The Beginners of a Nation
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Title: The Beginners of a Nation
Author: Edward Eggleston
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A HISTORY OF
LIFE IN THE UNITED STATES
THE BEGINNERS OF A NATION
A HISTORY OF THE SOURCE AND RISE
OF THE EARLIEST ENGLISH SETTLEMENTS
IN AMERICA WITH SPECIAL
REFERENCE TO THE LIFE AND
CHARACTER OF THE PEOPLE
BY
EDWARD EGGLESTON
[Illustration: Editor's logo.]
NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1896
COPYRIGHT, 1896,
By EDWARD EGGLESTON.
_TO_
_THE RIGHT HONORABLE JAMES BRYCE, M. P._
_MY DEAR MR. BRYCE_:
_In giving an account of the origins of the United States, I have told
a story of English achievement. It is fitting that I should inscribe
it to you, who of all the Englishmen of this generation have rendered
the most eminent service to the American Commonwealth. You have shown
with admirable clearness and candor, and with marvelous breadth of
thought and sympathy, what are the results in the present time of the
English beginnings in America, and to you, therefore, I offer this
volume. I need not assure you that it gives me great pleasure to write
your name here as godfather to my book, and to subscribe myself, my
dear Mr. Bryce,_
_Yours very sincerely,_
_EDWARD EGGLESTON._
PREFACE.
In this work, brought to completion after many years of patient
research, I have sought to trace from their source the various and
often complex movements that resulted in the early English settlements
in America, and in the evolution of a great nation with English speech
and traditions. It has been my aim to make these pages reflect the
character of the age in which the English colonies were begun, and the
traits of the colonists, and to bring into relief the social,
political, intellectual, and religious forces that promoted
emigration. This does not pretend to be the usual account of all the
events attending early colonization; it is rather a history in which
the succession of cause and effect is the main topic--a history of the
dynamics of colony-planting in the first half of the seventeenth
century. Who were the beginners of English life in America? What
propulsions sent them for refuge to a wilderness? What visions
beckoned them to undertake the founding of new states? What manner of
men were their leaders? And what is the story of their hopes, their
experiments, and their disappointments? These are the questions I have
tried to answer.
The founders of the little settlements that had the unexpected fortune
to expand into an empire I have not been able to treat otherwise than
unreverently. Here are no forefathers or foremothers, but simply
English men and women of the seventeenth century, with the faults and
fanaticisms as well as the virtues of their age. I have disregarded
that convention which makes it obligatory for a writer of American
history to explain that intolerance in the first settlers was not just
like other intolerance, and that their cruelty and injustice were
justifiable under the circumstances. This walking backward to throw a
mantle over the nakedness of ancestors may be admirable as an example
of diluvian piety, but it is none the less reprehensible in the
writing of history.
While the present work is complete in itself, it is also part of a
larger enterprise, as the half-title indicates. In January, 1880, I
began to make studies for a History of Life in the United States. For
the last sixteen or seventeen years by far the greater part of my time
has been given to researches on the culture history of the United
States in the period of English domination, that "good old colony
time" about which we have had more sentiment than information. As year
after year was consumed in this toilsome preparation, the magnitude of
the task became apparent, and I began to feel the fear for my work so
felicitously expressed by Ralegh, "that the darkness of age and death
would have covered over both it and me before the performance." It
seemed better, therefore, to redeem from the chance of such mishap a
portion of my work, by completing this most difficult part of the
task, in order that when, early or late, the inevitable night shall
fall, the results of my labor, such as they are, may not be wholly
covered over by the darkness.
There is always difference of opinion in regard to the comparative
fullness with which the several portions of a historical narrative
should be treated, and I can not hope to escape criticism on this
point. I have related some events with what will be considered
disproportionate amplitude of detail. But the distinctive purpose of
this work is to give an insight into the life and character of the
people, and there are details that make the reader feel the very
spirit and manner of the time. It is better to let the age disclose
itself in action; it is only by ingenious eavesdropping and peeps
through keyholes that we can win this kind of knowledge from the past.
Literary considerations should have some weight in deciding how fully
an episode shall be treated, unless the historian is content to
perform the homely service of a purveyor of the crude ore of
knowledge. I have sought to make this "a work of art as well as of
historical science," to borrow a phrase from Augustin Thierry. Some
omissions in this volume will be explained when its successors appear.
I find it an embarrassing task to make acknowledgment to those who
have assisted me; the debts that have accumulated since I began are
too many to be recorded. I must not neglect to express my grateful
remembrance of the hospitality shown to my researches during my
various sojourns in England. At the British Museum and at the Public
Record Office every facility has been extended to me, and a similar
attention was shown to my wants at other less public repositories of
books, such as the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. To Dr.
Richard Garnett, the head of the printed book department of the
Museum, I owe thanks for many personal attentions. I am also indebted
to Mr. E. M. Thompson, keeper of the manuscripts in the museum. The
late Mr. W. Noel Sainsbury, of the Public Record Office, was very
obliging. I owe most of all to the unfailing kindness of the Right
Honorable James Bryce, M. P., who found time, in the midst of his
preoccupations as a member of Parliament and his duties in high
office, to secure for me access to private stores of historical
material. Lord Edmund Fitzmaurice with generous kindness put himself
to much trouble to facilitate my examination of the manuscripts at
Landsdowne House. I am indebted to Lord Leconsfield for permission to
visit Petworth House and read there Percy's Trewe Relacion in the
original manuscript. I must ask others in England who befriended my
researches to accept a general acknowledgment, but I can not forget
their courtesy to a stranger. In common with other students I
received polite attentions during my researches in Paris at the
Bibliotheque Nationale.
In this country I owe much to the librarians of public libraries and
their assistants--too much to allow me to specify my obligations to
individuals. At the Astor, and at the Lenox, under its more recent
management, my debt has been continual for many years. Acknowledgments
are due to the officers of the Boston Public Library, the Library of
Congress, the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, and the libraries of the
New York, the Massachusetts, the Pennsylvania, the Maryland, and the
Virginia Historical Societies. To Harvard College Library and to the
New York State Library I am specially indebted; from them I have been
able to supplement my own collection by borrowing. The Brooklyn
Mercantile Library has granted me similar privileges. The New York
Mercantile Library, on the other hand, I have not found hospitable to
research.
To my generous friend Mr. Justin Winsor I owe thanks for many favors.
Dr. Thomas Addis Emmet opened his valuable collection to me, and the
late Mr. S. L. M. Barlow showed me similar kindness. My friend, Mr.
Oscar S. Straus, permitted me to use at my own desk valuable works
from his collection. There are others whose friendly attentions can be
more fitly recognized in later volumes of this series, and yet others
whom I must beg to accept this general but grateful acknowledgment.
Mr. W. W. Duffield, the Superintendent of the Coast and Geodetic
Survey, supplied the artist with the coast charts from which the maps
in this volume were drawn.
To avoid misapprehension, it is needful to say that this is not a
re-issue of anything I have heretofore produced. The lectures on the
culture history of the United States given at Columbia College and
other institutions were never written or reported. The papers on
colonial life contributed to the Century Magazine in 1882, and the
years following, were on a different plan and scale; they have merely
served the purpose of preliminary studies of the general subject. To
the editor and publishers of the Century Magazine I am obliged for
their courtesy in all affairs relating to my contract with them, and
for an arrangement which enables me to have free use of my material.
JOSHUA'S ROCK, LAKE GEORGE, _October, 1896_.
CONTENTS.
BOOK I.
_RISE OF THE FIRST ENGLISH COLONY._
CHAPTER THE FIRST.
English Knowledge and Notion of America at the Period of
Settlement 1
CHAPTER THE SECOND.
James River Experiments 25
CHAPTER THE THIRD.
The Procession of Motives 73
BOOK II.
_THE PURITAN MIGRATION._
CHAPTER THE FIRST.
Rise and Development of Puritanism 98
CHAPTER THE SECOND.
Separatism and the Scrooby Church 141
CHAPTER THE THIRD.
The Pilgrim Migrations 159
CHAPTER THE FOURTH.
The Great Puritan Exodus 188
BOOK III.
_CENTRIFUGAL FORCES IN COLONY-PLANTING._
CHAPTER THE FIRST.
The Catholic Migration 220
CHAPTER THE SECOND.
The Prophet of Religious Freedom 266
CHAPTER THE THIRD.
New England Dispersions 315
LIST OF MAPS.
(In the coast line the American maps follow the charts of
the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey; the third map
conforms to the British Ordnance Survey.)
I.--Chesapeake Bay 1
II.--James River 28
III.--The cradle of the Pilgrims 149
IV.--Coast explored by the Pilgrims 177
V.--The colony at St. Mary's 245
VI.--Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth 275
VII.--The early settlements on Narragansett Bay 296
VIII.--New England after the dispersions 343
[Illustration: Chesapeake Bay.]
BOOK I.
RISE OF THE FIRST ENGLISH COLONY.
CHAPTER THE FIRST.
_ENGLISH KNOWLEDGE AND NOTIONS OF AMERICA AT THE PERIOD OF
SETTLEMENT._
I.
[Sidenote: The Elizabethan age.]
The age of Elizabeth and James--the age of Spenser, of Shakespeare,
and of Bacon--was a new point of departure in the history of the
English race. All the conditions excited men to unwonted intellectual
activity. The art of printing was yet a modern invention; the New
World with its novelties and unexplained mysteries was a modern
discovery; and there were endless discussions and agitations of spirit
growing out of the recent reformation in religion. Imagination was
powerfully stimulated by the progress of American exploration, by the
romantic adventures of the Spaniards in the West Indies, and their
dazzling conquest of new-found empires in Mexico and Peru. It was an
age of creation in poetry, in science, and in religion, and men of
action were everywhere set on deeds of daring. The world had regained
something of the vigor and spontaneity of youth, but the credulity
and curiosity of youth were not wanting. The mind of the time accepted
and reveled in marvelous stories. The stage plays of that drama-loving
age reflected the interest in the supernatural and the eager curiosity
about far-away countries. Books of travel fitted the prevailing taste.
He who could afford to buy them regaled himself with the great folios
of Hakluyt's Voyages and Purchas his Pilgrimes. General readers
delighted in little tracts and pamphlets relating incidents of
far-away travels, or describing remote countries and the peoples
inhabiting them, or the "monstrous strange beasts" found in lands
beyond the bounds of Christendom.
[Sidenote: Credulity about America.]
[Sidenote: George Beste, First Voyage of Sir Martin Frobisher.]
America excited the most lively curiosity as a world by itself and the
least known of all the "four parts" into which the globe was then
divided. There were those, indeed, who made six parts of the world by
adding an arctic continent, which included Greenland and a vast
southern land supposed to stretch from Magellan's Strait southward to
the pole. It was easy to believe in these two superfluous continents;
they were mirages of the New World. Every great discovery excites
expectation of others like it. And in a time when vague report or
well-worn tradition counted for more than observation or experimental
knowledge, it was inevitable that current information about America
should be distorted and mixed with fable. In that age, still
pre-Baconian, men had few standards by which to measure probabilities,
and to those shut in by the narrow limits of mediaeval knowledge the
mere uncovering of a new continent whose existence contravened the
fixed beliefs of the ages was so marvelous that nothing told about it
afterward seemed incredible.
[Sidenote: Illusions of discoverers.]
[Sidenote: Note 1.]
The history of American exploration is a story of delusion and
mistake. The New World was discovered because it lay between Europe
and the East Indian Spice Islands by the westward route. Columbus,
seeking the less, found the greater by stumbling on it in the dark.
Zuan Caboto--in English, John Cabot--who is described by a
contemporary as "a Venetian fellow with a fine mind, greatly skilled
in navigation," discovered North America in 1497. But he did not exult
that he was the finder of a vast and fertile continent in which great
nations might germinate, for he believed that his landfall at Cape
Breton was within the dominions of the Grand Cham of China, and he
sailed down the coast again the next year, "ever with the intent to
find said passage to India." It was announced on his return from his
first voyage that Henry VII had "won a part of Asia without a stroke
of the sword."
[Sidenote: Note 2.]
The discovery of the Pacific by Balboa in 1513, and the voyage of
Magellan's ship across that ocean in 1520, were not sufficient to
remove the illusion that America was connected with Asia. The notion
that the New World was an Asiatic peninsula died lingeringly about the
middle of the sixteenth century; but to reach Asia was still the main
purpose of western exploration, and America was for a long time
regarded mainly as an obstruction. The belief in a passage to the
Pacific by means of some yet-to-be-discovered strait severing the
continent of America, survived far into the seventeenth century, and
the hope of coming by some short cut into a rich commerce with the
Orient led to a prying exploration of all the inlets, bays, and
estuaries on the American coast and so promoted discovery, but it
retarded settlement by blinding men to the value of the New World.
II.
[Sidenote: Frobisher.]
[Sidenote: Frobisher's Voyages, Hakl. Soc., _passim_.]
Adventure by sea became a favorite road to renown for ambitious
Englishmen in the time of Elizabeth, and the belief in a passage
through or round North America grew into a superstition. The discovery
of this strait seemed, in the phrase of George Beste, a writer of the
time, "the onely thing of the world that was left undone whereby a
notable mind might be made famous and fortunate." Sir Martin
Frobisher, who is reckoned by Camden "among the famousest men of our
age for counsell and glory gotten at sea," made three voyages in 1576
and the following years to that part of the American coast almost
under the arctic circle. He desisted from the attempt to get to China
by an arctic channel only when he had involved the "venturers" or
stockholders associated with him in heavy debts, and spent the fortune
of his wife and stepchildren, to whom "glory gotten at sea" must have
been insufficient compensation. "Sir Martin Frobisher whome God
forgive" is the phrase in which he is spoken of by his wife.
[Sidenote: Gilbert.]
[Sidenote: Haies in Hakl. Voy., 184-227.]
In the year of Frobisher's first voyage, Sir Humphrey Gilbert issued a
treatise to prove that there was a way to the East Indies round North
America. This he demonstrated by a hydra-headed argument constructed
after the elaborate fashion of that unscientific age, proving the
existence of a northwest passage, first by authority, secondly by
reason, thirdly by experience of sundry men's travels, and fourthly by
circumstance. Not content with getting to China by logic, and nothing
daunted by Frobisher's brilliant failure, Gilbert mortgaged his estate
that he might engage in attempts yet more disastrous than Frobisher's,
and lost his life during his second voyage, in 1584.
[Sidenote: Hakluyt.]
[Sidenote: Hakl. Disc. on Western Planting.]
[Sidenote: N. Y. Col. Docs. I, 16.]
About this time there appeared on the scene the famous geographer,
Richard Hakluyt, one of those men that exert a marked influence in
favor of a new movement mainly by ardor and industry. Hakluyt's fervor
was akin to enthusiasm, his belief of every story favorable to
projects for colonization, and his unwavering faith in the projects
themselves bordered on flat credulity. To men of his own time his
tireless advocacy of American exploration and colony-planting must
have seemed irksome hobby-riding. But he was the indispensable
forerunner of colonization. "Your Mr. Hakluyt hath served for a very
good trumpet," says Sidney. Believing in everything American as
unwaveringly as if his soul's salvation depended on his faith, he
believed in nothing more sublimely than in a passage to the "South
Sea" or Pacific Ocean. He seized on every vague intimation of ignorant
map-makers, on every suspicion of an explorer, on every fond tale of
an Indian that tended to lend support to the theory in hand. All
evidence was of equal weight in his scales, provided it lay on the
affirmative side of the balance. It mattered little to him where his
witnesses placed this elusive passage. In Hakluyt's mind it was
ubiquitous. The Pacific is now "on the backside" of Montreal Island,
and the great Laurentian lakes suffer a sea change; now it is reached
by a river flowing three months to the southward--that is, the
Mississippi. Then the much-sought strait is carried northward on the
authority of an old map--"a great old round carde"--shown him "by the
King of Portingall." But he had also seen "a mightie large old mappe
in parchment" which showed, as far south as latitude 40 deg., a little
neck of land "much like the streyte neck or Isthmus of Darienna." He
had seen the same isthmus on another old map "with the sea joynninge
hard on both sides as it doth on Panama." In a paper meant for private
use, he expresses solicitude that the nearness of the Pacific to
Florida shall not become known too commonly. Many years later an
injunction was granted in Holland forbidding a publisher to insert in
a map the newly discovered channel into the South Sea.
III.
[Sidenote: Ralegh.]
Both Frobisher and Gilbert made ineffectual attempts to plant colonies
in the new lands, but colony-planting held a place in their minds
quite secondary to the search for the South Sea in the north and the
finding of gold. It was only when the large and lucid mind of Sir
Walter Ralegh took up the subject seriously that the settlement of an
agricultural colony became for a while the real object of American
voyages. Ralegh sent no men to the arctic or to the wintry shores of
Newfoundland, as Frobisher and Gilbert had done. He turned to milder
latitudes, and dispatched his explorers in 1584, and his colonists in
1585, to the coast of what is now North Carolina.
[Sidenote: Ralph Lane's quest.]
[Sidenote: Note 3.]
[Sidenote: Lane's Account in Hakl. III.]
[Sidenote: Note 4.]
But the ever-mischievous South Sea delusion did not vanish when the
period of colonization was reached. Ralph Lane, the governor of
Ralegh's first colony on Roanoke Island, having inquired perhaps for
that western sea which Hakluyt had seen "on the mightie old mappe in
parchment," understood the inventive savages to say that the Roanoke
River sprang from a rock so near to a sea that the waves in storm
often dashed into this fountain, making the river brackish for some
distance below. That the story might be more interesting, they added
that there was gold there, and that the walls of a town in that land
were made of pearls. This is what the white men fancied the Indians
said; but whatever they said was spoken in a tongue of which Lane's
men had but the most scanty knowledge, if indeed it were not given
mainly by signs. Nothing dispirited by the extravagance of these
tales, Lane and some of his men set out to immortalize and enrich
themselves--like a company of children running after the pot of gold
at the end of the rainbow. While the crafty Indians were plotting the
destruction of the colonists left behind, the governor and his
followers pursued their quest until they were obliged to eat their
dogs, made palatable by seething with a dressing of sassafras leaves.
They returned, half famished and wholly disappointed, just in time to
rescue the colony from destruction. But faith is faith, and despite
his severe experience Lane went back to England believing that the
Roanoke rose near to the Bay of Mexico "that openeth out into the
South Sea." The map which the colonists brought with them when they
abandoned the country in 1586 handed down the delusion, in another
form, by showing a strait leading from the neighborhood of Port Royal
into a body of water to the westward.
IV.
[Sidenote: Seeking the Pacific on James River.]
[Sidenote: Hudson.]
[Sidenote: Dermer.]
Twenty years after the return of Ralegh's first colonists the
Jamestown company was sent to plant the germ of an English-speaking
nation in North America. Beginning with the first voyage of Columbus,
the search for a route through America had lasted a hundred and
fourteen years. No passage north of Magellan's Strait had been found,
yet a belief in the existence of such a water-way remained a part of
the geographical creed of the time. The Jamestown emigrants were
officially instructed to explore that branch of any river that lay
toward the northwest, perhaps because the charmed latitude of 40 deg.
might thus be reached. It was in carrying out this instruction that
Captain John Smith came to grief at the hands of the Indians while
looking for the Pacific in the swamps of the Chickahominy. Smith
rarely mixed his abounding romance with his geography; he is as sober
and trustworthy in topographical description and in map-making as he
is imaginative in narration. But Smith was at this time under the
influence of the prevailing delusion, and he hoped that his second
voyage up the Chesapeake would lead him into the Pacific. His belief
in a passage to the westward in latitude 40 deg., just beyond the
northward limit of his own explorations, he communicated to his friend
Henry Hudson, who was so moved by it that he sailed to America in 1609
in violation of his orders, and in seeking the strait to the South Sea
penetrated the solitudes of the picturesque river that bears his name.
The explorer Dermer was intent on winning immortality by finding a
passage to the Pacific when, in 1619, he was storm-driven into Long
Island Sound. At Manhattan Island, or thereabout, he got information
from the obliging Indians that made plain his way to the Orient. He
was very secretive about this route, which, however, seems to have
lain through Delaware Bay.
[Sidenote: Note 5.]
[Sidenote: Sandys's plan.]
[Sidenote: Note 6.]
[Sidenote: Luke Fox.]
[Sidenote: Northwest. Fox, p. 172.]
[Sidenote: Weston Documents 45 and 47 and ff.]
[Sidenote: Catlet and Lederer.]
[Sidenote: Glover, in Phil. Trans., xi 626. Comp. Perfect Descr. of
Va., 1649 and Lederer's Voyage.]
[Sidenote: Lawson's Carolina, 47.]
[Sidenote: Scot's Magazine, 1765, page 161.]
