet freely admits that Smith's activity in trading with the Indians for corn was of great service to the suffering colony. With the coming of autumn so many wild fowl were shot that the diet was much improved. On the 10th of December Smith started on an exploring expedition up the Chickahominy River. Having gone as far as his shallop would take him, he left seven men to guard it while he went on in a canoe with only two white men and two Indian guides. This little party had arrived at White Oak Swamp, or somewhere in that neighbourhood, when they were suddenly attacked by 200 Indians led by Opekankano, a brother of The Powhatan. Smith's two comrades were killed, and he was captured after a sturdy resistance, but not until he had slain two Indians with his pistol. It was quite like the quick-witted man to take out his ivory pocket compass, and to entertain the childish minds of the barbarians with its quivering needle which they could plainly see through the glass, but, strange to say, could not feel when they tried to touch it. Very like him it was to improve the occasion with a brief discourse on star craft, eked out no doubt with abundant gesticulation, which may have led his hearers to regard him as a wizard. There seems to have been a difference of opinion among them. They tied Smith to a tree, and the fate of Saint Sebastian seemed in store for him, when Opekankano held up the compass; then the captive was untied, and they marched away through the forest, taking him with them.

who takes him to Werowocomoco, Jan., 1608.

It is not at all clear why the red men should have made this attack. Hitherto the Powhatans had seemed friendly to the white men and desirous of an alliance with them. There is a vague traditional impression that Opekankano was one of a party opposed to such a policy; so that his attitude might remind us of the attitude of Montezuma's brother Cuitlahuatzin toward the army of Cortes approaching Mexico. Such a view is not improbable. Wingfield, moreover, tells us that two or three years before the arrival of the English at Jamestown some white men had ascended a river to the northward, probably the Pamunkey or the Rappahannock, and had forcibly kidnapped some Indians. If there is truth in this, the kidnappers may have belonged to the ill-fated expedition of Bartholomew Gilbert. Wingfield says that Opekankano carried Smith about the country to several villages to see if anybody could identify him with the leader of that kidnapping party. Smith's narrative confirms this statement, and adds that it was agreed that the captain in question was a much taller man than he. His story is full of observations on the country. Opekankano's village consisted of four or five communal houses, each about a hundred feet in length, and from the sandy hill in which it stood some scores of such houses could be seen scattered about the plain. At length Smith was brought to Werowocomoco and into the presence of The Powhatan, who received him in just such a long wigwam. The elderly chieftain sat before the fireplace, on a kind of bench, and was covered with a robe of raccoon skins, all with the tails on and hanging like ornamental tassels. Beside him sat his young squaws, a row of women with their faces and bare shoulders painted bright red and chains of white shell beads about their necks stood around by the walls, and in front of them stood the grim warriors.