A false notion once generally accepted is able to live in some
ghostly shape after the breath is out of its body. The hope of a
passage to the Pacific by means of a strait and the belief in a
narrow isthmus in latitude 40 deg. could not long survive the increase
of knowledge that followed the settlement of Virginia and Captain
Smith's explorations. But sixteen years after the landing at
Jamestown, when these two geographical jack-o'-lanterns had ceased
to flicker, the poet George Sandys, who was secretary of the colony,
wrote that he was ready to venture his life in finding a way to the
South Sea, but this way was now to be by an overland route. About
the same time Henry Briggs, the famous Savile lecturer at Oxford,
proved to the satisfaction of many that the rivers running westward
from the Virginia mountains must reach the Pacific in about one
hundred and fifty miles. One Marmaduke Parkinson, an explorer
sailing in the Potomac, confirmed the theory of the learned
mathematician by discovering in the house of a chief a "China Boxe,"
whatever that may have been. In 1631 Luke Fox set sail by the
northwest, carrying a letter from Charles I addressed "to the
Emperor of Japan," which he probably was not able to deliver. In
1634 Captain Thomas Yong got as far as the falls of the Delaware in
the endeavor to go through the continent in latitude 40 deg.. The strait
and isthmus and northwest passage having failed, Yong was content
to go by fresh water till he should reach a Mediterranean Sea in the
heart of America, which he believed to open into both the "North
Ocean" and the South Sea. As the century advanced the fresh-water
route had in turn to be finally abandoned, and seekers after the
Pacific were fain to betake themselves to dry-shod travel, and even
to mountain-climbing, as George Sandys had proposed. A Colonel
Catlet is mentioned who reached the Alleghanies in the endeavor to
find a river flowing westward, but he was daunted by what seemed to
him almost impassable ranges of mountains that barred his way. Over
these "rocky hills and sandy desarts" scarce a bird was seen to fly.
In 1669, Lederer, a German surveyor, set out from Virginia on a
similar futile exploration. As late as 1700 the well-informed Lawson
speaks hopefully of the proximity of the Pacific to North Carolina.
This fallacy had prompted many desperate adventures, and had been
the cause of many important discoveries, in the two centuries that
it held possession of men's minds. It reached its last attenuation
in 1765, when the public prints announced that large boats were
fitting out at Quebec to try the whale-fishing in Lake Ontario, and
that "they have hopes of finding a communication by water with the
western ocean, founded on the favorable reports of some Indians, who
inform that a river runs westward many hundreds of miles as large as
the Mississippi."
V.
[Sidenote: Gold-hunting.]
[Sidenote: Hakluyt. Pref. to Va., magnified.]
[Sidenote: Pilgrimage, 795.]
As the mistake made by Columbus had left for heritage an almost
ineradicable passion for the discovery of a westward sea way to Japan
and China, so the vast treasure of gold and silver drawn by the
Spaniards from Mexico and Peru produced a belief in the English mind
that a colony planted at any place on the American coast might find
gold. Here, again, the undoubting Hakluyt and other writers after him
were ready with learned conclusions balancing on the tight rope of
very slender premises. If an Indian had been seen wearing a piece of
copper that "bowed easily," this flexibility proved it to be tarnished
gold. If a savage seemed to say in his idiom, or by gestures and other
signs, something which the puzzled newcomers took to signify that in a
country farther on the copper was too soft for use, or that it was
yellow, or that it had a good luster, what further evidence could an
ingenious writer desire of the existence of the precious metal in that
country? Purchas, the successor of Hakluyt in geographical research,
explains the divine purpose in thus endowing a heathen land with gold,
which is that the Indian race "as a rich bride, though withered and
deformed, ... might find many suitors for love of her portion," and
thus the pagans be converted. But Purchas filches both the simile and
the pious thought from Herrera, who in turn probably pilfered it with
many better things from the good Las Casas. Purchas also speaks with
more optimism than elegance of the "silver bowels and golden entrails
of the hills," as though one had but to dig into the first mountain to
be enriched.
[Sidenote: Frobisher's gold.]
[Sidenote: Early Virginia gold-hunting.]
[Sidenote: Note 7.]
Frobisher brought home from sub-arctic islands what his clumsy
assayers avouched to be "gold eure." Refining works were erected for
this stuff at Deptford to no profit, and to this day the inquisitive
student is not able to ascertain from the conflicting reports whether
there was any gold in the ore or not. The main causes of the suffering
at Jamestown during the first winter were the waste of time and the
consumption of supplies while lading the ships with the glittering
"dust mica" which is so abundant in the Virginia sands. The
worthlessness of this cargo could not weaken the hopes of those
alchemists who were able to produce gold merely by the use of
arguments. The mines in Virginia moved farther west. It wanted only
that explorers should reach the mountains. In spite of the sickness
that wasted the colony in 1610, Lord De la Warr sent an expedition to
dig gold on the upper James, but the warlike up-river tribes soon
drove the prospectors back. In 1634, Sir John Harvey sent another body
of men on the same fool's errand, though there had not been found in
all the years preceding a particle of tangible evidence that gold
existed in Virginia. But on the James, as on the Hudson, the
glistering pigment with which the Indians besmeared their faces on
occasions of display was believed to contain gold, and the places of
its procurement were sought with ludicrous secrecy.
[Sidenote: Fact and fable about America.]
[Sidenote: Ingram's story.]
[Sidenote: Note 8.]
The unfaltering faith in the existence of abundant gold on the eastern
coast of North America could not have subsisted on thin air so long if
it had not been stimulated by the almost fabulous wealth drawn from
South America by Spain. It had received encouragement also from the
tales told by adventurers returned from America, who seem to have
thought it necessary to bring back stories that would match in some
degree the prevalent beliefs about the New World. The earliest but one
of all the documents relating to America preserved among the British
state papers is the statement of one David or Davy Ingram. With a
hundred other luckless seamen he was put ashore in Mexico by Sir John
Hawkins, because the ship lacked provisions. Ingram, traveling from
tribe to tribe, achieved the notable feat of crossing the continent in
a year. In 1569 he embarked on a French ship that he found near the
mouth of the St. John River in what is now the province of New
Brunswick. It was eleven years later that Davy Ingram, at home in
England, made his statement, and the sailor's story had by that time
gained much, perhaps, by frequent telling to wonder-loving listeners.
Sometimes he relates facts with sobriety, speaking the truth by
relapse, it may be; again, he seems to be repeating tales told him by
the savages, who were habitual marvel-mongers, or weaving into the
account of what he had seen legends common in the folklore about
America that had grown up in Europe; or perchance he only falls into
an old forecastle habit of incontinent lying without provocation. The
American women are described as "wearing great plates of gold covering
their whole bodies like armor.... In every cottage pearls are to be
found, and in some houses a peck"--an assertion that had a grain of
truth in it, since the sailor no doubt mistook wampum beads for
pearls. Fireflies, in this old tar's exalted memory, are "fire
dragons, which make the air very red as they fly," while the buffalo
appears as an animal "as big as two of our oxen." The streets in one
"city" are broader than London streets, which we may readily believe.
The banqueting houses are built of crystal, "with pillars of massie
silver, some of gold." This is a fine example of the manner of a mind
afflicted with the vice of exaggeration; crystal becomes silver in the
next breath, and silver is as instantly transmuted to gold. All that
optimistic projectors sought in America--gold, silver, pearls by the
peck, and great abundance of silkworms--are obligingly supplied in
Ingram's narrative. Such tales impressed the imagination in a romantic
and uncritical age.
VI.
[Sidenote: Indian devil-worship.]
The interest in America was heightened by popular curiosity regarding
the Indians. The American savages were sometimes treated as
sun-worshipers, but they were more commonly thought to be worshipers
of devils. The prevailing belief in witchcraft, divination, and
abounding evil spirits rendered it easy for Europeans to accept the
Indian deities as supernatural beings, and to credit the pretensions
of the powwows, or Indian priests, to give knowledge of distant or
future events, to heal the sick, and even to bring rain in time of
drought. But it was observed at Plymouth that when the Pilgrims prayed
for rain it fell gently, and that the rain procured by the Indian
conjurers was violent and destructive--a rain with something devilish
about it. According to writers of the time, the demons worshiped by
the savages were able to materialize themselves on great occasions,
appearing to their votaries in some beastly form. This belief in
Indian devil-worship fitted well with the religious faith of the
period, which can hardly be described as anything but a sort of
Manichaeism dividing the government of the universe almost equally
between good and evil powers. Religionists of all schools desired to
convert these subjects of Satan, not from those philanthropic motives
that are main considerations in modern propagandism, but because their
conversion would glorify God, and yet more because it would despite
the devil. Sometimes the religious motive was incongruously supported
by hopes of commercial advantage. The navigator Davis wrote to
Secretary Walsingham that if the Indians "were once brought over to
the Christian faith they might soon be brought to relish a more
civilized kind of life and be thereby induced to take off great
quantities of our coarser woolen manufactures."
[Sidenote: Indians exhibited.]
[Sidenote: Rosier's True Relation.]
[Sidenote: Tempest, ii, 2.]
The early explorers made a practice of kidnapping Indians and
transporting them to England, where the sight of barbarians without
doublet or hose quickened the interest in projects for colonization
and adventure. In our age of commercial activity and extended
geographical knowledge one can form but a weak conception of the
excitement produced by the sight of "the Indian man and woman," no
doubt Esquimaux, brought by Frobisher. Portraits of these rarities
were made for the king and queen and others. In 1605 Weymouth brought
from the coast of Maine five kidnapped Indians, "with all their bows
and arrows" and two beautiful birch-bark canoes. "This accident,"
exclaimed Sir Ferdinando Gorges, "hath been the means of putting life
into all our plantations." Some of the savages captured at various
times were exhibited for money, and one perhaps was shown after he was
dead; at least we may venture to conjecture so much from Shakespeare's
jeer in The Tempest at the idle curiosity of the crowd. In England,
says Trinculo, "any strange beast makes a man. When they will not give
a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead
Indian." This interest in outlandish savages no doubt suggested to the
poet the creation of the monster Caliban, who probably seemed a
realistic figure to the imagination of that age.
VII.
[Sidenote: Notions about animals.]
[Sidenote: Note 9.]
[Sidenote: Evelyn's Diary, i, 277.]
The animals of the new continent excited the wonder of the people of
Europe and increased the interest in America. Regarding them, also,
the most extravagant stories were easily credited. It was recorded in
the sober Latin of Peter Martyr that the advance of Cabot's ships was
retarded by the multitude of codfish on the Newfoundland coast, and
that the bears were accustomed to catch these fish in their claws. It
is hard to recognize the familiar opossum in the description by
Purchas: "A monstrous deformed beast, whose fore part resembleth a
fox, the hinder part an ape, excepting the feet, which are like a
man's; beneath her belly she hath a receptacle like a purse, where she
bestows her young until they can shift for themselves." The humming
bird was believed to be a cross between a fly and a bird. The Hudson
River Dutch settlers went further, and named it simply "the West
Indian bee." These dainty creatures were prepared for exportation to
Europe in New Amsterdam by drying them, in Barbadoes by filling them
with sand. They were accounted "pretty delicacies for ladies, who wore
them at their breasts and girdles." Evelyn saw two preserved as great
rarities at Oxford, in 1564. A New England versifier extols
The humbird for some queen's rich cage more fit
Than in the vacant wilderness to sit.
[Sidenote: Wood's New Eng. Prospect, p. 23.]
[Sidenote: De Bry's Hariot, p. 10.]
Flying squirrels, when brought into English parks in 1608, were the
occasion of much wondering excitement. King James begged for one of
them, like a spoiled child. The skins of muskrats were esteemed for
their odor and were brought to England "as rich presents." It was
thought that musk might be extracted from this animal. Hariot, the
learned man of Ralegh's first colony, fancied that the civet cat would
prove profitable to settlers in America, but his words indicate that
he had been misled by traces of the skunk, whose perfume has never yet
come into request. Speaking of the "civet catte," he says, "in our
travails there was found one to have been killed by a salvage or
inhabitant; and in many places the smell where one had lately beene
before."
[Sidenote: Note 10.]
The raccoon, the "aroughcun" of the Virginia Indians, being a
plantigrade, was esteemed a monkey; the peccaries were called the wild
hogs of America, and were thought to have "their navels on the ridge
of their backs." Somewhere in the region of the Hudson River a beast
is described as having a horn in the middle of his forehead, from
which it would appear that the unicorn on the royal coat of arms may
have been found running at large. It is not easy to account for the
"camel mare," reported to have been seen about three hundred miles
west from the coast of New Jersey, unless it belonged to the genus
_Incubus_. The bewildering number of new creatures found in America
troubled the European scholars of that day, who were ever theological.
They were puzzled to get so many four-footed beasts and creeping
things into the compass of Noah's ark. Mercator, the Flemish
geographer, avoided this difficult embarkation by concluding that
America had been excepted from the Deluge.
VIII.
[Sidenote: An age of romance and adventure.]
Thus grotesque and misleading were many of the glimpses that Europe
got of the New World as the mists of ignorance slowly lifted from it.
These erratic notions regarding America give one an insight into the
character of the English people at the period of discovery and
colony-planting. Credulity and the romantic spirit dwell together. The
imagination in such an age usurped the place of discrimination, and
the wonderful became the probable. The appetite for the marvelous
fostered exaggeration; every man who had sailed in foreign seas
thought it shame not to tell of wonders. The seventeenth century
indeed betrayed a consciousness of its own weakness in a current
proverb, "Travelers lie by license." History and fiction had not yet
been separated. Like every other romantic age, the period of Elizabeth
and James was prodigal of daring adventure; every notable man aspired
to be the hero of a tale. English beginnings in America were thus made
in a time abounding in bold enterprises--enterprises brilliant in
conception, but in the execution of which there was often a lack of
foresight and practical wisdom.
ELUCIDATIONS.
[Sidenote: Note 1, page 3.]
See the careful and learned discussion of the Voyages of Cabot by the
late Charles Deane, in Winsor's Narrative and Critical History of
America, vol. iii. Mr. Deane effectually destroys the delusion which
so long gave the credit of this discovery, or a part of it, to
Sebastian Cabot, the son of the real discoverer. Mr. Henry Harrisse,
in John Cabot, the Discoverer of America, and in an earlier work, Jean
et Sebastien Cabot, etc., reaches the same conclusion. He even doubts
Sebastian's presence in the expeditions of his father, John Cabot,
etc., p. 48.
[Sidenote: Note 2, page 4.]
Yet George Beste, who sailed with Frobisher, says: "Now men neede no
more contentiously strive for roume to build an house on, or for a
little turffe of ground, ... when great countreys and whole worldes
offer and reache out themselves to them that will first voutsafe to
possesse, inhabite, and till them." These countries, he says, "are
fertile to bring forth all manner of corne and grayne, infinite sortes
of land cattell, as horse, elephantes, kine, sheepe, great varietie of
flying fowles of the ayre, as phesants, partridge, quayle, popingeys,
ostridges, etc., infinite kinds of fruits, as almonds, dates, quinces,
pomegranats, oringes, etc., holesome, medicinable, and delectable"
(Frobisher's Voyages, Hakluyt Society, p. 38).
[Sidenote: Note 3, page 8.]
Ralegh, in his History of the World, book i, chap, viii, sec. xv, has
an interesting digression on the danger of trusting such
communications, and he relates an anecdote of misapprehension by this
very party sent under Grenville and Lane: "The same happened among the
English, which I sent under Sir Richard Greeneville to inhabit
Virginia. For when some of my people asked the name of that country,
one of the savages answered, '_Wingandacon_,' which is as much as to
say, as, _'You wear good cloaths,' or gay cloaths_." From this answer
it came that the coast of North Carolina was called "Wingandacon," or,
in its Latinized form, Wingindacoa, while the chief, or "king," of the
country appears in the narratives of the time as Wingina. Ralegh says
that Yucatan means merely "What say you?" and that Peru got its name
from a similar mistake.
[Sidenote: Note 4, page 8.]
I found the original of this map among the drawings made by John White
in the Grenville Collection in the British Museum. It was reproduced
to accompany a paper of mine on the Virginia Colony in the Century
Magazine of November, 1882. It excited interest among scholars, as it
was supposed to have been previously unknown. A copy was afterward
found, however, in the collection made by Dr. Kohl for the State
Department at Washington. The drawings in the Sloane MSS., British
Museum, attributed to John White by Dr. E. E. Hale, in the
Transactions of the American Antiquarian Society, iv, 21, are not
White's originals. The latter are in the Grenville Collection. See my
comparison of the two in The Nation of April 23, 1891.
[Sidenote: Note 5, page 10.]
As late as December 5, 1621, in a letter from the Virginia Company to
Governor Wyatt, these words occur: "The Conjectures of the Southwest
Passage and the piece of copper which you sent us gladly saw and
heard." This long-surviving desire for a short passage to the East
Indies is traceable to the passion that existed in Europe in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for spices, and this no doubt came
from the gross forms of cookery in that time. Anderson's Commerce, sub
anno 1504, cites Guicciardini on the great quantities of spices used,
and adds: "For in those days the people of Europe were much fonder of
spices in their cookery, etc., than they have been in later times."
The rise in the price of commodities in Elizabeth's time may have been
only apparent, but it promoted voyages looking to the extension of
commerce. Compare Holinshed, i, 274.
[Sidenote: Note 6, page 10.]
Waterhouse's Declaration of Virginia, 1622, a rare tract. Also
Purchas, iii, 892, 893, where these words are quoted from Briggs: "The
Indian Ocean, which we commonly call the South Sea, which lyeth on the
West and Northwest Side of Virginia, on the other side of the
mountains beyond our Falls [of James River] and openeth a free and
faire passage, not only to China, Japan, and the Moluccas, but also to
New Spaine, Peru, and Chili, and those rich countries of Terra
Australis not as yet discovered." It is one of many marks of practical
sagacity in Captain John Smith that after his experience on the
American coast he was able to form views of the geography of the
continent almost a century in advance of the opinions held in his
time. He speaks of "those large Dominions which doe stretch themselves
into the main God knoweth how many thousand miles" (Generall Historie,
book vi).
[Sidenote: Note 7, page 14.]
So late as 1626, Fleet, the only survivor of the massacre of Spelman's
party, after spending five years in captivity among the Virginia
Indians, persuaded a London merchant to intrust him with a vessel for
the Indian trade by his stories of the "powder of gold" with which the
savages made a paint for their faces. To this story he added a
statement that he had often been in sight of the South Sea or Pacific
Ocean. Fleet's Journal may be found in Scharf's History of Maryland,
i, 13, etc. Van der Donck relates, in his description of New
Netherland, that Kieft, the director of New Netherland, and Van der
Donck, found an Indian painting himself and bought the pigment, which
being burned in a crucible yielded two pieces of gold. (See the
translation in New York Historical Society Collection, ii, 161, 162.)
A bag of specimens of the precious ores of the Hudson River region was
sent to Holland by the ill-fated ship that sailed out of New Haven in
1645. The ship was seen no more except by the New Haven people, who
beheld its specter in the sky. Of the Hudson River gold mines no
specter has ever been seen in earth or sky.
[Sidenote: Note 8, page 15.]
I have quoted from Mr. Sainsbury's abstract of the fragment in the
British Public Record Office, but a similar statement by Ingram was
inserted in Hakluyt's Divers Voyages in 1589. It was omitted in the
later edition as too incredible even for Hakluyt. See also a paper by
Dr. De Costa, in the Magazine of American History, March, 1883, on the
copy of Ingram's Statement preserved in the Bodleian Library. Ingram's
story, and others like it, seem to be satirized in the play of
Eastward, Ho! by Chapman, Jonson, and Marston. The assertion of
Seagull, in the play, that "they have in their houses scowpes,
buckets, and diverse other vessels of massie silver," would seem at
first sight to be an unmistakable allusion to the extravagance of
Ingram's narrative. But in the second edition of Bullein's A Dialogue
against the Fever Pestilence, which was published in 1573, one Mendax,
describing an unknown land, declares that "their pottes, panns, and
all vessells are cleane gold garnished with diamondes." This shows
that Ingram's story had probably absorbed certain traits from what I
have ventured to call European folklore tales about America--folk
tales originally applied to the Orient, no doubt; echoes of Sir John
Mandeville and Marco Polo, perhaps. Of course it is just possible, but
not probable, that Bullein had heard the tales of Ingram, who had
returned three years or more before he printed his second edition. The
authors of Eastward, Ho! probably enlarged on Bullein.
[Sidenote: Note 9, page 18.]
"Unguibusque inter squamas immissis," Decade III, book vi. These
details are probably given on the authority of Sebastian Cabot, whose
veracity is not above suspicion.
[Sidenote: Note 10, page 19.]
Some of the early writers speak of "apes." Strachey calls what appears
to be a raccoon a monkey, and Brickell, as late as 1743, uses the same
word. The peccaries are recorded as in the text by the marvel-loving
Purchas, p. 805. One finds unicorns in Speed's Prospect, Description
of New York. Speed also lets us know that the buffalo was accustomed
to defend himself by vomiting "a hot scalding liquor" on the dogs that
chased it. Argall was the first Englishman to see the bison, in 1613.
Citing his letter, Purchas says, p. 943, "In one voyage ... they found
a slow kind of cattell as bigge as kine, which were good meate."
CHAPTER THE SECOND.
_JAMES RIVER EXPERIMENTS._
I.
[Sidenote: Departure of the emigrants.]
[Sidenote: Ld. Chancellor's Speech in reply to the Speaker.]
[Sidenote: A. D. 1606.]
In December, 1606, there lay at Blackwall, below London, the Susan
Constant, of one hundred tons, the Godspeed, of forty tons, and the
little pinnace Discovery, of but twenty tons--three puny ships to bear
across the wintry Atlantic the beginners of a new nation. The setting
forth of these argonauts produced much excitement in London. Patriotic
feeling was deeply stirred, public prayers were offered for the
success of the expedition, sermons appropriate to the occasion were
preached, and the popular feeling was expressed in a poem by Michael
Drayton. Even those who were too sober to indulge the vain
expectations of gold mines and spice islands that filled the
imaginations of most Englishmen on this occasion could say, as Lord
Bacon did later: "It is with the kingdoms on earth as it is with the
kingdom of heaven: sometimes a grain of mustard seed proves a great
tree. Who can tell?" On the 19th of that most tempestuous December the
little fleet weighed anchor and ran down on an ebb tide, no doubt, as
one may nowadays see ships rush past Blackwall toward the sea. Never
were men engaged in a great enterprise doomed to greater sorrows.
From the time they left the Thames the ships were tossed and delayed
by tempests, while the company aboard was rent by factious
dissensions.
II.
[Sidenote: The laws and orders.]
Those who shaped the destinies of the colony had left little undone
that inventive stupidity could suggest to assure the failure of the
enterprise. King James, who was frivolously fond of puttering in novel
projects, had personally framed a code of unwise laws and orders. The
supremacy of the sovereign and the interests of the Church were
pedantically guarded, but the colony was left without any ruler with
authority enough to maintain order. The private interest of the
individual, the most available of all motives to industry, was merged
in that of the commercial company to which Virginia had been granted.
All the produce of the colony was to go into a common stock for five
years, and the emigrants, men without families, were thrown into a
semi-monastic trading community like the Hanseatic agencies of the
time, with the saving element of a strong authority left out. Better
devices for promoting indolence and aggravating the natural proneness
to dissension of men in hard circumstances could scarcely have been
hit upon. Anarchy and despotism are the inevitable alternatives under
such a communistic arrangement, and each of these ensued in turn.
III.
[Sidenote: Character of the emigrants.]
[Sidenote: Smith's Gen. Hist., iii, c. i and c. xii.]
[Sidenote: Advertisements for Planters of New Eng., p. 5.]
[Sidenote: Comp. Briefe Declaration in Pub. Rec. Off., Sainsbury i,
66; and New Life of Va.]
[Sidenote: Essay on Plantations.]
The people sent over in the first years were for the most part utterly
unfit. Of the first hundred, four were carpenters, there was a
blacksmith, a tailor, a barber, a bricklayer, a mason, a drummer.
There were fifty-five who ranked as gentlemen, and four were boys,
while there were but twelve so-called laborers, including footmen,
"that never did know what a day's work was." The company is described
by one of its members as composed of poor gentlemen, tradesmen,
serving men, libertines, and such like. "A hundred good workmen were
better than a thousand such gallants," says Captain Smith. Of the
moral character of the first emigrants no better account is given. It
was perhaps with these men in view that Bacon declared it "a shameful
and unblessed thing" to settle a colony with "the scum of the people."
IV.
[Sidenote: The arrival.]
[Sidenote: A. D. 1607.]
[Sidenote: Percy, in Purchas, p. 1689.]
The ships sailed round by the Canaries, after the fashion of that
time, doubling the distance to Virginia. They loitered in the West
Indies to "refresh themselves" and quarrel, and they did not reach
their destination until seedtime had well-nigh passed. They arrived on
the 6th of May, according to our style. Driven into Hampton Roads by a
storm, they sailed up the wide mouth of a river which they called the
James, in honor of the king. At that season of the year the banks
must have shown masses of the white flowers of the dogwood, mingled
with the pink-purple blossoms of the redbud against the dark primeval
forest. Wherever they went ashore the newcomers found "all the ground
bespread with many sweet and delicate flowers of divers colors and
kinds." The sea-weary voyagers concluded that "heaven and earth had
never agreed better to frame a place for man's habitation."
[Sidenote: The first meetings with Indians.]
[Sidenote: Percy, in Purchas iv, pp. 1685, 1686.]
They were like people in an enchanted land--all was so new and
strange. On the first landing of a small party they had a taste of
savage warfare. "At night, when wee were going aboard, there came the
savages creeping from the Hills like Beares, with their Bowes in their
Mouthes, charged us very desperately, hurt Captain Gabrill Archer in
both hands, and a Sayler in two places of the body very dangerous.
After they had spent their arrowes, and felt the sharpness of our
shot, they retired into the Woods with a great noise and so left us."
[Illustration: James River.]
[Sidenote: A. D. 1607.]
But the newly arrived did not find all the Indians hostile. The chief
of the Rappahannocks came to welcome them, marching at the head of his
train, piping on a reed flute, and clad in the fantastic dress of an
Indian dandy. He wore a plate of copper on the shorn side of his head.
The hair on the other side was wrapped about with deer's hair dyed
red, "in the fashion of a rose." Two long feathers "like a pair of
horns" were stuck in this rosy crown. His body was stained crimson,
his face painted blue and besmeared with some glistering pigment
which to the greedy eyes of the English seemed to be silver ore. He
wore a chain of beads, or wampum, about his neck, and his ears were
"all behung with bracelets of pearls." There also depended from each
ear a bird's claw set with copper--or "gold," adds the narrator,
indulging a delightful dubiety.
[Sidenote: Purchas i, 686 and following.]
During the period of preliminary exploration every trait of savage
life was eagerly observed by the English. The costume, the wigwams,
and most of all the ingenious weapons of wood and stone, gave delight
to the curiosity of the newcomers.
V.
[Sidenote: Founding of Jamestown.]
[Sidenote: Note 1.]
[Sidenote: Relatyon of the Discovery of our River, Am. Antiq. Soc.,
iv, 61.]
The colonists chose for the site of their town what was then a
malarial peninsula; it has since become an island. The place was
naturally defended by the river on all sides, except where a narrow
stretch of sand made a bridge to the main. Its chief advantage in the
eyes of the newcomers was that the deep water near the shore made it
possible to moor the ships by merely tying them up to trees on the
river bank. Here the settlers planted cotton and orange trees at once,
and experimental potatoes, melons, and pumpkins, but they postponed
sowing grain until about the first of June in our reckoning.
[Sidenote: The winter of misery.]
[Sidenote: A. D. 1607.]
[Sidenote: Purchas, p. 1690.]
They took up their abode in hastily built cabins roofed with sedge or
bark, and in ragged tents. The poorer sort were even fain to shelter
themselves in mere burrows in the ground. Ill provided at the start,
the greater part of their food was consumed by the seamen, who
lingered to gather comminuted mica for gold. In this hard environment,
rent by faction, destitute of a competent leader and of any leader
with competent authority, the wonder is that of this little company a
single man survived the winter. "There never were Englishmen left in
any foreign country in such misery as we were in this new-discovered
Virginia," says George Percy, brother to the Earl of Northumberland. A
pint of worm-eaten barley or wheat was allowed for a day's ration.
This was made into pottage and served out at the rate of one small
ladleful at each meal. "Our drink was water, our lodgings castles in
the air," says Smith. The misery was aggravated by a constant fear of
attack from the Indians, who had been repulsed in an energetic assault
made soon after the landing of the English. It was necessary for each
man to watch every third night "lying on the cold, bare ground," and
this exposure in a fever swamp, with the slender allowance of food of
bad quality and the brackish river water, brought on swellings,
dysenteries, and fevers. Sometimes there were not five men able to
bear arms. "If there were any conscience in men," says Percy, "it
would make their hearts bleed to hear the pitiful murmurings and
outcries of our sick men without relief every day and night for the
space of about six weeks." The living were hardly able to bury the
dead, whose bodies were "trailed out like dogs." Half of the hundred
colonists died, and the survivors were saved by the Indians, who,
having got a taste of muskets and cannon in their early attack on
Jamestown, now brought in supplies of game, corn, persimmons, and
other food, to trade for the novel trinkets of the white men.
VI.
[Sidenote: Emergence of Captain John Smith.]
Peril and adversity bring the capable man to the front. The colony
proceeded, by means of the technicalities habitually used in those
days, to rid itself of its president, Wingfield, a man of good
intentions but with no talents suitable to a place of such difficulty.
Slowly, by one change and then another, the leadership fell into the
hands of Captain John Smith. During the voyage he had drawn upon
himself the jealousy of the others, probably by his boastful and
self-asserting habit of speech. When the list of councilors, till then
kept secret, was opened at Jamestown and his name was found in it, he
was promptly excluded by his associates. It was only on the
intercession of the clergyman, Hunt, that he was at length admitted to
the Council.
His paradoxical character has been much misunderstood. Those who
discredit the historical accuracy of Captain Smith's narratives
consider his deeds of no value. It is the natural result and
retribution of boasting that the real merit of the boaster is cast
into the rubbish heap of contempt along with his false pretensions.
On the other hand, those who appreciate Smith's services to the colony
in its dire extremities believe that the historical authority of such
a man must be valid.
[Sidenote: His romantic tendencies.]
His character, double and paradoxical as it is, presents no insoluble
enigma if we consider the forces of nature and of habit underlying its
manifestations. According to his own highly colored narrative, he had
fed his fervid imagination on romances of chivalry. The first natural
result in a youth so energetic as he, was that he should set out to
emulate the imaginary heroes of whom he had read. It was equally a
matter of course that a man of his vanity should exaggerate his own
adventures to the size of those that had excited his admiration. The
same romantic turn of the imagination that sent him a-wandering after
exploits in Flanders and in the wars with the Turks, in Barbary, and
in Ireland, made his every adventure seem an exploit of heroic size.
Such a man is valuable when boldness and aggressive action are in
request; to relate facts where autobiography is involved he is little
fitted.
[Sidenote: His story of his own life.]
According to Smith's own narrative, he was robbed and shipwrecked at
sea; he slew three infidel champions in single combat and cut off
their heads, just for the amusement of the ladies; he was made captive
by the Turks and escaped by slaying his master with a flail; he
encountered pirates; in the plunder of a ship he secured by the grace
of God a box of jewels; and, to round off his story, he was beloved
in romance fashion by a fair Turkish lady, one Tragabigzanda;
befriended by a Russian lady, the good Calamata; and, later, was
snatched from the open jaws of death by the devotion of the lovely
Princess Pocahontas, daughter of King Powhatan, of Virginia. What more
could one ask? Here are the elements of all the romances. But, to
crown all, he emulated the misadventure of the prophet Jonah, and he
even out-Jonahed Jonah. He got ashore by mere swimming without the aid
of a whale, when cast overboard by Catholic pilgrims to appease a
tempest. Never any other wanderer since the safe return of Ulysses
passed through such a succession of marvelous escapes as this young
John Smith. His accidents and achievements, even without exaggeration,
were fairly notable, doubtless, but they are forever obscured by his
vices of narration.
[Sidenote: Interest in colonization.]
[Sidenote: His character.]
By the time he was twenty-eight years old this knight-errant had
pretty well exhausted Europe as a field for adventure. Soon after his
return to his own land he found the navigator Gosnold agitating for a
new colony in Virginia, the scene of Ralegh's failures. That being the
most difficult and dangerous enterprise then in sight, nothing was
more natural than that Smith should embark in it. From this time to
the end of his life this really able man gave his best endeavors to
the advancement of American colonization. In counsel he was accounted
wise, and his advice was listened to with more than common deference
in the assemblies of the Virginia Company as long as the company
lasted. In labor he was indefatigable, in emergencies he proved
himself ready-witted and resourceful. His recorded geographical
observations are remarkably accurate considering his circumstances,
and his understanding of Indian life shows his intelligence. His
writings on practical questions are terse, epigrammatic, and wise
beyond the wisdom of his time. But where his own adventures or credit
are involved he is hardly more trustworthy than Falstaff. His boasting
is one of the many difficulties a historian has to encounter in
seeking to discover the truth regarding the events of an age much
given to lying.
VII.
[Sidenote: Smith's exploration and trading.]
[Sidenote: A. D. 1607, 1608.]
[Sidenote: Oxford Tract, _passim_.]
[Sidenote: Gen. Hist _passim_.]
On Smith principally devolved the explorations for a passage to the
Pacific and the conduct of the Indian trade. He was captured by the
Indians in the swamps of the Chickahominy and carried from village to
village in triumph. Contriving to secure his release from the head
chief, Powhatan, he returned to Jamestown. Nothing could have suited
better his bold genius and roving disposition than the life he
thereafter led in Virginia. He sailed up and down the bays and
estuaries, discovering and naming unknown islands, ascending great
unknown rivers, cajoling or bullying the Indians, and returning to his
hungry countrymen at Jamestown laden with maize from the granaries of
the savages. Smith and his companions coasted in all seasons and all
weather in an open boat, exercising themselves in morning
psalm-singing and praying, in manoeuvring strange Indians by
blustering or point-blank lying, and in trying to propagate the
Christian religion among the heathen--all in turn as occasion offered,
like true Englishmen of the Jacobean time.
[Sidenote: His narrative.]
Captain Smith's earlier accounts of these achievements in Virginia
seem to be nearer the truth than his later Generall Historie. As years
rolled on his exploits gained in number and magnitude in his memory.
The apocryphal story of his expounding the solar system by means of a
pocket compass to savages whose idiom he had had no opportunity to
learn is to be found only in his later writings. He is a prisoner but
a month in the narrative of the Oxford Tract of 1612, which was
written by his associates and published with his authority, but his
captivity had grown to six or seven weeks in the Generall Historie of
1624. His prosaic release by Powhatan had developed into a romantic
rescue by Pocahontas. Two or three hundred savages in the earlier
account become four or five hundred in the later. Certain Poles assist
him in the capture of an Indian chief in the authorized narrative of
Pots and Phettiplace. In the later story our hero performs this feat
single-handed. A mere cipher attaches itself sometimes to the figure
representing the number of his enemies, who by this simple feat of
memory become ten times more redoubtable than before.
[Sidenote: His service to the colony.]
[Sidenote: Oxf. Tract, p. 32. Gen. Hist., bk. iii, ch. v.]
[Sidenote: Historie of Travaile into Virginia, p. 41.]
But it does not matter greatly whether the "strangely grimmed and
disguised" Indians seen by Smith at one place on the Potomac, who,
according to the story, were shouting and yelling horribly, though in
ambuscade, numbered three or four hundred as in one account, or three
or four thousand as in his later story. To Captain Smith remains the
credit of having been the one energetic and capable man in those first
years--the man who wasted no time in a search for gold, but won from
the Indians what was of infinitely greater value--the corn needed to
preserve the lives of the colonists. In an open boat, with no
instrument but a compass, he explored and mapped Chesapeake Bay so
well that his map was not wholly superseded for a hundred and forty
years. Even Wingfield, who had reason to dislike Smith, recognizes the
value of his services; and Strachey, who had every means of knowing,
says that "there will not return from" Virginia "in hast any one who
hath bene more industrious or who hath had (Captain Geo. Percie
excepted) greater experience amongst them, however misconstruction
maye traduce here at home."
[Sidenote: Smith overthrown.]
[Sidenote: A. D. 1609.]
[Sidenote: Note 2.]
During the autumn of 1608 and the winter following Captain Smith was
sole ruler of Jamestown, all the other councilors having gone; but the
next spring there arrived five hundred new colonists inadequately
provisioned, and under two of the old faction leaders who were Smith's
mortal enemies. These were the visionary and turbulent Archer and his
follower Ratcliffe. Smith got some of the newcomers to settle at
Nansemond, and others took up their abode near the falls of the James
River. After much turmoil Smith was disabled by an accident, and his
enemies contrived to have him sent home charged, among other things,
with having "incensed" the Indians to assault the insubordinate
settlers under West near the falls, and with having designed to wed
Pocahontas in order to secure royal rights in Virginia as son-in-law
to Powhatan.
[Sidenote: His later years.]
[Sidenote: Note 3.]
He afterward explored the New England coast with characteristic
thoroughness and intelligence. What he published in his later years by
way of advice on the subject of colony-planting is full of admirable
good sense. With rare foresight he predicted the coming importance of
the colonial trade and the part to be played by the American fisheries
in promoting the greatness of England by "breeding mariners." He only
of the men of his time suspected the imperial size and future
greatness of North America. He urged that the colonies should not
annoy "with large pilotage and such like dues" those who came to trade
in their ports. Low customs, he says, enrich a people. This is a
strange doctrine in an age when foreign trade seemed almost an evil,
and false conceptions of economic principles were nearly universal.
Captain Smith's words are often pregnant with a wit whose pungency is
delightful. In mental and physical hardihood, and in what may be
called shiftiness, as well as in proneness to exaggeration and in
boastfulness, he was in some sense a typical American pioneer--a
forerunner of the daring and ready-witted men who have subdued a
savage continent.
VIII.
[Sidenote: The famine of 1609-'10.]
[Sidenote: Note 4.]
[Sidenote: A. D. 1609, 1610.]
[Sidenote: A. D. 1610.]
[Sidenote: Note 5.]
[Sidenote: Tragicall Relation, 1623. Briefe Declaration, 1624, both in
British Pub. Record Office. Percy's Trewe Relacyon, MS., Petworth
House.]
Disaster of some sort could hardly have been avoided had Captain Smith
been allowed to stay, but after his departure ruin came swiftly, and
there was no hand strong enough to stay it. The unchecked hostility of
the savages drove the outsettlers from Nansemond and the falls of the
James. The Indians found exercise for their devilish ingenuity in
torturing those who fell into their hands alive, and outraging the
dead. The brave but unwise Percy added fuel to their consuming fury by
visiting their shrine and desecrating the tombs of their chiefs. There
was now no one who could carry on the difficult Indian trade.
Ratcliffe, who had conspired to send Smith back to England, fell into
an ambuscade while emulating Captain Smith's example in trading with
Powhatan. He was tortured to death by the Indian women, and only
fifteen of his fifty men got back to Jamestown. The brood hogs of the
colony were all eaten, the dogs came next, and then the horses, which
were to have stocked Virginia, were consumed to their very hides.
Rats, mice, and adders were relished when they were to be had, and
fungi of various sorts were eaten with whatever else "would fill
either mouth or belly." An Indian slain in an assault on the stockade
was dug up after he had been three days buried, and eaten "by the
poorer sort," their consuming hunger not being embarrassed by the
restraints of gentility. From this horrible expedient it was but one
step to the digging up of their own dead for food. Famine-crazed men
even dogged the steps of those of their comrades who were not quite
wasted, threatening to kill and devour them. Among these despairing
and shiftless men there was but one man of resources. Daniel
Tucker--let his later sins as tyrant of Bermuda be forgiven--bethought
himself to build a boat to catch fish in the river, and this small
relief "did keep us from killing one another to eat," says Percy. He
seems to have been the only man who bethought himself to do anything.
One man, in the ferocity engendered by famine, slew his own wife and
salted what he did not eat at once of her flesh, but he was put to
death at the stake for this crime. Some, braving the savages, sought
food in the woods and died while seeking it, and were eaten by those
who found them dead. Others, in sheer desperation, threw themselves on
the tender mercies of the Indians and were slain. To physical were
added spiritual torments. One despairing wretch threw his Bible into
the fire, crying out in the market place that there was no God in
heaven. Percy adds, with grim theological satisfaction characteristic
of the time, that he was killed by the Indians in the very market
place where he had blasphemed in his agony. The depopulated houses,
and even the palisades so necessary for protection, were burned for
firewood by the enfeebled people, and Jamestown came presently to look
like the slumbering ruins of some ancient fortification. Fortunately,
the Indians did not think it worth while to lose any more of their men
in attacking the desperate remainder. It seemed inevitable that all
who were shut up in the Jamestown peninsula should perish of hunger in
a very few days. Of the nearly five hundred colonists in Virginia in
the autumn of 1609, there were but sixty famine-smitten wretches alive
in the following June, and hardly one of these could have survived had
help been delayed a few days longer.
IX.
[Sidenote: The arrival of Gates and Somers, 1610.]
[Sidenote: A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colony of Virginia,
1619, p.23.]
[Sidenote: Note 6.]
Relief came to the little remnant from a quarter whence it was least
expected. The emigrants of the preceding year had been sent out under
the authority of Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers. The two
leaders were jealous of each other, and for fear either should gain
advantage by prior arrival they embarked in the same ship. This ship
became separated from the rest of the fleet and went ashore on the
Bermudas, then uninhabited, and "accounted as an inchaunted pile of
rockes and a desert inhabitation for Divels," in the words of a writer
of the time; "but all the fairies of the rocks were but flocks of
birds, and all the Divels that haunted the woods were but herds of
swine." Here old Sir George Somers, a veteran seaman, constructed two
little cedar vessels, and provisioning them for the voyage with what
the islands afforded--live turtles, and the flesh of wild hogs and
waterfowl salted--the company set sail for Virginia in the spring of
1610, arriving barely in time to save the colony from extinction.
Finding that their provisions would not last more than two or three
weeks, they abandoned the wreck of Jamestown, crowding all the people
into four pinnaces, including the two improvised cedar boats built on
the Bermudas. They sailed down the river in the desperate hope of
surviving until they could reach Newfoundland and get supplies from
fishing vessels. The four little craft were turned back on
encountering Lord De la Warr, the new governor, ascending the James to
take charge of the colony. The meeting with De la Warr was bitterly
regretted by the old settlers, who preferred the desperate chance of a
voyage in pinnaces on a shipless sea with but a fortnight's provision
to facing again the horrors of life at Jamestown.
[Sidenote: De la Warr's arrival, 1610.]
[Sidenote: Smith's Oxford Tract, so called.]
With all the formalities thought necessary at that time, De la Warr
took possession of Jamestown, now become a forlorn ruin full of dead
men's bones. Gates was sent to England for a new stock of cattle,
while the brave old Sir George Somers once more embarked for the
Bermudas in the Patience, the little cedar pinnace which he had built
wholly of the wood of that island without a particle of iron except
one bolt in the keel. In this boat he sailed up and down until he
found again "the still vexed Bermoothes," where he hoped to secure
provisions. He died in the islands. Argall was also sent to the
Bermudas, but missed them, and went north to the fishing banks in
search of food.
[Sidenote: Note 7.]
[Sidenote: De la Warr's government, 1610.]
[Sidenote: Note 8.]
[Sidenote: British Museum, MS. 21,993, ff. 174, 178. Instr. to Gates
and De la Warr.]
[Sidenote: Gold-hunting.]
[Sidenote: Briefe Declaration, MS., Pub. Rec. Off.]
Jamestown was cleansed, and with a piety characteristic of that age
the deserted little church was enlarged and reoccupied and daily
decorated with Virginia wild flowers. All the bitter experience of the
first three years had not taught the true method of settling a new
country. The colony was still but a camp of men without families, and
the old common stock system was retained. To escape from the anarchy
which resulted from a system that sank the interest of the individual
in that of the community, it had been needful to arm De la Warr with
the sharp sword of martial law. Some of the instructions given him
were unwise, some impossible of execution. To convert the Indians out
of hand, as he was told to do, by shutting up their medicine men or
sending them to England to be Christianized by the methods then in
use, did not seem a task easy of accomplishment, for Indian priests
are not to be caught in time of war. But De la Warr undertook another
part of his instructions. A hundred men under two captains were sent
on a wild-goose chase up the James River to find gold or silver in the
mountains, whither the phantom of mines had now betaken itself. This
plan originated with the London managers of Virginia affairs, and men
had been sent with De la Warr who were supposed to be skillful in
"finding out mines." But being especially unskillful in dealing with
the Indians, they were tempted ashore by savages, who offered them
food and slew them "while the meate was in theire mouthes." The
expedition thereupon turned back at a point about forty miles above
the present site of Richmond.
[Sidenote: Flight of De la Warr.]
A new town was begun at the falls, in the fond belief that two mines
were near, and De la Warr took up his residence there. Jamestown,
drawing its water from a shallow and probably polluted well, became
the seat of a fresh epidemic. In the month of March following his
arrival the governor fled from the colony to save his own life,
leaving Virginia more than ever discredited.
X.
[Sidenote: Sir Thomas Dale, 1611.]
[Sidenote: Docs. Rel. to Col. Hist. N. Y., i, pp. 1, 2, 3, 9, 10,
16-21.]
As the hope of immediate profit from Virginia died away, the colony
would have been abandoned if there had not arisen in its favor a
patriotic enthusiasm which gave it a second lease of life. Many of the
great noblemen were deeply engaged in this new agitation in favor of
the unlucky colony, and none more deeply, perhaps, than Prince Henry,
the heir apparent. At Henry's request, Sir Thomas Dale, an officer who
had been employed about the prince's person, and who with other
English officers was now in the service of the Netherlands, was
granted leave of absence to go to Virginia. Since the colony was a
check to Spain, the Netherlands were supposed to have an indirect
interest in the enterprise and were persuaded to continue Captain
Dale's pay. De la Warr, who remained in England, was nominally
governor; Gates, when present in Virginia, was the ranking officer;
but for five years Dale appears to have been the ruling spirit in the
colony.
[Sidenote: The heavy hand of Dale, 1611-1616.]
[Sidenote: A Briefe Declaration of the Plantation of Virginia, 1624,
MS., Pub. Rec. Off.]
To induce him to go, Dale had been deceived regarding the condition of
the plantation, as had been everybody else that had gone to Jamestown
after the first ships sailed. The vice-admiral, Newport, was the
principal reporter of Virginia affairs in England and the principal
agent of the company in this deception. Dale's rough temper was
already well known. It was for this, no doubt, that he had been chosen
to do a rude piece of work. On his arrival he saw the desperate state
of the undertaking. He pulled Vice-Admiral Newport's beard and
threatened him with the gallows, demanding "whether it weare meant
that people heere in Virginia shoulde feed uppon trees."
[Sidenote: Brit. Museum, MS., 21,993, f. 174.]
[Sidenote: Briefe Declaration.]
Under the inefficient government of George Percy, who had again been
placed in charge, the seedtime of 1611 was allowed to pass without the
planting of corn. The Jamestown people were found by Dale "at their
daily and usual work bowling in the streets." But the days of
unthrifty idleness were at an end. "The libertyes, ffranchises, and
immunityes of free denizens and natural-born subjects of any our
other dominions" promised to the colonists, were also at an end from
the moment of the arrival of this sharp-set soldier and
disciplinarian. Dale's pitiless use of martial law turned Virginia not
exactly into a military camp, but rather into a penal settlement where
men suffered for the crime of emigration. The men taken to Virginia in
Dale's own company were hardly fit for anything else, and were so
"diseased and crazed in their bodies" that at one time not more than
sixty out of three hundred were capable of labor. The food sent with
Sir Thomas Dale by the corrupt contractors was "of such qualitie as
hoggs refused to eat." Sir Thomas Gates afterward made oath to its
badness before the Chief Justice in London.
XI.
[Sidenote: The years of slavery.]
Dale regarded himself as an agent of the company. His aim was by hook
or crook to make the hitherto unprofitable colony pay dividends to the
shareholders, who were his employers. His relation to the emigrants
was that of a taskmaster; one might, perhaps, more fitly call him a
slave-driver. Instead of seeking to render the colony self-supporting
by clearing corn ground, he gave his first attention to lading vessels
with sassafras root, then much prized as a medicine, and cedar timber,
valued especially for its odor.
[Sidenote: Briefe Declaration. Percy to Northumberland, Hist. MS.,
Commission, Rept., iii, 53, 54.]
[Sidenote: Observations and Travel from London to Hamburgh, p. 13.]
During a part of Dale's time eight or nine ounces of meal and half a
pint of peas was the daily ration. In their declaration, made some
years afterward, the surviving colonists aver that both the meal and
the peas were "moldy, rotten, full of cobwebs and maggots, loathsome
to man and unfit for beasts." Better men than these might have been
driven to mutiny by the enforced toil and bad food. And mutiny and
desertion were usually but other names for suicide under the rule of
the pitiless high marshal. Some fled to the woods, hoping to reach a
mythical Spanish settlement believed to be not very far away. Dale set
the Indians on them, and they were brought back to be burned at the
stake. Others, who in desperation or deadly homesickness resolved to
venture their lives in a barge and a shallop "for their native
country," suffered in various ways for their temerity. Death by
shooting or hanging was clemency. One offender was put to death by the
awful torture of breaking on the wheel, a penalty that Dale may have
learned during his stay on the Continent. Taylor, the water poet, has
left us the sickening details of such an execution in Germany in 1616.
One need not waste any sympathy on those who were hanged for stealing
to satisfy hunger; death is more merciful than life to men in such a
case. But one poor rogue, who thought to better his rations by
filching two or three pints of oatmeal, had a bodkin run through his
tongue and was chained to a tree until he perished of hunger. Though
these things were twice attested by the best men in the colony, one
prefers to make some allowance for their passionate resentment, and
to hope that some of the horrors related are exaggerated. It is hard
to believe, for example, that men unable to work were denied food, and
left to creep away into the wretched burrows in the ground used for
shelter, there to die unregarded in the general misery.
[Sidenote: Briefe Declaration.]
In 1612 a company of ten men sent out to catch fish braved the perils
of the ocean in a little bark and got back to England. It was the only
escape from Dale's tyranny, pitiless and infernal. "Abandon every hope
who enter here" was almost as appropriate to the mouth of the James
River as to the gate of Dante's hell. All letters of complaint sent to
England were intercepted, and all efforts of friends of the colonists
in England to succor or rescue them were thwarted by the company in
London. The king's pass to one of the colonists authorizing him to
leave Virginia was sent to him by his friends closely made up in a
garter, to avoid the vigilance of Sir Thomas Dale.
[Sidenote: Dale's services.]
[Sidenote: Note 9.]
Dale's administration was strongest on its military side. There was no
danger that the Indians would reduce the colony to any straits while
he was in charge. He gave his first attention to fortification, and he
even begged for two thousand convicts out of English jails to form a
line of posts from Hampton to a point a hundred miles above Jamestown.
He sent Argall all the way to Mount Desert to plunder a Jesuit
settlement and make prize of a French ship--an undertaking congenial
to Dale's military temper and the Viking tastes of Argall. As his
experience increased, Dale came to understand that other than military
measures were needed to found a colony, though he never more than half
comprehended the elements of the problem. In his later time he cleared
more corn ground, and he could boast at his departure that Virginia
contained six horses, a hundred and forty-nine neat cattle, two
hundred and sixteen goats, and hogs without number. Dale set off a
private garden of three acres of land to each of the old planters, on
the condition that they should provide food for themselves while still
giving nearly all of their time to the service of the common stock.
Even this slave's-patch of private interest given to only a fraction
of the colonists put some life into Virginia; but two thirds of the
people were retained in the old intolerable bondage, and not even the
most favored secured personal ownership of land. Dale's administration
was remembered as "the five years of slavery."
XII.
[Sidenote: Dale's return.]
[Sidenote: Note 10.]
[Sidenote: Note 11.]
The rough-handed soldier from the Low Countries had indeed brought the
Virginia chaos into order, but it was an order almost as deadly as the
preceding anarchy. Dale confessed that the government of Virginia was
"the hardest task he had ever undertaken," and he got himself out of
it after five years by making a theatrical return to England in 1616
with a train of Indians, including the "Princess" Pocahontas,
converted, baptized with a Christian name as Rebecca, and wedded to an
Englishman. He added glowing reports of the country, and proved all by
exhibiting "at least sixteen several sorts of staple commodities to be
raised in this plantation." For greater effect, samples of twelve of
these products of the colony were sold by public auction in the open
court of the company. Though Dale could show many commodities, some of
which have never flourished in Virginia since his time, he left behind
him not an established community, but a mere camp of unhappy men
retained in the country by the sheer impossibility of getting away.
After nine years of suffering, Virginia consisted of some three
hundred and twenty-six men, twenty-five women and children, and graves
outnumbering many times over all the living souls.
[Sidenote: Note 12.]
Three things had been discovered in Dale's time that were of
importance to the colony. Dale had by personal experiment learned the
two fishing seasons in the James River. The colonists had begun the
profitable cultivation of tobacco, and the economic success of the
colony was thereby assured. Lastly, even Dale's small experiment with
private interest rendered the apportionment of the land and the
establishment of private ownership certain to come in time. As early
as 1614 it was estimated that three men working for themselves raised
more corn than ten times as many when the labor was for the public
stock.
XIII.
[Sidenote: Argall's government.]
[Sidenote: Lord Rich's intrigue.]
[Sidenote: Note 13.]
[Sidenote: Stith, 142.]
[Sidenote: The Companie's root of difference. MS. Rec. Va. Co., May 7,
1623.]
[Sidenote: MS. Rec. Va. Co., _passim_.]
Captain Argall, who succeeded Sir Thomas Dale, was a bold and notable
mariner. He had built the first Virginia vessel; he had traded with
the Indians for corn with as much enterprise and address as Captain
Smith had shown; he had in a small ship called the Dainty made the
first experimental voyage to James River by the westward route,
avoiding the long circuit by the Canaries and West Indies. It had been
his fortune to be the first Englishman to see the American bison,
which he found near the Potomac. He it was who by a shrewd trick had
captured Pocahontas and held her as hostage; and he drove the French
out of Maine, despoiling their settlement at Mount Desert. To a
mastery of all the arts that make the skillful navigator he added the
courteous politeness of a man of the city and the unfaltering rapacity
of a pirate. As governor, he robbed the company with one hand and the
hapless colonists with the other. While using the ships and men of the
colony to carry on the Indian trade, he turned all the profits of it
into his own wallet. The breeding animals of the colony accumulated by
Dale he sold, and made no account of the proceeds. There was hardly
anything portable or salable in Virginia that he did not purloin. He
even plundered the property of Lady De la Warr, the widow of his
predecessor. He boldly fitted out a ship belonging to Lord Rich, and
sent an expedition of sheer piracy to the West Indies under an old
letter of marque from the Duke of Savoy. When advices from England
warned Argall that his downfall was imminent, he forthwith redoubled
his felonious diligence. His chief partner in England was Lord Rich,
who became the second Earl of Warwick in 1619, about the time of
Argall's return, and who is known to history in his later character as
a great Puritan nobleman, who served God while he contrived to better
his estate with both hands by such means as troublous times put within
his reach. He was not content with small pickings. Rich appears to
have aimed at nothing less than wrecking the company and securing the
land and government of Virginia. The first step toward this was to get
a charter for a private or proprietary plantation within Virginia
which should be exempt from all authority of the company and the
colony. This independent government was to serve as a refuge from
prosecutions for Argall and other piratical agents, and at last to
possess itself of the wreck and remainder of Virginia. The second step
in this intrigue was one that could have availed nothing in any time
less respectful to shadowy technicalities and less prone to legal
chicanery than that of James I. As we have seen, jealousy was excited
in Virginia by the possibility of Captain Smith's wedding Pocahontas
and setting up a claim to authority based on her inheritance from
Powhatan. A tradition lingered in Virginia a hundred years later that
King James questioned Rolfe's right to intermarry with a foreign
princess without the consent of his sovereign. If this had any
foundation, it grew out of the value of a pretext in a time of
technicality and intrigue. There may have been already a scheme to
trade upon the hereditary right of Powhatan's daughter. Pocahontas
died in England, leaving an infant son. Argall, on his arrival,
hastened to notify the company that Opechankano, the brother and
successor of Powhatan, had resolved not to sell any more land, but to
reserve it for the son of Pocahontas when he should be grown. The
company charged that this was a ruse to serve the ends which Argall,
Rich, and others had in view. The larger plan miscarried, but Argall
found his prey so tempting that he lingered longer than was safe, and
got away in the nick of time by the aid of Lord Rich, who had stood
guard like a burglar's pal, and who contrived to delay the ship
carrying out the new governor until a small swift-sailing vessel could
be sent to fetch away Argall and his varied booty of public and
private plunder. In that day justice often went by favor, and Argall
consigned his spoils to hands so powerful that the Virginia Company,
stripped bare by his treacherous villainy, could never recover any of
its lost property. The embittered colonists had the bootless
satisfaction of sending over after the runaway governor twenty-four
bundles of accusatory depositions.
XIV.
[Sidenote: Fall of the lottery.]
[Sidenote: Note 14.]
From the first nobody reaped any profit from investments made in the
new colony except the clique of merchants who had been allowed to sell
wretched supplies for the distant settlers at ruinous rates. Rich and
those interested with him had abundantly reimbursed themselves for all
outlays on their part. The Virginia Company, swindled by commercial
peculators at home, robbed by a pirate governor in America, and
embarrassed by Spanish intrigues at the English court, had also been
deprived of the lotteries, large and small, which had supplied money
for sending eight hundred emigrants to Virginia. The lottery, which
had fallen into great disrepute and had suffered "many foul
aspersions," was abolished in compliance with a public sentiment. The
company was tottering swiftly to a fall; vultures like Warwick were
waiting longingly for its death.
[Sidenote: Revival of interest, 1618.]
But there set in once more a widespread patriotic movement in its
behalf. Such movements were characteristic of that vital age when love
of country was fast coming to count for more as a motive to action
than loyalty to the person of a prince. "Divers lords, knights,
gentlemen, and citizens, grieved to see this great action fall to
nothing," came to its rescue with one final effort which resulted
after some years in putting the enterprise well beyond the danger of
failure. They formed auxiliary societies within the Virginia Company,
after the custom of corporations in that day. Each of these undertook
to plant a settlement or "hundred." In one year the population rose
from less than four hundred to about a thousand. The newly active
element infused a more liberal spirit into the company, and set about
correcting the abuses in its management.
XV.
[Sidenote: The Great Charter, 1618.]
[Sidenote: Pub. Rec. Off. Col. Papers, iii, 40. Disc. of the Old Va.
Co.]
[Sidenote: Note 15.]
The movement of 1618 was retarded by the disgrace into which the
colony had fallen. An unbroken series of misfortunes and
disappointments, the bad conduct of the company's affairs, the ill
fame of Dale's remorseless tyranny, and the fresh Argall scandal, had
made Virginia odious. One convict to whom the alternative was
proposed, chose hanging in preference to transportation to Virginia.
It was needful that something should be done to restore credit. The
men who took the lead in the patriotic movement of 1618 on behalf of
Virginia were mainly liberal statesmen--that Earl of Southampton who
is known as the friend of Shakespeare; Sir Edwin Sandys, one of the
greatest men of a great age, whose brave support of popular liberty
had lost him the favor of the king; Sir John Danvers, and others. The
records before the election of Sandys in 1619 were probably destroyed
to conceal the guilt of the managers. We can only conjecture that the
rising influence of the men who were able a few months later to
overthrow the ruling party had much to do with the most notable
change that took place in the conduct of affairs in the Virginia
Company at this time. On the 13th of November, 1618--memorable but
neglected and forgotten date--the Virginia Company, acting within the
powers conferred on it by its charter, granted to the residents in
Virginia a document styled a "Great Charter or Commissions of
Priviledges, Orders, and Lawes." No copy of this instrument now
exists, but some of its provisions have been preserved. It established
a legislative body, to consist of councilors of estate and of
representatives or burgesses chosen by the several "plantations" or
hundreds, and it limited the power of the governor. This charter was
the starting point of constitutional government in the New World. It
contained in embryo the American system of an executive power lodged
mainly in one person, and a Legislature of two houses. One might
without much exaggeration call this paper a sort of Magna Charta of
America, and it was a long and probably a deliberate step toward
popular government. If the results that have followed it be
considered, it can hardly be accounted second in importance to any
other state paper of the seventeenth century.
XVI.
[Sidenote: Division of land.]
[Sidenote: Note 16.]
[Sidenote: Aspinwall Papers, p. 14, note.]
[Sidenote: True Declaration, p. 25.]
Not only did this admirable charter establish a representative form of
government and do away with martial law, but it fairly launched the
Virginians on the current of freedom and advancement by authorizing a
liberal division of land to all those who had arrived before the
departure of Sir Thomas Dale. The oldest land titles in Virginia are
deduced from the authority of the Great Charter of 1618. Communism,
pernicious everywhere, is at its worst in an infant settlement. "Every
man sharked for his own bootie," says a writer on Virginia in 1609,
"but was altogether careless of the succeeding penurie." The
distribution of land abolished the common stock system of labor, and
opened a pathway to the ambition of the diligent.
[Sidenote: The good news in Virginia.]
[Sidenote: Note 17.]
[Sidenote: Tragicall Relation, 1623.]
Tidings of the great change wrought in their condition and prospects
by the new charter reached the dwellers on the James River in the
spring of 1619, and the colonists were "ravished with so much joy"
that they felt themselves "now fully satisfied for their long labors
and as happy men as there were in the world." They valued their
liberties as no man can who has not known the bitterness of bondage,
and in 1623, when they had reason to fear the re-establishment of the
old tyranny, the Virginia Assembly petitioned the king in these strong
words: "Rather than be reduced to live under the like government, we
desire his Majesty that commissioners may be sent over to hang us." We
have here, perhaps, the very first of the many protests of colonial
Legislatures against oppression from England.
XVII.
[Sidenote: The sending of wives to Virginia.]
[Sidenote: Note 18.]
[Sidenote: Note 19.]
In 1618, before the adoption of the charter, it was concluded, in the
quaint phrase of the time, "that a plantation can never flourish till
families be planted and the respects of Wives and Children fix the
people on the soyle," or, in simpler words, that a colony of bachelors
can hardly found a state. The first ship laden with home-makers
carried over ninety maids, and the company thought it necessary to
promise special rewards to the men who should marry these young women.
If the maids were as certified, "young, handsome, and well
recommended," they needed no such dowry in a land that had hardly a
woman in it. Young or old, handsome or homely, the maids did not prove
a drug. Shipload after shipload of them were eagerly bought by the
planters, who had to pay a round sum in the high-priced tobacco of
that early time to defray the cost of transporting these wives.
Besides having to pay for his wife, the planter could have her only on
the condition of winning her consent; and the eager courtship that
ensued on the arrival of a shipload of maids must have been one of the
most amusing scenes in the settlement of America. Suitors far
outnumbered the women, and the latter had things pretty much their own
way. The first cargo of this interesting merchandise was landed in
1619, but as late as 1624 the women were probably in danger of setting
the colonists by the ears, for the governor felt obliged to issue a
proclamation threatening fine or whipping for the offense of betrothal
to more than one person at a time. In 1632, thirteen years after the
first shipment, we find the colony still being replenished with women
sent in the same fashion. In that year, two, whose behavior during the
voyage had been disgraceful, were sent back as unfit to be mothers of
Virginians. The precaution could not have been of much practical use,
but it indicates the early growth of a wholesome local pride. When
there were house mothers in the cabins, and children born in the
country, the settlers no longer dreamed of returning to England; and
there was soon a young generation that knew no other skies than those
that spanned the rivers, fields, and vast primeval forests of their
native Virginia, which now for the first time became a home.
XVIII.
[Sidenote: The struggle ended, 1624.]
It is not the Virginia colony alone that we have seen in the crucible.
The fate of English colonization was no doubt settled by the
experiments made during the first years on the James River, and the
story told in this chapter is but the overture to the whole history of
life in the United States. In our colonizing age a settlement might be
made in the heart of Africa with a far smaller loss of life than was
incurred in the first sixteen years in Virginia. From 1607 to 1623
there were landed in Virginia more than six thousand people. The
number that returned to England was inconsiderable, but in the year
1624, when the colony passed under a royal government, there remained
alive in the colony only twelve hundred and seventy-five. Of those who
came in these early years four fifths perished. A part of this loss
was due to radically wrong conceptions of the nature, end, and proper
methods of colonization, a part to corrupt and incompetent management
in the London Company. The bad character of many of the earliest
emigrants was one cause of difficulty. The writers of the time
probably exaggerated this evil in order to excuse the severity of the
government and the miseries into which the settlers fell. But the loss
of many of the early comers must be accounted a distinct gain to
Virginia. Unfitted for their environment, they were doomed to
extinction by that pitiless law which works ever to abolish from the
earth the improvident, the idle, and the vicious.
ELUCIDATIONS.
[Sidenote: Note 1, page 29.]
In 1889, when I visited Jamestown, there was no apparent trace of
Sandy Beach which had connected the island with the mainland. This bit
of sand, in the antique phrase of one of the early colonists, was "no
broader than a man may well quaite a tileshard." Strachey, in Purchas,
p. 1752. Jamestown is now a farm; the ruins of the church and many of
the tombs in the eighteenth-century churchyard remain; but the upper
end of the island is wearing away, and I picked out of the crumbling
sand, far from the later burying place, human bones of earlier
burials, possibly of the victims of the famines and epidemics. The
walls of the magazine had been exposed by erosion. I brought away
wrought nails, bits of glass grown iridescent from long burial, and
an exploded bombshell of so small a caliber as to mark its antiquity.
By the aid of a negro youth living on the farm I found the hearth
bricks turned up in various places by the plow, and the arrangement,
or rather lack of arrangement, of the town could thus be made out. My
guide volunteered the information that Jamestown was "the first place
discovered after the Flood." Some drawings made at the time were
reproduced with an article on Nathaniel Bacon in the Century Magazine
for July, 1890.
[Sidenote: Note 2, page 37.]
Whether Smith was injured by gunpowder and required treatment, as he
asserts, or was sent home under charges, has been matter of dispute.
Both accounts are correct, as is shown by the testimony of an
important manuscript at Petworth House, in Surrey, which I was allowed
to examine by the courtesy of Lord Leconsfield. It is from the pen of
George Percy, a brother of the Earl of Northumberland, who was chosen
to succeed Smith on his departure from the colony. It is not the
narrative from which Purchas makes extracts, but a sequel to it. The
title is "A Trewe Relacyon of the pceedinge and Ocvrrentes of momente
wch have hapned in Virginia from the Tyme Sr Thomas Gates was
shipwrackde vpon the Bermudes Ano. 1609 vntill my depture ovtt of the
country wch was in Ano Dni 1612." It is a quarto of forty-one pages.
Percy was a man of courage, but his own narrative in this little book
shows that he had no qualification for the office of governor except
the rank of his family. His ill health is made an excuse for his
inefficiency, but Dale's letter of May 25, 1611, shows that even the
horrible events of Percy's first government had not taught him to
plant corn when again left in charge. Percy naturally resents Smith's
boastfulness, and bluntly accuses him of laying claim to credit that
was not his. The charge that Smith, unable to control the unruly
settlers at the Falls under West, advised the Indians to attack them,
is supported by Percy; and a very different charge, that he stirred up
the Indians to assassinate West himself, appears at a later time in
Spelman's Relation, a tract that bears abundant internal evidence of
the writer's mental inability to speak the truth. Percy himself
relates that the Indians were already hostile to West's party, and
that they had wounded and killed some of West's men in resentment of
their wanton outrages. See also the account in the Oxford Tract, with
the signatures of Pots and Phettiplace, for Smith's version of the
affair. "Bloody-mindedness" seems not to have been a trait of Smith.
But the exigency was a terrible one, for death by starvation was
already impending, and only the restoration of discipline at any cost
could have saved the colony from the horrible fate it met. Such a
course would not have done much violence to the notions of the time,
and would have found precedents in the various plots against the lives
of Smith, Wingfield, and others in the colony. It is quite probable,
however, that there is no truth in the story. The violent hatred of
the factions will account for the suspicion.
[Sidenote: Note 3, page 38.]
Captain Smith's True Relation was sent from Virginia and was printed
in London in 1608. In 1612 he published what is commonly referred to
as the Oxford Tract. Its proper title is very long. The first part of
it is as follows: "Map of Virginia, with a description of the Covntry,
the Commodities, People, Government, and Religion. Written by Captain
Smyth, sometime Governor of the Covntry. And wherevnto is annexed the
proceedings of those colonies since their first departure from
England," etc. The second part of the book professes to be taken from
the writings of eight of the colonists, whose names are given, and to
have been edited by W. S.--that is, the Reverend Dr. Symonds. The
Generall Historie was first proposed in a well-considered and rather
elegant speech by Captain Smith at a meeting of the Virginia Company,
April 12, 1621, while the new patent which was to be submitted to
Parliament was under discussion. He suggested the writing of a history
to preserve the memory of the worthies of Virginia, dead and living,
and gave it as his opinion that no Spanish settlement of the same age
afforded matter more interesting. "Which worthy speech," says the
record, "had of the whole court a very great applause as spoken freely
to a speciall purpose, and therefore thought fitt to be considered and
put in practice in his due time. And for which also Mr. Smyth as
preferring allwaies mocions of speciall consequence was exceedingly
commended." MS. Records of the Virginia Company, i, 197-200. A first
edition of the Generall Historie appeared in 1624, the last two
editions in 1632. The book is a compilation of Smith's earlier works,
somewhat expanded, not to say inflated. The later portions are mostly
made up from the official and _quasi_-official pamphlets. Just what
was Dr. Symonds's part in the preparation of the Oxford Tract and the
Generall Historie it would be interesting to know. The latter work
was in some sense by authority of the company, and liable to the
peculiar suspicion that hangs about writings designed to advance the
colony and not primarily to record history. Its descriptive portions
are of high value, and we are now able to control its historical
errors to a certain extent. Besides these three works on Virginia,
Smith published a Description of New England, 1616, New England's
Trials, 1620, and Advertisements for the Unexperienced Planters of New
England or Elsewhere, in 1631, the year of his death. These all
contain valuable matter relating to Virginia. He also published in
1627 two works on seamanship, a Sea Grammar, and the Accidence or
Pathway to Experience necessary for a Young Seaman. In 1630 he
published his True Travels, a book which contains an account of his
own adventures previous to his going to Virginia. More than a quarter
of a century had elapsed between the occurrence of these adventures
and their publication. Smith's vivid imagination had meantime no doubt
greatly magnified his own exploits. It is quite impossible at this day
to sift what truth there is in the True Travels from the
exaggerations. Travelers in that time were not held to a very rigid
account, and their first obligation seems to have been to amuse their
readers. No distinct line had yet been drawn in literature between
fact and fiction.
Many years ago, before I had had an opportunity to examine and compare
all his writings, I rashly printed a brief argument in favor of the
trustworthiness of Captain John Smith and the credibility of the
Pocahontas story. I believe no person of critical judgment can make a
thorough comparison of Smith's successive books without being
convinced of the ineradicable tendency of his mind to romance in
narrating adventure, especially his own adventure. Even his style
where his vanity speaks loses something of its native directness and
force. His practical writings on navigation and on the proper conduct
of colonization, and his descriptions of the country and the savages,
are plain, direct, and lucid. His speeches in the Virginia Company
appear to have been exceedingly wise, and to have impressed his
hearers. Note, for example, his proposals (Records, i, 197) that
colonial governors should be liable to trial in England; his proposal
to reduce the fee for sending a child to Virginia from five pounds to
five marks, the cost of apprenticing to a trade (i, 174); and his
preference for a governor well paid to one working "for love"
(February 4, 1623). His personal morals were probably unexceptionable.
One of his associates certifies to his freedom from tobacco, wines,
dice, debts, and oaths. But a comparison between the statements made
in the Oxford Tract and those in the Generall Historie leaves upon the
mind of the critic a distinct impression of the very processes by
which his adventures were exaggerated in his own memory as time
elapsed. The three or four hundred savages on the Potomac (Oxford
Tract, p. 32, a sufficiently marvelous story) rise to three or four
thousand in the Generall Historie. Pocahontas becomes the central
figure in incidents as told in 1624 in which she had no place in 1612.
There is but one allusion to Pocahontas in the entire Oxford Tract (p.
103), and that has to do with the charge that Smith intended to marry
her. A just and witty judgment of Captain Smith was made almost in his
own time by Thomas Fuller. He says: "Such his perils, preservations,
dangers, deliverances, they seem to most men beyond belief, to some
beyond truth. Yet we have two witnesses to attest them, the prose and
the pictures, both in his own book; and it soundeth much to the
diminution of his deeds that he alone is the herald to publish and
proclaim them.... However, moderate men must allow Captain Smith to
have been very instrumental in settling the plantation in Virginia,
whereof he was Governor, as also admiral of New England." Fuller's
Worthies, edition of 1840, i, 276. Those who desire to see an
ingenious and learned defense of Captain Smith, particularly in the
matter of the Pocahontas story, will find it in an address by Mr.
William Wirt Henry, published by the Virginia Historical Society.
Prof. Arber's discussion of the subject in his edition of Smith's
Works is sentimental rather than critical. Compare Deane's Wingfield
for the other side. Unnecessary heat has characterized some of the
debates about John Smith. History pitched in a shrill polemical key is
not instructive and is something less than amusing. These debates
center themselves on the Pocahontas story, which is of little
historical importance except as it involves the trustworthiness of
Smith's narrative.
The conduct of Captain Smith in the Virginia colony will be better
understood if we appreciate the character of his principal opponent,
Gabriel Archer. Archer's return to Virginia in 1609 and his agency in
overthrowing Captain Smith are alluded to apparently in a passage in
the New Life of Virginea, 1612, "In which distemper that envious man
stept in, sowing plentifull tares in the hearts of all," etc. One of
Archer's schemes seems to have been to establish a parliament and a
complicated government at the beginning. Purchas and Strachey both
take sides against Archer in his controversy with Smith. Purchas, iv,
p. 1749, Oxford Tract, 22. Wingfield warned Newport of the danger of
disturbance from Archer, who was "troubled with an ambitious spirit."
Wingfield's Discourse, 77, 94, 95. Wingfield also says, "In all their
disorders was Mr. Archer a ringleader." He adds that Ratcliffe "did
wear no other eies or eares than grew on Mr. Archer's head." For a
bibliographical account of Smith's works the reader is referred to the
valuable notes in Mr. Winsor's Narrative and Critical History of
America, vol. iii, _passim_.
[Sidenote: Note 4, page 38.]
A Trewe Relacyon, etc., at Petworth House, as above. The Indians in
sheer wantonness scraped out the brains of their dead victims with
mussel shells. Percy seems to have retaliated in a way to exasperate
without disabling the savages. He "burned their hawses, Ransacked
their Temples, tooke downe the corpses off their deade Kings from off
their Toambes [that is, the scaffold on which their well-dried remains
were deposited], and caryed away their pearles, caps, and bracelets
wherewith they doe decore their Kings fvneralls." (For this sacred
house thus desecrated by Percy the Indians had such reverence that
none but priests and chiefs were allowed to enter, and the Indians
never ventured to pass it without casting some offering of tobacco,
wampum, copper, or puccoon root into the water.--Strachey, 90.) When
Percy had captured a chief's wife and children, the soldiers in
revengeful wantonness, according to Percy's account, threw the
children out of the boat and shot them in the water. The inefficient
Percy was able to save the life of the "queen" or chief's wife with
difficulty. West and Ratcliffe, who had overthrown Smith, are accused
by Percy of unnecessary cruelty to the savages. West sailed away in
the ship, leaving Jamestown to its fate. Ratcliffe was put to death
with exquisite tortures. There is no doubt some truth, as there is
certainly jealousy, in Percy's charge that Captain Smith was "an
ambitious, unworthy, and vainglorious fellow, attempting to take all
men's authorities from them," but he was neither weak, like Percy and
Ratcliffe, nor visionary, like the gold-hunting Martin and the
doctrinary and demagogical Archer, nor treacherous and cruel, like
West. With all his faults he only was master of the situation in these
early years. Percy admits that the lawful authority was that of Smith.
The history of the government of Percy and his supporters seems to
justify Smith's refusal to share his lawful power with incompetent
factionaries.
[Sidenote: Note 5, page 39.]
So far the State Papers, but Percy, in his A Trewe Relacyon, adds that
he caused the man to be tortured till he confessed, and he relates
repulsive details of the crime. The effrontery of an official
publication went so far as to deny (True Declaration, 1610), on the
authority of Sir Thomas Gates, this fact so circumstantially and
abundantly attested. In Peckard's Life of Ferrar, p. 158, a petition
from the Virginia colony to the king is preserved in which occur these
words: "To tell how great things many of us have suffered through
hunger alone would be as incredible as horrible for us to repeat to
your sacred ears."
[Sidenote: Note 6, page 41.]
See, among other authorities, A Plaine Declaration of Barmudas, in
black letter, 1613, written by one of the party. Myriads of birds
nested on the island. How the hogs came to be there is matter of
conjecture. The writer of the Plaine Declaration makes old Sir George
Somers the resourceful hero of their marvelous escape, and it was from
him that the islands took the name of Somers or Summer Islands. For
want of pitch, the seams of the vessels were paid with "a kind of hard
lime" and some "wax cast up by the sea." Strachey's A True Reportory
of the Wracke and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight, etc.,
Purchas, iv, p. 1734, is also by one of the shipwrecked party. The
Rev. Joseph Hunter has written with much learning, patient research,
and fatiguing prolixity to disprove the theory that Shakespeare's
Tempest was suggested by the wreck of Gates and Somers. He succeeds in
showing its relation to another occurrence, but works of imagination
do not usually have their origin in a single fact, and it is hard to
resist the conviction that the Tempest, as we have it, contains more
than one allusion to the wreck upon "the still vexed Bermoothes."
[Sidenote: Note 7, page 42.]
The beauty of the wood of certain American trees had already been
noted. The communion table in Jamestown in De la Warr's time was made
of black walnut. The pews were of cedar, and there were "fair, broad
windows," with shutters of cedar, "to shut and open as the weather
shall occasion," but there appears to have been no glass. Window glass
was little used at that time, and there probably was not a glazed
window in the colony. The pulpit was of cedar, and the font was "hewen
hollow like a canoa." Strachey, in Purchas, p. 1755.
[Sidenote: Note 8, page 42.]
Some families appear to have gone to Virginia with De la Warr. The
purpose to send families of wives and children and servants is
expressed in A True Declaration, which was dated 1610, but, as Mr.
Alexander Brown points out, issued in December, 1609.
[Sidenote: Note 9, page 48.]
The Tragicall Relation of 1623, and the Briefe Declaration of 1624,
manuscripts in the British Public Record Office, are the most
important authorities for the facts given in the text. The Briefe
Declaration is rather the fuller, but the earlier paper supplies some
particulars. These two formal documents are not from the same hand,
and the slight difference between them in details tends rather to
confirm than to shake the reader's confidence in their testimony. The
names of Sir Francis Wyatt, George Sandys, and other prominent
colonists appended to the Tragicall Relation are a guarantee of its
good faith. It is curious to note that Raphe Hamor, whose relation is
so favorable to Dale, and who held the post of secretary under Dale
and that of vice-admiral under Argall, signs this paper, which is a
severe impeachment of Sir Thomas Smythe's administration of the
affairs of the company before 1619. Hamor's True Discourse has
heretofore usually been taken as an authority, but after reading the
documents in the Public Record Office one is compelled to believe that
Hamor, or perhaps one might say Dale, under cover of his secretary,
misrepresents the state of the colony, and makes promises to those who
may emigrate that it was hardly possible to carry out. The Discourse
of the old Virginia Company (Colonial Papers, iii, 40), and other
papers in the Public Record Office relating to the strife between the
company and the Court, throw light on this period. The half-apologies
for Dale's cruelties in Smith's Generall Historie, book iv, prove
their existence. "For amongst them, so hardened in evil," says this
writer, "the fear of a cruel, painful, and unusual death more
restrains them than death itself." See also Hamor, p. 27. There is a
letter from Whitaker appended to Hamor's Discourse. Though apparently
an incidental letter, it bears marks of having been procured for
purposes of vindication. Its defensive tone goes to show that the
character of Dale's tyranny had transpired in England. Whitaker
praises Sir Thomas Dale mainly for being religious and valiant, and
says that he had "great knowledge in Divinity and good conscience in
all his doings; both which bee rare in a martiall man." In Whitaker's
Good Newes of Virginia, 1613, there is no praise of Sir Thomas Dale.
That Dale was famous for his severity before he left Europe is
manifest from the phrase used by the Jesuit Biard, "Le Mareschal
Thomas Deel que vous auez ouy estre fort aspre en ses humeurs."
Relation, chap. xxxiii. See in this and the preceding chapter the
whole account of his savage temper toward his French prisoners, etc.
It has been the custom of our older writers to speak of Dale's
administration only in praise, but careful weighing of the original
authorities shows that Dale was utterly pitiless in the cruelty of his
discipline and unjust in his detention of the old planters, and that
when he left the colony he was more generally execrated than any other
man that ruled in these early days, not even excepting his successor,
Argall. Dale's severity was serviceable in carrying the enterprise
through straits, but the reports of his harshness brought the colony
into disrepute and checked immigration. The detestation of Dale was
shared by the best men in Virginia, yet it is to be remembered that
the savagery of Dale's government was due not wholly to the brutal
temper of the man, but partly to the age and the school in which he
had been bred. Legal torture was in use long after this. The Clarendon
Papers, quoted by Southey, state that at Henley-on-Thames, as late as
1646, it was ordered that a woman's tongue should be nailed to a tree
for complaining of the tax levied by Parliament. The cruel practices
of the agents of the Virginia Company are paralleled by those of the
East India Company at the same time. "Before they were intrusted with
martial law they made it a rule to whip to death or starve to death
those of whom they wished to get rid." Mills, British India, i, 38.
Even that champion of popular liberty, Sir Edwin Sandys, found it in
his heart to approve of Dale's course while admitting its harshness.
He said to the court of the Virginia Company of the 17th of November,
1619, that "Sir Thomas Dale, building upon these foundations with
great and constant severity, reclaymed almost miraculously those idle
and disordered people, and reduced them to labor and an honest fashion
of life." MS. Records of the Virginia Company. Compare also Sir Thomas
Smythe's defense, note to Aspinwall Papers in IV Massachusetts
Historical Collections, ix, p. 1. My citations from the Tragicall
Relation and Briefe Declaration are partly from the originals in the
British Public Record Office, which I carefully examined in 1885, but
the first of these is printed in Neill's Virginia Company, and the
Briefe Declaration was published by the State of Virginia in 1874 in a
Senate document entitled Colonial Records of Virginia. Very good
abstracts of both papers appear in Sainsbury's Calendar. I cite the
Discourse of the Old Virginia Company from the MS. in the British
Public Record Office. I do not remember to have seen it in print.
[Sidenote: Note 10, page 49.]
Birch's Court of James I, i, 415. Chamberlain to Carleton, June 22,
1616: "Sir Thomas Dale is arrived from Virginia, and brought with him
some ten or twelve old and young of that country, among whom is
Pocahuntas, daughter of Powhatan, married to one Rolfe, an Englishman.
I hear not of any other riches or matter of worth, but only some
quantity of sassafras, tobacco, pitch, tar, and clapboard, things of
no great value unless there were plenty, and nearer hand. All I can
hear of it is, that the country is good to live in, if it were stored
with people, and might in time become commodious. But there is no
present profit to be expected."
[Sidenote: Note 11, page 49.]
The Discourse of the Old Virginia Company, an exceedingly interesting
manuscript in the British Record Office, makes it appear that as late
as 1618 the colonists had no thought of staying in Virginia, and even
the directors at home were interested only in making money out of
tobacco and sassafras, with little or no care to plant a permanent
colony. Some allowance must be made, perhaps, for the _ex-parte_
nature of this paper, but its tone and the high character of those who
offered it give reason to trust it. Colonial Papers, iii, 40. Answer
of the Virginia Company to Queries of the Privy Council in 1625.
[Sidenote: Note 12, page 49.]
We may trust Hamor's True Discourse, p. 17, for some of these details,
though the book generally is discredited by the account given in the
Tragicall Relation, which Hamor himself signed with others in 1623. A
comparison of all these authorities makes it evident that only
eighty-one who were ranked as "farmers" derived any benefit from
Dale's three-acre division, while about two hundred others were
probably left in unmitigated bondage.
[Sidenote: Note 13, page 51.]
"And to protect Captain Argall from being called to an account for his
government under shew of a new plantation to be set up in Virginia by
Captain Argall and his partners, whereof the said earl (Warwick) hath
since appeared to be one (which yet to this day hath had no
beginning), there was procured a patent to the said captain and his
associates for the said new plantation; whereby he and his Company,
their heirs and assigns (save only in time of defence by war), were
exempted from all power, authority, and jurisdiction to be from hence
derived or there established, that so he might reign there as great
and absolute master, without law or controulment, and without the fear
of ever being called to any future reckoning.... Whatsoever was
remaining at that time in the colony belonging to the public ... he
converted it in a manner wholly to his own private use and possession,
the very public lands cultivated, the Company's tenants and servants,
their rents, corn and tributes of corn, their kine and other cattle,
their stores and other provisions; whereby the company, being disabled
in all appearance of ever setting up the same again or to bear the
great burden of public charge both at home and abroad, being thus
stripped of all revenue, the said Company must have failed and decayed
and the whole colony have fallen in time into the hands of the said
captain and his association to be there established, which seemeth to
have been his prime and original desire.... This course of depredation
and roving not sufficing as likely to receive encounter and check from
hence, new engines were used, some to dishearten and some to disgrace
the Company, that so as it seemeth they might in time obtain the
plantation and leave it as a prey to the said captain, his friends and
followers, etc." Burk's History of Virginia, Appendix, vol. i. The
extract is from the document known as The Company's Chief Root of
Differences, etc. I have compared this copy with that in the MS.
Records of the Virginia Company, Library of Congress, and find only
slight verbal differences. At the instance of Warwick the authors of
this paper--Lord Cavendish, Sir Edwin Sandys, and John and Nicholas
Ferrar--were put under arrest in their own houses for this
"impertinent declaration." The Warwick party had made "threats of
blood" to deter Southampton from complaining to the king.
[Sidenote: Note 14, page 53.]
Birch's Court and Times of James the First, i, 311. Chamberlain to
Carleton, May 16, 1614: "Sir Thomas Gates is come from Virginia, and
brings word that plantation will fall to the ground if it be not
presently supplied. He speaks of wonderful commodities that are to be
had there if we could but have patience and would be at the cost to
bring them to perfection." Out of this necessity for some present
support came the great lottery. It was recommended by the Privy
Council to the Mayor of Canterbury, February 22, 1615. There was a
"running lottery" of smaller adventures in Paul's Churchyard before
the "great standing lottery" was instituted, and then there were other
"running lotteries" "in many other places after." Purchas, p. 1773. No
doubt there were corruptions and abuses in these lotteries. The
merchants prospered while Virginia languished. Its unpopularity is
attributed to "malignant tongues," in the MS. Records of the Virginia
Company, i, 158, and the overthrow of the lottery may have been part
of the plot of those who sought soon after to wreck the company
itself.
[Sidenote: Note 15, page 55.]
My attention was first attracted to the date of the Great Charter of
November 13, 1618, by a minute in the handwriting of Secretary
Williamson in the Public Record Office, as follows: "Those Adventurers
& Planters by Vertue of y{e} s{d} Lett{rs} Patent of Incorporacon &c.
made a Great charter of Lawes & Ord{rs} for y{e} govermn{t} of the
Country. It bore date at London, Nov. 13{th} 1618." Col. Pprs, i, 11.
The proceedings of the first Assembly in Virginia are preserved in the
Public Record Office in Pory's Report. This report gives the only
information we have regarding the provisions of this long-lost
charter. An abstract of these proceedings is printed in the Calendar
of Colonial Documents, and the whole document was reprinted in the New
York Historical Society Collections, second series, vol. iii, and yet
more carefully in the Colonial Records of Virginia, 1874. There is an
allusion to this charter in the Briefe Relation, 1624. Various
Virginia land grants deduce their authority from the Great Charter of
Laws and Orders of November 13, 1618, as we learn from a note in the
Aspinwall Papers, p. 14. There are many allusions to the charter of
1618 in the Manuscript Records of the Virginia Company in the Library
of Congress.
[Sidenote: Note 16, page 56.]
The Code of Lawes, Divine, Morall and Martiall, by which Dale reigned
was edited and published by Strachey in 1612, and reprinted in Force's
Tracts, vol. iii. This code appears to have had no other sanction than
the approval of Sir Thomas Smythe, the governor of the company. The
beneficial effect of these laws is maintained in Hamor's Discourse, in
Rolfe's Relation, and in certain letters of Dale in the Record Office.
It was not, indeed, the government by martial law, but Dale's abuse of
his power, that wrought the mischief. After the emancipation the old
settlers lived in perpetual terror lest some turn of the wheel should
put them once more in the power of Sir Thomas Smythe and his divine
and martial laws. See especially the Additional Statement appended to
the Discourse of the Old Virginia Company. On the long and bitter
dissension that resulted in the overthrow of the company, see Arthur
Woodnoth's Short Collection of the most remarkable Passages from the
Original to the Dissolution of the Virginia Company, a rare work of
great value to the historian of this period.
[Sidenote: Note 17, page 56.]
Rolfe's Relation has it that the ship which brought Yeardley brought
also the news of the election of Sandys and John Ferrar. But Yeardley
arrived in Virginia on the 18th of April (O.S.), and Sir Thomas
Smythe's resignation did not take place until ten days later.
Manuscript Records of the Virginia Company. The news that Sir George
Yeardley did bring was no doubt that the power of Sir Thomas Smythe
and his party was broken, and that the actual control of affairs was
in the hands of such men as Sandys, Southampton, Cavendish, Danvers,
and the two Ferrars. The whole policy of the company indicates that
the new party was really in power, and the appointment of such a man
as Yeardley was probably the work of the rising party. The records
before the resignation of Sir Thomas Smythe were probably destroyed
for purposes of concealment.
[Sidenote: Note 18, page 57.]
Manuscript Book of Instructions, etc., Library of Congress. Letter to
the Governor and Council by the ship Marmaduke, August 12, 1621. A
proposal to send women had been made seven years earlier. Commons
Journal, 1, 487, May 17, 1614. Extract from Martyn's Speech (for which
he was reprimanded): "That they require but a few honest Labourers
burthened with Children.--Moveth, a committee may consider of the
means for this, for Seven Years; at which some of the Company may be
present." On November 17, 1619, Sir Edwin Sandys pointed out in the
court of the company that the people of Virginia "were not settled in
their mindes to make it their place of rest and continuance." "For the
remedying of the Mischiefe and for establishing a perpetuitie of the
Plantation," he proposed the sending of "one hundred young maides to
become wives." Manuscript Records of the Virginia Company, i, 44, 45.
Two women, the first in the colony, had arrived in September, 1608.
Oxford Tract, 47. There were women in Gates's party in 1610. It was
even reported that some English women had intermingled with the
natives. Calendar Colonial Papers, i, 13. An allowance of food to
women in De la Warr's time is proof that women were there. In 1629
there was living Mistress Pearce, "an honest, industrious woman," who
had been in Virginia "near twenty years." Rolfe (a copy of whose
Relation is among the Duke of Manchester's MSS. now in the British
Public Record Office) sets down a remainder of seventy-five of the
three hundred and fifty-one persons in the colony at Dale's departure,
as women and children. It is worth recalling here that D'Ogeron, who
governed Santo Domingo in 1663 and after, supplied the buccaneers
with wives brought from France; and the plan was also put into
practice in Louisiana about a century later than the Virginia
experiment, and the same expedient, as is well known, was resorted to
in Canada. In Virginia more pains were taken to have all the women
thus imported of a good character than in some of the French colonies.
[Sidenote: Note 19, page 58.]
The belief that these maids were "pressed" or coerced into going is
probably erroneous (see the speech of Sandys, July 7, 1620, Manuscript
Records of the Virginia Company). He says, "These people (including
the maids) are to be provided as they have formerly beene, partlie by
printed publication of the supplies indicated, together with the
conditions offered to these publique tennants, partlie by help of such
noble friends and others in remote parts as have formerlie given great
assistance." The notion that some of the maidens were pressed seems to
have had its rise in the counterfeiting of the great seal and the
issuing of forged commissions to press maidens for "breeders for the
King" in the Bermudas and Virginia in order to extort money. One Owen
Evans was accused of such practices in October, 1618 (Sainsbury, p.
19), and one Robinson was hanged, drawn, and quartered for this or
similar offences in November of the same year (Birch's Court of James
I, 108). In order to encourage the adventurers or shareholders to
subscribe to the sending of maids, a town was laid off in Virginia to
be called Maydstown. The subscribers were to be allowed shares in this
town. Manuscript Records, May 20, 1622, on the general subject; also
Records under date of November 3, 1621, and the 17th of the same
month, June 11, and November 21, 1621, and the manuscript book in the
Library of Congress, which I refer to in these notes as Manuscript
Book of Instructions, pp. 76 and 89. I may remark here that this book
has not been in use in recent times for reference. Its origin is
uncertain, nor can the authorities of the library tell where it came
from. It was compiled in the latter part of the seventeenth century,
judging from internal evidence, and was perhaps kept among the records
of the colony for reference on what we should call constitutional
questions. I found a loose memorandum laid in its pages in the
handwriting of Thomas Jefferson, to whom the book probably once
belonged.
CHAPTER THE THIRD.
_THE PROCESSION OF MOTIVES._
I.
[Sidenote: The chief mistake.]
The cause of the sorrows of Virginia will be more plainly seen if we
turn again to the motives that propelled Englishmen to plant a colony.
The chief mistake lay in the main purpose. If the founding of a state
had been other than a secondary and remote end, the managers might
have sent at first families and not bachelors, farmers and not
gentlemen, laborers and not riff-raff. But more visionary motives
dominated the action. A state was planted, but something else was
mainly intended by the first projectors. The work seemed continuous,
but the end in view shifted and the actors gradually changed. The only
motive that held from first to last, and ran through all the rest, was
the rivalry with Spain.
[Sidenote: The rivalry with Spain.]
[Sidenote: Lane to Sydney. Aug. 12, 1585. Sainsbury.]
[Sidenote: Lane to Walsingham. Aug. 12, 1585. Sainsbury.]
[Sidenote: Note 1.]
The colonies attempted by Frobisher and Gilbert were to serve as
relays in the work of exploration for a sea passage to the Pacific and
the search for mines, but they mark strongly the influence of the
Spanish example on English projects. Ralegh was a lifelong opponent in
peace and war of Spanish intrigue and aggression, and his efforts to
plant colonies in the virgin land were suggested by a knowledge of
the almost exhaustless treasure that flowed into Spanish coffers from
America. The opportune capture of a Spanish carack bound homeward from
Mexico with letters describing the wealth of Mexican mines brought the
support of English merchants to Ralegh's undertaking. Imbued with the
same spirit, Ralegh's governor wrote from Roanoke Island in 1585 that
his colony would be a means of deliverance from the domination of
Spain, "whose strength doth altogether grow from the mines of her
treasure." In the perilous isolation of the little company on Roanoke
Island, Lane assures himself that God will feed his men by means of
ravens rather than suffer their "enemies the papists" "to triumph at
the overthrow of this most Christian action." The home-staying English
of that age were spurred to colony-planting by three main
motives--cupidity, patriotic feeling, and religious zeal--and all of
these were provoked by emulation and jealousy of Spain.
II.
[Sidenote: Delusions in colony-planting.]
The prolonged movement for a colonial establishment, which extended
over the latter half of the reign of Elizabeth and almost the whole of
the reign of James I, was kept alive by delusions. The ultimate ends
for which colonies were proposed and planted in the last quarter of
the sixteenth and the first quarter of the seventeenth century were
none of them attained. The movable passage through North America to
the Pacific was still leading explorers a merry dance when the first
Jamestown emigrants sailed in 1606, and gold mines of comminuted mica,
of iron pyrites, of Indian mineral paints, and of pure fable were
potent attractions for some time after. The gradual increase of
geographical knowledge caused the "South Sea" to take shelter in the
unknown region behind the mountains, and the gold mines reported by
Indians and discovered by sanguine prospectors were somehow lost in
the interminable forests. In this exigency the first colony must have
perished for want of support if new hopes as illusive as the old had
not moved the English people to avert such a calamity.
[Sidenote: Commodities.]
[Sidenote: For example, Carlisle's treatise, Anderson's Commerce, year
1583.]
[Sidenote: Wine.]
[Sidenote: Silk.]
[Sidenote: Anderson on the year 1589.]
[Sidenote: 1609.]
The production of commodities which the ungenial climate of the
British Islands refused to grow was thought of from the beginning, and
they became after 1616 the main hope of wealth from Virginia. It
seemed grievous that England should spend her money in buying wine and
silk from southern Europe and naval stores from the Baltic. The only
maxim of political economy generally accepted in that day was that a
nation is enriched by getting money from abroad and keeping it at
home. The precious metals constituted the only recognized riches. Laws
were made to restrain the exportation of gold and silver, and
sumptuary laws to discourage the consumption of those things that must
be bought of the foreigner. Efforts to raise in Great Britain the
products of the Mediterranean region would have proved successful if
the climate had been half as favorable to such enterprises as the
government. The arguments advanced in favor of the possibility of
producing wine in England did much, no doubt, to secure the sunshine
of royal favor for experiments made to that end, but climatic
conditions were inexorable. King James busied himself to no profit in
raising mulberry trees and nursing a private stock of silkworms, in
imitation of Henry IV, the reigning King of France, who succeeded in
producing cocoons in the Tuileries but not in making silk culture
profitable in the north of France. Mulberries were first planted in
England in 1608, two years after the sailing of the Virginia
argonauts. James sent circulars to persons of influence among his
subjects asking them to cultivate mulberry trees, and, in the years
immediately following, the silk fever ran its course alongside the
excitement about the great lottery in behalf of the Virginia colony.
Hakluyt, spreading sails for America in every breeze, hastened to
announce at the first mention of silk culture that mulberry trees,
"apt to feed silke wormes to make silke," were a "chiefe commoditie"
of Virginia.
The first principles that govern colony-planting were not yet
understood. It was proposed to force everything from a forlorn camp of
men dwelling under roofs of bark and sedge, environed by treacherous
foes and in constant peril of starvation. The raising of silkworms was
begun in Virginia in 1613, and before the colony was nine years old it
was able to send to England silk that doubtless had cost more than a
hundred times its market value. The experiment came to nothing. It
could not have happened otherwise amid the miseries of those early
years. The rats, which opportunely destroyed the eggs of the silk
moth, were made to bear the responsibility for the failure.
[Sidenote: A new silk fever.]
[Sidenote: Cal. Dom. S. P. James I, p. 428.]
[Sidenote: Pory's Report, Pub. Rec. Off.]
[Sidenote: Phil. Trans. I, 201.]
[Sidenote: Hening i, 14.]
[Sidenote: Original Records of Colony of Va.]
[Sidenote: Note 2.]
[Sidenote: 1655.]
[Sidenote: Comp. Va. Richly Valued, 1650, and Leah and Rachel, 1636.]
[Sidenote: Note 3.]
Silk was little known in England at the beginning of Elizabeth's
reign, but it came into great request a few years later. In 1617 Lord
Carew declares that there is "a madness for silk instead of cloth."
This rage for silk led to the establishment of silk manufacturing in
England; throwsters, dyers, and weavers were brought to England from
abroad and settled in Spitalfields, "the cheap end of its metropolis,"
and in Moorfields. It seemed more than ever important to produce silk
in the king's dominions, in order to supply these manufacturers with
material without importation from alien lands. Accordingly, a new
effort was made in 1620 to secure raw silk from Virginia. The Earl of
Southampton, ever eager to promote the Virginia colony, "writt into
Italy, France, and Spayne" for silkworm "seed"; the king gave some
from his own stock, and the expert who had charge of the king's worms
was sent over to look after the business. A French book on the subject
was translated to instruct the colonists. The first Virginia Assembly
in 1619 had passed a law to promote the raising of the mulberry. To
save expense, the colonists at this time, or later, planted the trees
in hedgerows and mowed them with a scythe. In 1621 orders were sent
from England that none but members of the Council and the heads of
hundreds should wear silk, unless they had made it themselves. The
prohibition shows how general was the craze for silk clothing. The
climate of Virginia proved genial enough, but the massacre of 1622,
the bitter Indian conflicts that ensued in 1623, and the epidemic of
the same year, following one another swiftly, were enough to
annihilate a hundred feeble projects. The real doom of silk-raising,
however, came from the fact that the culture of tobacco in virgin soil
was incalculably more profitable and vastly less troublesome to
pioneers than hatching silkworms' eggs in one's pocket or bosom, or
sleeping with them in a small box under one's bolster and covering
them in the warm bed on rising. The project was blighted in the bud by
adverse economic conditions--a killing frost more deadly to such
enterprises than an ungenial climate. But a lesson in economic
principles is one of the hardest for men to learn. Long after the
colony had become prosperous, English projectors and Virginia
experimenters tried again and again to supplant tobacco with silk. If
we may credit the report, Virginia furnished a coronation robe of silk
for Charles I, and Charles II certainly wore silk from worms hatched
and fed in his Virginia dominions. One Esquire Digges brought
Armenians to Virginia to attend his worms. But in the Reformed
Virginia Silkworm, by Hartlib, the friend of Milton, it is announced
that a young lady had discovered that silkworms would care for
themselves on the trees, "to the instant wonderful enrichment of all
the planters there, requiring neither cost, labour, or hindrance in
any of their other employments." It is also suggested on the eager
title-page of the pamphlet that "the Indians, seeing and finding that
there is neither Art, Pains, or Skill in the thing," will
"incontinently fall to raising silk." Not only were the gentle
savages, and especially their women and children, to devote themselves
to silk, but the American caterpillar--"the natural silkworm" as it
was called--was expected to spin for the market if his cocoon could be
"refined."
[Sidenote: Hening ii, 242.]
[Sidenote: Phil. Trans. XI, 628.]
By 1666 the silk delusion had passed, and the Virginia Assembly
repealed all acts for the encouragement of mulberry trees. Ten years
later, Glover, the botanist, found many of these trees still standing
as melancholy witnesses to the waste of energy by the earlier
promoters and settlers of the colony. Almost every other American
colony made the same experiment for itself, and Virginia renewed its
endeavors from time to time, each generation forgetting what its
fathers had learned.
III.
[Sidenote: Silk-grass.]
[Sidenote: 1585.]
[Sidenote: A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of
Virginia.]
[Sidenote: Proceedings of Va. Assembly, 1619. 2d N. Y. Hist. Society
Coll. iii, 348.]
[Sidenote: Purchas IV, p. 1777.]
[Sidenote: Instr. of 24 July, 1624. MS. Bk. of Instr. Libr. of Cong.]
Along with the silk fever went the silk-grass craze. Ralegh's people
had seen the Indians wearing garments woven of the fiber of the _Yucca
filamentosa_, the "Adam's needle and thread" of our popular speech.
Hariot, in his account of it, declares that "the like grows in
Persia," and that much of the "silk-works" coming thence to Europe was
made of this fiber. He probably confounded the yucca with the ramie
plant of the East, of which grass cloth is made. Of the yucca fiber
taken to England in 1585, "a piece of silk grogram" was made, and of
course pronounced "excellent good"; it was even presented to the
queen. The coarse and rather brittle fiber of this plant was exalted
by enthusiasts into something nearly equal to silk. Ordinances for
planting it were sent from England; at least one legislative act in
its favor was passed by the Virginia Assembly, and the most foolish
hopes were entertained regarding the profit to be had from it. By 1619
it had come to be called "silk flax," and it was then advocated for
homelier uses, such as cordage and linen, and every householder was
compelled by law to set a hundred plants; the governor himself set
five thousand. In 1624 it is spoken of as "a commoditie of speciall
hope and much use." There were by this time those who ventured to say
that the silk-grass enterprise was "full of difficultie"; but the
managers in England easily got rid of this objection by attributing
the difficulty to "negligence and want of experience." They were just
then intent on finding some commodity that would take the place of
tobacco, which was frowned upon by both court and Parliament. In spite
of all discouragement, the hope of good results from the yucca fiber
outlasted that generation, and was in full vigor in 1649, sixty-four
years after Hariot's mistake.
IV.
[Sidenote: Wine.]
[Sidenote: MS. Rec. Va. Co. i, 343.]
It was also proposed to produce wine in Virginia for English
consumption. No more gold and silver should go out of the realm to buy
port and canary to the profit of foreigners and the impoverishment of
the good and loyal subjects of his Majesty. The instructions on this
point were clear, and before the Virginia exiles had secured bread to
stay their hunger they had made wine of the sour wild grapes of the
country. French vine-dressers were sent over a little later and were
forbidden to plant tobacco, but were compelled to employ themselves
about vines, with the care of silkworms for variety. In 1621 these
Frenchmen sent to England a cask of wine, the arrival of which was
duly celebrated. Other experimental casks of wine were afterward sent
to England from America at long intervals, but without decreasing the
profits of wine growers in the Old World.
[Sidenote: Other products sought.]
[Sidenote: Nova Brittania.]
All the commodities sought from Virginia were unsuited to conditions
in a new country. To the folly of making such experiments at all where
living itself was an experiment, the managers added the folly of
crowding a multiplicity of problematic enterprises on the colony at
the same time. With a virgin continent in which to produce novelties,
all things seemed possible in an age so hopeful. Plants of every
clime grew rank in the imagination of projectors. Virginia was a
wonderland, and it was readily believed without evidence that the
"soyle and clymate" were "very apt and fit for sugar canes"; "also
linseed and rapeseeds to make oiles," as a black-letter pamphlet of
1609 expresses it. Along with "orenges, limons, and almonds," this
official writer proposes to plant "anniseeds, rice, cummin,
cottonwool, carroway seeds, ginger, madder, olives, oris, sumacke,"
and, as if this breathless list were not enough for one new land, he
adds, "and many such like that I can not now name." If we may trust
the publications of the company, various West India plants were tried
in the very first days of the colony, while the threefold peril of
death from famine, pestilence, and savage war was imminent.
[Sidenote: Timber and naval stores.]
[Sidenote: MS. Rec. Va. Co. 31 May and 23 June, 1620.]
[Sidenote: Note 4.]
But it was not enough to wring from an infant colony the products of
the south; those derived from the north of Europe were straightway to
be got there also. German millwrights--"Dutch carpenters," in the
phrase of the records--were brought from Hamburg by John Ferrar to
build Virginia sawmills; timber was still sawed by hand in England.
Pitch, tar, and potash were to be produced by Poles sent out for the
purpose in the second year of the colony. Patriotism dictated that
England should be relieved of her dependence on foreign countries for
naval stores. Virginia had forests: why should she not produce these
things?
[Sidenote: Glass-making.]
[Sidenote: Note 5.]
[Sidenote: Iron works.]
[Sidenote: Note 6.]
[Sidenote: Result of the massacre.]
It had been found that the savages eagerly received glass beads in
exchange for corn and peltries. Nothing more was required to prove the
profitableness of glass-making. Some Germans were sent to the colony
in 1608, and glass works were established. For some reason no proper
materials were available at first, and it became necessary to request
that sand might be sent from England to make Virginia glass of at the
glass works in the woods near Jamestown. The German glass blowers were
prone to run away to the Indians, among whom work was lighter and food
more abundant. The tribesmen encouraged these desertions by providing
dusky wives for the men whose skill with tools and weapons they valued
highly. In 1621 the glass business was revived, and this time it was
intrusted to Italian workmen. About the same time iron works were
established at Falling Creek, with "forty skilled workmen from Sussex
to carry them forward." Twenty-five ship carpenters were sent to ply
their trade on the James River, and it was also arranged that oil was
to be distilled from walnuts by the "apothecaries." George Sandys was
sent over in July, 1621, to have entire control of all schemes for
staple commodities. There was a certain fitness in intrusting these
creatures of the imagination to a poet. Pineapples, plantains, and
other fruits were to be started forthwith. There was once again great
hope from the "rich commodity of silk," an endowed school for Indians
was founded, and the little Virginia pool became iridescent with many
frail bubbles. The sudden and frightful massacre by the savages in
March, 1622, obliterated instantly all vain and premature projects.
This calamity did not cause the failure of these foredoomed schemes;
it only saved them from a painful and lingering death, and provided
their friends with a decent epitaph for them. The people who survived
the massacre were decimated by an epidemic in the following year. What
strength they could spare from frequent battles with the savages they
spent in growing corn and tobacco, which last, of all the things
tried, proved to be the only commodity profitable for export.
V.
[Sidenote: Tobacco.]
[Sidenote: A Covnter-Blaste to Tobacco, 1604.]
[Sidenote: Note 7.]
[Sidenote: Note 8.]
[Sidenote: Note 9.]
Against tobacco King James had written a book. It was denounced in
Parliament and regarded by all public-spirited men as an evil.
Nevertheless, it turned the scale and saved the colony. In
colony-planting the problem is fundamentally an economic one, and
economic problems are solved by coarse and homely means. John Rolfe,
the first Englishman that ventured to wed an Indian, planted the first
tobacco at Jamestown in 1612, and by 1616 the better West India
variety had perhaps been substituted for the harsh kind grown by the
Virginia Indians, and by them called "uppowoc" or "apooke." Tobacco
prospered and was profitable, to the disgust of the pedantic king and
the sorrow of all who had cherished hopes of beautiful products from
a colony upon which so much poetic sentiment had been lavished.
Neither gold nor spices came as had been expected; the strings of
pearls seen by Ralegh's men were not again to be found, or were
perhaps transformed on investigation into wampum beads; the silver
mine once discovered on the upper James had vanished forever; tropical
fruits refused to grow; even madder and woad failed, and, though the
indigo plant would readily mature, nobody knew how to manufacture the
dye. Silk was troublesome and unprofitable, shipbuilding, and such
coarse but patriotic products as naval stores had come to naught. But
the detestable "weed," as King James had dubbed it, throve apace. As
early as 1617 the waste margins of the broad streets of Jamestown were
planted with it by the eager settlers. The English merchants grasped
at the profits of it, the farmers of the customs rejoiced in the heavy
duties imposed on it, and a powerful mercenary interest in the
prosperity of Virginia was established. By 1624, when the Virginia
Company was dissolved, the danger that the colony would be abandoned
as a result of Spanish intrigues, Indian massacres, or prolonged
discouragement had passed away. Public spirit, patriotism, and
religious enthusiasm no longer guarded it as a feeble house plant. It
had struck root in the outdoor soil of human self-interest and its
life was assured. From that time the colony that had been for
seventeen years a fairyland to dreamers in England and a perdition to
its inhabitants, became a sober money-making enterprise, uninteresting
to enthusiasts and philanthropists.
VI.
[Sidenote: Motives of sentiment.]
In the preceding sections of this chapter we have traced what may be
called the series of commercial motives that, sometimes in succession,
often in co-operation, propelled the Virginia movement. The agitation
for a colony was primarily a commercial one. The London or Virginia
Company by which it was carried forward had been organized in the form
of the great trading corporations of the time, such as the Muscovy
Company and the East India Company, and it was expected to yield large
returns. But though commercial in form and purpose, the Virginia
Company from the outset was able to appeal successfully in every
emergency to motives that were far from mercenary. Into the
chain-threads of commercial enterprise was woven a woof of patriotic
feeling and religious sentiment.
VII.
[Sidenote: Rise of the patriot party in the Virginia Company.]
[Sidenote: Woodnoth's Short Collection, p. 6.]
[Sidenote: Peckard's Ferrar, 113.]
Dale's empty-handed return, and Argall's homecoming with hands full of
the spoil of both colony and colonists, were severe blows to the hope
of profit from Virginia, and thereafter commercial motives fell to a
second place. The company began to pass more and more out of the
control of traders like Sir Thomas Smyth and Alderman Johnson, and
the corrupt clique of predatory merchants, as well as out of the reach
of voracious noblemen like Warwick. More and more it passed into the
hands of the great liberal statesmen whose leader was the
incorruptible Sir Edwin Sandys, a man of rare gifts and knowledge and
of great resoluteness. These men had suffered some disappointment, no
doubt, in their struggle for parliamentary freedom in England. They
might have succeeded better had their antagonist been a strong king,
but against the pusillanimity, the vanity, the vacillation, and the
pedantic dogmatism of James little permanent headway could be made.
Without relinquishing the conflict in the House of Commons, they took
it up in the Quarter Courts of the Virginia Company. In this new field
they found themselves afresh confronted by the obstinacy of the king,
who was stirred up to oppose them by the discarded governor, Sir
Thomas Smyth, and his friends, by Warwick, and by all the partisans of
high prerogative and all the advocates of the Spanish match.
"Bedchamber men" and others about the king's person were engaged to
work upon the king to come to the rescue of Sir Thomas Smyth's
"honor." The Spanish ambassador Gondomar, who had spies in the
Virginia Company, took pains to feed James's discontent. He told the
king that it was time for him to look into the Virginia courts, which
were held in the great hall of the house of the Ferrar family. Too
many of the king's nobility and gentry resorted thither, in order to
be in company with the popular Lord Southampton and the dangerous
Sandys. They were deep politicians, and they entertained designs
beyond a tobacco plantation. Their leaders, he said, were "subtle men
of high courage who regarded neither his master nor their own."
[Sidenote: Sir Edwin Sandys.]
[Sidenote: Royal Hist. MS. Comm. viii, II, 45.]
[Sidenote: The king's interference.]
[Sidenote: 1620.]
[Sidenote: A land of freedom.]
[Sidenote: Note 10.]
Sandys, as assistant to Sir Thomas Smyth and virtual governor, had
already succeeded in establishing in Virginia a constitutional state
with a representative government. He was furthering plans for the
foundation of the little separatist state of New Plymouth, and his
enemies set agoing tales that he had dark designs of removing with the
Pilgrims to America, in order to found a democratic state there. In
1619 Sir Thomas Smyth tendered his resignation, and the company, to
his surprise, it would appear, accepted it, and chose Sandys to his
place. When, in 1620, his first year of government drew to a close,
Sir Edwin Sandys erected an elegant ballot-box in the midst of the
hall of the Ferrars, that the brilliant assemblage of noblemen,
knights, gentlemen, and merchants might by a secret vote exercise the
right of choice without any constraint. Just as the assemblage was
about to begin voting, two clerks of the signet were announced with a
message from the king forbidding the company to choose Sandys. "Choose
the devil, if you will, but not Sir Edwin Sandys," was one form in
which the king expressed his aversion. Southampton, braving the king's
displeasure, allowed himself to be elected, with Sandys for deputy.
In June, 1621, both Southampton and Sandys were imprisoned. This
attracted attention to Virginia as a "refuge from a more oppressive
government in England." In three months' time twenty-five ships set
sail for the colony, which gained an impetus from the king's
opposition that put it beyond the danger of destruction by the
calamities of the next two years. Even before the massacre and
pestilence of 1622 and 1623, Southampton was assured by friends at
court that it would come to "push of pike," and that the company would
be overthrown. The charter of the company was vacated in 1624, but
free government had so taken root in the colony that it could never
afterward be quite extirpated. A new English state with a popular
government had been founded of deliberate purpose by a group of
English statesmen, at the head of which, and easily first, was Sir
Edwin Sandys, whose great service to the people and nation that were
to come has been almost forgotten.
VIII.
[Sidenote: Religious propagandism.]
[Sidenote: Note 11.]
We shall not have taken a just account of Virginia colonization if we
do not reckon religious motives among the many forces that carried
that wavering enterprise to success. From the excitement about
American exploration and colonization the English church caught its
first missionary impulse. The Indian captives brought from America at
various times gave to Englishmen the novel sight of men and women
from beyond the bounds of Christendom; people who had never been
baptized, and had never learned to wear English garments, "naked
slaves of the devil," as one of the early Virginia clergymen described
them. To the benevolent desire of Englishmen for the deliverance of
the savages from devil-worship and semi-nudity, there was added the
natural wish for ecclesiastical extension. The separation of England
from the Roman hierarchy had been a blow to the aspiration for an
unattainable catholicity cherished in one form or another by Christian
ecclesiastics of almost every school. It was not possible that the
great men who were leaders of the English church in the reigns of
Elizabeth and James should be content with the narrow limits of "the
little English paddock," while Spanish conquerors and missionary
priests were winning for the Roman communion a new and vast dominion
in America. English ecclesiastics felt keenly the reproach made
against them by the Roman Catholics that they were not "converters of
infidels."
[Sidenote: Zeal of the clergy.]
Perhaps the earliest of all Anglican missionaries was Robert Hunt, the
first minister in Virginia, a light shining in a dark place indeed. He
bore with unfaltering courage and a sweet-hearted patience rarely
equaled in the history of martyrdom the accumulating miseries of
Jamestown, until he also perished in the general mortality. His
nobleness of spirit softened the detestable rivalries of the early
leaders. The most active and influential writers in favor of
colonization were clergymen such as Hakluyt, Symonds, Purchas, and
Crashaw. Other clergymen, following in the footsteps of Hunt, risked
life itself in the Virginia colony, while devout laymen spent their
money in its behalf. Thus did Anglican zeal further a colonization
that, by a curious perversity of outcome, resulted in founding a
nation of dissenters.
IX.
[Sidenote: The Ferrars.]
In the great hall of the house of Nicholas Ferrar, a London merchant,
the courts or meetings of the Virginia Company were held for years.
The two sons of this Nicholas Ferrar, John and Nicholas, served in
turn as deputy governors of the Virginia Company. This pious Ferrar
family, as it became influential, lent to the scheme of colonizing
Virginia something of the air of a project for propagating the gospel.
Nicholas, the father, gave money for the education of infidels in
Virginia. A school was founded there by the gifts of the pious, and
rewards were given to those colonists who would educate Indian
children in their families. After the younger Nicholas, who was a man
of remarkable zeal and activity, tinged with a romantic enthusiasm,
became deputy in 1622, the production of silk and wine and iron and
the educating of Indians in Christianity traveled on abreast. A
college was proposed, for which an endowment of thirteen hundred
pounds was collected, and to which a valuable library was bequeathed
by a settler. Practical men grumbled at the prematurity of all this,
and complained of those in charge that "they spent Michaelmas rent in
mid-summer moone." The governor of the colony, honest Sir Francis
Wyatt, wished that "little Mr. Ferrar were in Virginia, where he might
add to his zeal a knowledge of the country."
The horrible massacre of March, 1622, made the Indian question
something other than the Ferrars saw it. All schemes for educating the
savages were obliterated in a day. The only thought after this was how
to put the savages to death, old and young, men and women, more often
by foul means than by fair. The settlers even emulated, if they did
not surpass, the treachery of the Indians. With the dissolution of the
company by _quo warranto_ proceedings in 1624 the government of the
colony passed to the Crown, and the Ferrars had no more to do with
Virginia.
X.
[Sidenote: Later History of the Ferrars.]
[Sidenote: Peckard's Life of N. Ferrar.]
[Sidenote: Arminian Nunnery 1641.]
[Sidenote: Hearne's Langtoft's Chronicle, App. to Pref., cix.]
The later career of Nicholas Ferrar the younger, though without direct
relation to colonization, throws light on the age of colony
beginnings. Rejecting the offer of a rich bride, he bought for his
mother, now a widow, the manor lordship of Little Gidding, in
Huntingdonshire, and took the entire Ferrar family, including his
brother and his sister with eighteen children, into religious
retirement. Here this half-domestic, half-monastic community gave alms
to the poor, illuminated manuscripts of the Bible, and worshiped in
its little chapel with genuflections and other observances that
procured for it the nickname of the "Protestant Nunnery," and brought
down upon it the pious fury of the Puritans. Nicholas Ferrar, who had
taken deacon's orders, was the real head of the community. He prepared
at Little Gidding what is perhaps the earliest English monatesseron of
the four gospels. By means of relays of worshipers the Ferrars kept
their devotions always in progress. The entire Psalter was chanted
antiphonally during each twenty-four hours. Those whose turn it was to
keep vigil were wont to leave a candle at the door of Nicholas and to
wish him good-morrow at one o'clock in the morning, at which hour he
was accustomed to rise and begin the exercises of the day. The
strength of this belated mediaeval saint gave way under a discipline so
austere, and he died in 1637. Little Gidding, with its "fair grove and
sweet walks letticed and gardened on both sides," was devastated a few
years later by the counter-zeal of the Puritans, who showed an
especial indignation against the organ, which they broke into pieces
to light fires for roasting the sheep of the Ferrars. Behold an
epitome of the first half of the seventeenth century--its idealism in
affairs, and its war to the death of opposing ideals in religion!
[Sidenote: Advent of Puritanism.]
In the very years during which the Ferrars were most active on
behalf of Virginia the earliest Puritan movement toward America set
in. The attenuated mediaevalism of the Ferrars did not lack a
certain refined beauty, but it was hardly suited to the rough work
of hewing a road along which civilization might march into a savage
wilderness. The Puritans, with their robust contempt for aesthetic
considerations--making firewood of organs with delight, and feasting
without scruple on the sheep of those whom they esteemed
idolaters--were much the fitter to be champions against the American
Canaanites.
ELUCIDATIONS.
[Sidenote: Note 1, page 74.]
Two of the chapter heads to Hakluyt's Westerne Planting, printed in 2d
Maine Historical Collections, ii, sufficiently indicate the views
prevailing at the time:
"V. That this voyadge will be a greate bridle to the Indies of the
Kinge of Spaine, and a meane that wee may arreste at our pleasure for
the space of tenne weekes or three monethes every yere, one or two
hundred saile of his subjectes Shippes at the fysshinge in Newfounde
lande.
"VI. That the mischefe that the Indian threasure wroughte in time of
Charles the late Emperor, father to the Spanishe Kinge, is to be had
in consideration of the Queens moste excellent Majestie, least the
contynuall comynge of the like threasure from thence to his sonne
worke the unrecoverable annoye of this realme, wherof already wee have
had very dangerous experience."
The heading of the first chapter should be added: "I. That this
westerne discoverie will be greately for thinlargemente of the gospell
of Christe whereunto the princes of the refourmed relligion are
chefely bounde, amongst whome her Majestie ys principall."
It would be foreign to the purpose of the present work to tell the
story of Spanish jealousy of Virginia, and of the diplomatic intrigues
for the overthrow of the colony. See documents in Mr. Alexander
Brown's Genesis of the United States. One can not but regret that Mr.
Brown did not give also the original of his Spanish papers; no
translation is adequate to the use of the historian.
[Sidenote: Note 2, page 78.]
This method was recommended to the colonists as late as 1753 in
Pullein's Culture of Silk for the Use of the American Colonies, and it
had probably long prevailed on the continent of Europe.
[Sidenote: Note 3, page 79.]
The authorities on the early efforts to raise silk, in addition to
those cited in the text and the margin, are too numerous to find place
here. The most valuable of all is, of course, the copy of the Records
of the Virginia Company after April, 1619, in the Library of Congress,
_passim_. See, for example, under date of December 13, 1620, and June
11, 1621. See also A Declaration of Virginia, 1620, and Purchas, pp.
1777-1787, Hamor's True Discourse, Smith's General History, Book II,
Anderson's Commerce under 1620, and various state papers abstracted by
Sainsbury, with Sainsbury's preface to the first volume of his
Calendar, and Hening, _passim_. The reader is also referred to Mr.
Bruce's Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century,
issued as these pages are passing into the hands of the printer. The
wildness of some of the proposals for the production of Virginia silk
in the Commonwealth period is almost surpassed by other projects of
the time. In Virginia Richly Valued, 1650, perfume was to be extracted
from the muskrat, and the James River sturgeon were to be
domesticated. Fishes may be "unwilded," says the author. Besides
feeding silkworms, the Indians were to be used in pearl fisheries in
Virginia waters. Wyckoff on Silk Manufacture, Tenth Census, says that
experimental silkworms had been taken to Mexico by the Spaniards in
1531, without any permanent results.
[Sidenote: Note 4, page 82.]
Even in Elizabeth's time efforts had been made to procure naval stores
without the intervention of foreign merchants. As early as 1583,
Carlisle, who was son-in-law to Secretary Walsingham, had subscribed a
thousand pounds toward an American colony, which it was urged would
buy English woolens, take off idle and burdensome people, and, among
other things, produce naval stores. In 1601 Ralegh had protested
eloquently against the act to compel Englishmen to sow hemp. "Rather
let every man use his ground to that which it is most fit for," he
said. Edwards, Life of Ralegh, p. 272.
[Sidenote: Note 5, page 83.]
Why Germans were sent it is hard to say, as glass was made in England
as early as 1557. Glass was produced in Virginia, according to
Strachey, who says: "Although the country wants not Salsodiack enough
to make glasse of, and of which we have made some stoore in a goodly
howse sett up for the same purpose, with all offices and furnases
thereto belonging, a little without the island, where Jamestown now
stands." History of Travaile into Virginnia Brittannia, p. 71. The
house appears to have been standing and in operation in 1624. Calendar
of Colonial Documents, January 30, February 16, and number 20, pp. 38,
39.
[Sidenote: Note 6, page 83.]
Purchas, p. 1777, says that one hundred and fifty persons were sent
over two years earlier to set up three iron works, but the statement
seems hardly credible. In the midst of the misery following the
massacre of 1622, and notwithstanding the imminent probability of the
overthrow of the company, which was already impoverished, some of the
adventurers or shareholders sent nine men to Virginia to try a
different method of making iron from the one that had previously been
used. Letter of August 6, 1623, in Manuscript Book of Instructions in
Library of Congress, fol. 120. Having "failed to effect" the making of
iron "by those great wayes which we have formerly attempted," the
undiscouraged visionaries "most gladly embraced this more facile
project" of making iron "by bloom," but with a like result, of course.
[Sidenote: Note 7, page 84.]
The raising of tobacco in Virginia was one of the earliest projects
entertained. "We can send ... tobacco after a yeare or two, five
thousand pounds a yeare." Description of the Now-discovered river and
Country of Virginia, with the Liklyhood of ensuing Ritches by
England's Ayd and Industry, May 21, 1607. Public Record Office,
printed in Transactions of the American Antiquarian Society, iv, 59,
62. The paper is supposed to be from the pen of Captain Gabriel
Archer.
[Sidenote: Note 8, page 85.]
In 1604 the king had, by a royal commission addressed to "our
treasurer of England," arbitrarily raised the duty on tobacco from
twopence a pound to six shillings tenpence. He was probably moved to
make this surprising change by his antipathy to tobacco; but by
increasing the profits of the farmers of customs and monopolists of
tobacco, he no doubt contributed to that abandonment of Virginia to
tobacco raising which seemed to him so lamentable. The use of Spanish
tobacco in England was general before that from Virginia began to take
its place. Barnabee Rich says, in 1614: "I have heard it tolde that
now very lately there hath bin a cathologue taken of all those new
erected houses that have set vppe that trade of selling tobacco in
London, ande neare about London, and if a man may beleeue what is
confidently reported, there are found to be vpward of 7000 houses that
doth liue by that trade." He says such shops were "almost in euery
lane and in euery by-corner round about London." The Honestie of this
Age, p. 30.
[Sidenote: Note 9, page 86.]
The MS. records of the Virginia Company and the State papers relating
to Virginia in the Public Record Office, London, are the most
important authorities on the subjects treated in the text. On the
commodities attempted at the outset, Manuscript Book of Instructions,
Library of Congress, the first volume of Hening's Statutes, _passim_,
and Purchas, pp. 1777-1786, _passim_. On the inferiority of the Indian
tobacco, see Strachey, p. 121.
[Sidenote: Note 10, page 89.]
Peckard's Life of Ferrar supplies many of the particulars in this
section. The Records of the Virginia Company and other original
authorities do not sustain all of Peckard's statements. The author's
view is evidently distorted by biographer's myopia. He often seems to
depend on tradition, but in some passages his touch is more sure, and
he writes like a man who has documents before him. Arthur Woodnoth's
Short Collection of the Most Remarkable Passages from the Originall to
the Dissolution of the Virginia Company is of great value. It is a
scarce tract, which I met first in the White-Kennett Library, in the
rooms of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. It is also in
the British Museum, Harvard College, and the Library of Congress. It
is to be taken with discrimination, but the view of the inner workings
of court intrigue as it affected Virginia is so fresh and detailed
that it would be a pity to miss its information. It was printed in
1651. There is a brief sketch of the life of Sandys in Brown's Genesis
of the United States, ii, 993.
[Sidenote: Note 11, page 90.]
Hakluyt's Discourse concerneing Westerne Planting, printed first in
the Maine Historical Collections, second series, vol. ii, page 11.
"And this enterprise the princes of religion (amonge whome her
Majestie ys principall) oughte the rather to take in hande because
papists confirme themselves and drawe other to theire side shewinge
that they are the true Catholicke churche because they have bene the
onely converters of many millions of infidells. Yea, I myself have
bene demanded of them how many infidells have bene by us converted."
BOOK II.
THE PURITAN MIGRATION.
CHAPTER THE FIRST.
_RISE AND DEVELOPMENT OF PURITANISM._
I.
[Sidenote: Love of display in Elizabeth's time.]
[Sidenote: Note 1.]
[Sidenote: Machyn's Diary, 324, note.]
Not religious disputants only, but the world in general, exaggerated
the importance of vestments and ceremonies in the reign of Elizabeth.
The love of formality and display that characterized the Renascence
was then at its height. It was a time of pomps and royal progresses.
Great historic characters went about dressed like performers in a
show. Some of the queen's gowns were adorned with jewels on every
available inch of space. These bespangled robes were draped over vast
farthingales, which spread out like tables on which her arms might
rest, and her appearance when thus attired has been compared to that
of an Oriental idol. Her courtiers and statesmen were equally fond of
dazzling the spectator. Ralegh wore a pendent jewel on his hat
feather, and the value of the gems on his shoes was estimated at six
thousand six hundred pieces of gold. The love of pomp was not confined
to the court; every nobleman and country gentleman kept his house
filled with idle serving men, the sons of neighboring gentlemen or
yeomen, whose use was to "grace the halls" of their patron by their
attendance and to give dignity to his hospitality. High sheriffs and
other officials performed their functions with thirty or forty men in
livery at their heels, even borrowing the retainers of their friends
to lend state to their office. Edward VI set out upon a progress in
1551 with a train of four thousand mounted men. These were noblemen
and gentlemen with their retainers. He was obliged to dismiss all but
a hundred and fifty of this vast army of display lest it should "eat
up the country." The gorgeous progresses of Elizabeth are too well
known to need description. A painting of the time shows her to us in
the act of making a friendly call on her cousin-german, Lord Hunsdon.
She is sitting under a canopy, and is borne on the shoulders of men
and attended by a brilliant train of lords and ladies on foot. It was
truer in the days of Shakespeare than it has been since that "all the
world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."
[Sidenote: The age of the drama.]
A passionate love of the theater was inevitable in such a time. The
best poetry then took a dramatic form; even history was taught from
the stage; and satire and polemics felt the attraction and were often
put into imaginary dialogues. It was Shakespeare's good fortune that
he happened to live among a people fond of show and in an age
dramatic as well as poetic to its very core. Genius is nourished by
sympathy, and supremely great performance is rendered possible only by
the rare coincidence of the great man and a fitting environment.
[Sidenote: Display in dress.]
[Sidenote: Peckard's Life of Ferrar.]
[Sidenote: Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses, _passim_.]
[Sidenote: Note 2.]
Dress signified more to the men of the time of Elizabeth and James
than it is easy for us moderns to imagine. Greatness declared itself
by external display. The son of a rich merchant when he returned from
his travels decked himself in gorgeous apparel, and formally made his
appearance on the Exchange like a butterfly newly emerged. It was thus
that his parents brought the young man out in the world. A sum equal
in purchasing power to several thousand dollars in our time is said to
have been spent on one pair of trunk hose. Men of the lowest ranks,
desirous of appearing more than they were, impoverished themselves in
buying expensive hats and hose; and it is recorded that women
suffering for the necessaries of life sometimes contrived to adorn
themselves with velvet. For the very reason that so much importance
was attached to dress, laws were made to repress inappropriate display
in people of lower rank. Even the severe Puritan moralists did not
object to the pomp of the great, but to the extravagant imitation of
it by those who had no right to such ostentation. It was with
difficulty that men could conceive of greatness without display. To
refuse a bishop his vestments was to abate something of his lofty
rank.
II.
[Sidenote: Observance of ceremonies.]
[Sidenote: Compare _supra_, p. 41.]
[Sidenote: Strachey, in Purchas, iv, 17-54.]
[Sidenote: De la Warr's letter, in Strachey's Virginia, p. xxix.]
Along with a love for external show went a scrupulous observance of
decorous and often pompous ceremonies. Englishmen in the sixteenth and
the early part of the seventeenth century never omitted to observe
proper formality, no matter how dire the emergency. One may see this
exemplified by reverting to some of the earliest events in American
history. When Gates arrived at Jamestown near the close of the
"starving time," he found only the gaunt ghosts of men clamoring to be
taken from the scene of so many horrible miseries. Instead of giving
immediate attention to the sufferings of the people, he caused the
little church bell to be rung. Such of the inhabitants as could drag
themselves out of their huts repaired once more to the now ruined and
unfrequented church with its roof of sedge and earth supported by
timbers set in crotches. Here the newly arrived chaplain offered a
sorrowful prayer, and then George Percy, the retiring governor,
delivered up his authority to Sir Thomas Gates, who thus found himself
in due and proper form installed governor of death, famine, and
desperation. When Gates abandoned the wrecked town with his starving
company he fired a "peale of small shott," in order not to be wanting
in respect for a royal fort; and when De la Warr arrived, a few days
later, he made his landing with still greater pomp than that of Gates.
There was a flourish of trumpets on shipboard before he struck sail
in front of Jamestown. A gentleman of his party bore the colors of the
governor before him. The governor's first act when he set foot on
American soil was to fall on his knees and offer a long, silent
prayer, which was probably sincere though theatrical, after the manner
of the age. He rose at length and marched up into the ruined town. As
he passed into the stockade by the water gate, which was shabbily off
its hinges, the color bearer dropped down before him and allowed the
colors to fall at the feet of his lordship, who proceeded to the
tumble-down chapel, under the earthen roof of which the authority over
the colony was duly transferred to his hands with such solemnities as
were thought proper. Whenever Lord De la Warr went to church at
Jamestown he was attended by the councilors, captains, and gentlemen,
and guarded by fifty men with halberds, wearing De la Warr's livery of
showy red cloaks. The governor's seat was a chair covered with green
velvet. It was in the choir of the now reconstructed little church,
and a velvet cushion lay on the table before him to enable him to
worship his Maker in a manner becoming the dignity of a great lord
over a howling wilderness. More than a quarter of the able-bodied men
in Virginia were needed to get the governor to church and back again
aboard the ship where he dwelt.
[Sidenote: Formality at Plymouth.]
[Sidenote: De Rasieres's letter, 2d N. Y. Hist. Coll., ii, 352.]
Even at a later date in the rather hungry little Pilgrim colony at
Plymouth almost as much ceremony was observed, though the people were
extreme Puritans without rank. At beat of drum on Sunday morning the
men came to Captain Standish's door with their cloaks on, each bearing
a musket or matchlock. They proceeded to church three abreast, led by
a sergeant. In the rear walked the governor, in a long robe. On his
right was Elder Brewster, wearing a cloak. On the governor's left was
Captain Miles Standish, who also wore a cloak and side arms, and
carried a small cane as a sort of baton of authority perhaps. Thus
"they march in good order, and each sets his arms down near him."
[Sidenote: Puritanism an outgrowth of the time.]
It was only in an age such as this that resistance to the celebration
of rites and the observance of forms could be made a capital article
of faith by the Puritan, and later by the Quaker. The wearing of a
surplice, the propriety of doffing the hat on certain occasions, was a
matter for scruple and violent debate, for the grave consideration of
the lawgiver and magistrate, and for severe penalties.
III.
[Sidenote: Origin of the Puritan movement.]
[Sidenote: Fuller's Ch. Hist., book v, sec. iv, 27, 28.]
[Sidenote: 1536.]
In the brief Protestant reign of Edward VI there were those who
objected to "the vestments," and one may even find what were afterward
called Puritan opinions condemned among current errors in the
twenty-eighth year of Henry VIII; but Puritanism--as a party protest
against pomp and ceremonialism in religious worship--had its origin in
the persecution of Queen Mary's time. The English Protestants who
fled from that fiery ordeal found refuge chiefly in Protestant cities
of the Continent. Strasburg, Frankfort, Basel, Zurich, and Geneva were
the places to which these English exiles mainly resorted. Zurich and
Strasburg became cities of refuge for many of those who were to become
leaders of the Anglican or Conservative party, while others who tended
to what were afterward called Puritan views went sooner or later to
Geneva, where Calvin was the dominant influence.
[Sidenote: A. D. 1553.]
[Sidenote: The English exiles.]
In the cities in which they found safety the exiles organized English
churches. More remarkable religious communities were never gathered
into single congregations. Five bishops and five deans of the English
Church, and more than fifty eminent doctors of divinity, with younger
men who were destined to play a leading part in the future, were
comprised in these little churches. Such communities soon became
centers of animated discussion and debate.
[Sidenote: Outbreak of dissension.]
During the preceding reign of King Edward VI, English Protestantism
had been forced into many compromises within itself. No form of
religious life can become national without exacting of its advocates
of differing shades of opinion many sacrifices for the sake of unity;
but now that the leaders of English Protestantism were in exile they
found themselves in a measure freed from motives of policy and with
leisure to develop and apply their theories. A passion for the ideal
thus suddenly unchained easily becomes rampant. There sprang up
swiftly a dispute between the church in Strasburg and the church in
Frankfort on matters of government. The reformatory spirit is rarely
conciliatory, and in its excess and overflow it is wont to be
pragmatic and impertinent. Some of the reformers of Strasburg felt
bound to go over to Frankfort and re-reform the reformed English
church there; and the little English community in Frankfort was soon
torn asunder between the followers of Richard Cox and those of John
Knox--the same who was afterward so famous in the Scottish
reformation.
[Sidenote: Character of the debates at Frankfort.]
This dispute in Frankfort between the Coxans and the Knoxans, as they
were called, had all the characteristics that render church quarrels
odious. One finds in it the bitterness of slanderous violence--the
little deceptions and unmanly treacheries that characterize such
debates and disclose the sorry threadbareness of human saintship even
in exiles and martyrs for conscience' sake. But, petty as were these
squabbles at Frankfort, they produced results of the first magnitude.
Small things change the whole course of history when they lie near the
fountain head of a great current. From the conflicting factions in the
church of the exiles at Frankfort were evolved the opposing parties
that were to give character to English Protestantism, and to modify
profoundly the history of England and as profoundly the history of the
United States.
[Sidenote: The rise of the two great parties.]
[Sidenote: Note 3.]
In the contentions of the English at Frankfort, resulting now in the
exiling from the city of one beaten minority and now in the departure
of another, and in the driving away of one leading disputant after
another, there appeared at length the features of the two great
parties of English Protestantism face to face for the first time. One
of these parties tried to hold all of antique ritual that the
Protestant conscience could be made to bear, insisted upon the
superior authority of the clergy, and sought to disturb as little as
possible the ancient order of the English church. On the other hand,
in the rapid changes produced by the Frankfort contentions, the
tendency of the ultra wing of the Protestants to the notion of a local
and independent church and to a democratic church government was
already apparent. Even the peculiarity of two ministers presiding over
one church, which was cherished later in New England, appeared among
the English at Frankfort and Geneva at this time.
[Sidenote: A purified ritual.]
[Sidenote: Note 4.]
While attempting to mediate between the parties at Frankfort, Calvin
expressed his preference for a ritual of greater purity than that
established by the English Prayer Book of King Edward's time. Extreme
Protestants rallied round this ideal of a liturgy purified of human
tradition. It was some years later, after the Frankfort church had
been dissolved and the exiles had returned to England, that this party
came to be known by the name of Puritan--that is, a party not so much
bent on purity of conduct as on purifying Protestant worship from
mediaeval forms.
[Sidenote: Return of the exilies, 1558.]
After the death of Mary and the accession of Elizabeth the English
Protestants returned to their own country. The two great parties that
were to divide the English church had already begun to crystallize.
Those who had settled at Strasburg and Zurich came back hoping to
re-establish the Anglican Church on the conservative basis of the
Prayer Book of Edward VI. Those who returned from Basel and Geneva had
caught the spirit of the Calvinistic churches, and wished to push the
reformation to a more logical extreme; while the Frankfort church, or
what remained of it, had been storm-driven well-nigh to a theory of
congregational independence in church government.
[Sidenote: Results.]
The petty squabbles of the English exiles, transplanted to England,
grew into bitter feuds and brought forth persecutions and political
struggles. The settlement of New England, the battles of Marston Moor
and Naseby, the temporary overthrow of the English monarchy, the
growth of non-conformity, the modification of the English Constitution
and of all English life, were germinally present in the differences
between the exiles at Zurich and those at Geneva, and in the squabbles
of Cox and Knox, of Whithead and Horne at Frankfort-on-the-Main about
gowns and litanies and the authority of the priest. It is not often
that a great historical movement can be traced through a single rill
to its rise at the fountain head.
IV.
[Sidenote: The Puritan debate.]
[Sidenote: Certayne Qvestions concerning silk or vvool in the high
priest's ephod, 1605.]
The theological debates that fill so large a place in the history of
the first half of the sixteenth century in Europe were mainly
concerned with speculative dogmas. However futile controversies may
seem that seek to reduce to formulas the relations between God and
man, they have at least a topical dignity. But the debates about
ceremonies and vestments which the exiles brought back to England from
the Continent, and which held first place there during the reign of
Elizabeth and James, were bitter without being serious. A
life-and-death struggle concerning the wearing of "white surplices" or
the making of the sign of the cross in baptism can not but seem
frivolous to the modern mind. Learned scholars like Broughton and
Ainsworth thought it not beneath them to write tractates discussing
the material of which the ephod of a Jewish high priest was made. It
was learnedly demonstrated that the ephod was of silk, and there were
sober essays on the linsey-woolsey side of that controversy. To the
fine-spun mind of that time the character of the Jewish ephod was
thought to settle the propriety of the Christian surplice. To the
modern reader the whole debate about vestments and liturgies would be
amusing if it were not so tedious. It is necessary to steady one's
judgment of that age by remembering that deeper things sometimes lay
concealed under these disputes regarding the contemptible mint and
cumin of ecclesiasticism. Puritanism at its rise was an effort to
escape from formalism, the outgrowth of an aspiration for greater
spirituality in worship; but it gradually passed into an opposite
formalism as rigid as that from which it had escaped.
[Sidenote: Uniformity not possible.]
It was in vain that Elizabeth tried to compel uniformity. The
difference between the radical and the conservative is constitutional,
and is manifest in every period of agitation. Neither the mediation of
moderate men nor the compulsion of authority can bring these two
sempiternal divisions of the human race into agreement. The
conservative English churchman limited his Protestantism to the
rejection of the pope's authority, and to certain moderate reforms in
church government and ritual. He shuddered with alarm at every
proposal to reconstruct religious institutions which were moss-grown
with ancient sentiment. The extreme Puritan, on the other hand, went
about his work in the spirit of a Jehu. He saved all his reverence for
the precepts of the Bible, now becoming common in the vulgar tongue.
He applied biblical phraseology to the affairs of life in a way that
would have been impossible had he possessed any sense of humor. He
felt himself impelled by the call of God to carry out in England the
changes that had taken place in the Calvinistic churches of the
Continent, and to go even further. He would have no surplices, no sign
of the cross, no liturgy, no church holy days. Away with these rags
of Antichrist, was his cry. Let us get back to the simplicity of the
primitive ages. The Anglican, on the other hand, felt himself an
Englishman above all, and without a stately liturgy, great bishops in
square caps and lawn sleeves, Christmas feasts, solemn Good Fridays,
and joyous Easters, there would have remained for him no merry
England.
V.
[Sidenote: Growth of party spirit.]
The party line between Anglican and Puritan was not at once sharply
drawn. It was only after debates growing ever more acrimonious, after
persecutions and numberless exasperations, that the parties in the
Church of England fell into well-defined and hostile camps. If there
had been some relaxation of the requirements of uniformity, if a
conciliatory policy had been pursued by the government, the ultimate
division might have been postponed until party spirit had cooled; but
in that day blows took the place of words, and words had the force of
blows. The queen herself could write to a bishop who scrupled to do
what she desired, "By God, I will unfrock you!" and moderation in
debate was not to be expected from lesser folk.
[Sidenote: Puritanism the party of opposition.]
[Sidenote: Note 5.]
When the reformer has warmed to his work he looks about him for new
abuses to fall upon. The dominant discontent of any age is prone to
spread its wings over other grievances, and feebler movements seek
shelter from the strong. Puritanism no doubt gathered momentum from
the widespread agrarian and industrial disturbance in this and the
preceding reigns. The profit from sheep-raising had induced many manor
lords to inclose the wastes on which the peasants had pastured their
cattle for ages. The humble copy-hold tenant, having no longer grass
for his cows or mast for his pigs, was driven to distress by
agricultural progress. In some cases even the common fields,
cultivated in allotments from ancient times by the members of the
village communities, first as serfs and later as tenants, were turned
into sheepwalks, and hamlets of tenants' cottages were torn down to
make room for more profitable occupants of the soil. The worst
offenders wer
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