In a rebuilded Jamestown, Lord De La Warr, of "approved courage, temper
and experience," held for a short interval dignified, seigneurial sway,
while his restless associates adventured far and wide. Sir George Somers
sailed back to the Bermudas to gather a cargo of the wild swine of those
woods, but illness seized him there, and he died among the beautiful
islands. That Captain Samuel Argall who had traversed for the Company
the short road from the Canaries took up Smith's fallen mantle and
carried on the work of exploration. It was he who found, and named for
the Lord Governor, Delaware Bay. He went up the Potomac and traded for
corn; rescued an English boy from the Indians; had brushes with the
savages. In the autumn back to England with a string of ships went that
tried and tested seafarer Christopher Newport. Virginia wanted many
things, and chiefly that the Virginia Company should excuse defect and
remember promise. So Gates sailed with Newport to make true report and
guide exertion. Six months passed, and the Lord Governor himself fell
ill and must home to England. So away he, too, went and for seven years
until his death ruled from that distance through a deputy governor. De
La Warr was a man of note and worth, old privy councilor of Elizabeth
and of James, soldier in the Low Countries, strong Protestant and
believer in England-in-America. Today his name is borne by a great
river, a great bay, and by one of the United States.
In London, the Virginia Company, having listened to Gates, projected
a fourth supply for the colony. Of those hundreds who had perished in
Virginia, many had been true and intelligent men, and again many perhaps
had been hardly that. But the Virginia Company was now determined to
exercise for the future a discrimination. It issued a broadside,
making known that it was sending a new supply of men and all necessary
provision in a fleet of good ships, under the conduct of Sir Thomas
Gates and Sir Thomas Dale, and that it was not intended any more to
burden the action with "vagrant and unnecessary persons... but honest
and industrious men, as Carpenters, Smiths, Coopers, Fishermen, Tanners,
Shoemakers, Shipwrights, Brickmen, Gardeners, Husbandmen, and laboring
men of all sorts that... shall be entertained for the Voyage upon such
termes as their qualitie and fitnesse shall deserve." Yet, in spite of
precautions, some of the other sort continued to creep in with the sober
and industrious. Master William Crashaw, in a sermon upon the Virginia
venture, remarks that "they who goe... be like for aught I see to those
who are left behind, even of all sorts better and worse!" This probably
hits the mark.
The Virginia Company meant at last to have order in Virginia. To this
effect, a new office was created and a strong man was found to fill it.
Gates remained De La Warr's deputy governor, but Sir Thomas Dale went
as Marshal of Virginia. The latter sailed in March, 1611, with "three
ships, three hundred people, twelve kine, twenty goats, and all things
needful for the colony." Gates followed in May with other ships, three
hundred colonists, and much cattle.
For the next few years Dale becomes, in effect, ruler of Virginia. He
did much for the colony, and therefore, in that far past that is not
so distant either, much for the United States--a man of note, and worth
considering.
Dale had seen many years of service in the Low Countries. He was still
in Holland when the summons came to cross the ocean in the service of
the Virginia Company. On the recommendation of Henry, Prince of Wales,
the States-General of the United Netherlands consented "that Captain
Thomas Dale (destined by the King of Great Britain to be employed in
Virginia in his Majesty's service) may absent himself from his company
for the space of three years, and that his said company shall remain
meanwhile vacant, to be resumed by him if he think proper."
This man had a soldier's way with him and an iron will. For five years
in Virginia he exhibited a certain stern efficiency which was perhaps
the best support and medicine that could have been devised. At the end
of that time, leaving Virginia, he did not return to the Dutch service,
but became Admiral of the fleet of the English East India Company, thus
passing from one huge historic mercantile company to another. With six
ships he sailed for India. Near Java, the English and the Dutch having
chosen to quarrel, he had with a Dutch fleet "a cruel, bloody fight."
Later, when peace was restored, the East India Company would have given
him command of an allied fleet of English and Dutch ships, the objective
being trade along the coast of Malabar and an attempt to open commerce
with the Chinese. But Sir Thomas Dale was opening commerce with a
vaster, hidden land, for at Masulipatam he died. "Whose valor," says his
epitaph, "having shined in the Westerne, was set in the Easterne India."
But now in Maytime of 1611 Dale was in Virginian waters. By this day,
beside the main settlement of Jamestown, there were at Cape Henry and
Point Comfort small forts garrisoned with meager companies of men. Dale
made pause at these, setting matters in order, and then, proceeding up
the river, he came to Jamestown and found the people gathered to receive
him. Presently he writes home to the Company a letter that gives a view
of the place and its needs. Any number of things must be done, requiring
continuous and hard work, "as, namely, the reparation of the falling
Church and so of the Store-house, a stable for our horses, a munition
house, a Powder house, a new well for the amending of the most
unwholesome water which the old afforded. Brick to be made, a sturgion
house... a Block house to be raised on the North side of our back river
to prevent the Indians from killing our cattle, a house to be set up to
lodge our cattle in the winter, and hay to be appointed in his due time
to be made, a smith's forge to be perfected, caske for our Sturgions
to be made, and besides private gardens for each man common gardens
for hemp and flax and such other seeds, and lastly a bridge to land our
goods dry and safe upon, for most of which I take present order."
Dale would have agreed with Dr. Watts that
Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do!
If we of the United States today will call to mind certain Western small
towns of some decades ago--if we will review them as they are pictured
in poem and novel and play--we may receive, as it were out of the tail
of the eye, an impression of some aspects of these western plantings of
the seventeenth century. The dare-devil, the bully, the tenderfoot, the
gambler, the gentleman-desperado had their counterparts in Virginia. So
had the cool, indomitable sheriff and his dependable posse, the friends
generally of law and order. Dale may be viewed as the picturesque
sheriff of this earlier age.
But it must be remembered that this Virginia was of the seventeenth, not
of the nineteenth century. And law had cruel and idiot faces as well as
faces just and wise. Hitherto the colony possessed no written statutes.
The Company now resolved to impose upon the wayward an iron restraint.
It fell to Dale to enforce the regulations known as "Lawes and Orders,
dyvine, politique, and martiall for the Colonye of Virginia"--not
English civil law simply, but laws "chiefly extracted out of the Lawes
for governing the army in the Low Countreys." The first part of this
code was compiled by William Strachey; the latter part is thought to
have been the work of Sir Edward Cecil, Sir Thomas Gates, and Dale
himself, approved and accepted by the Virginia Company. Ten years
afterwards, defending itself before a Committee of Parliament, the
Company through its Treasurer declared "the necessity of such laws, in
some cases ad terrorem, and in some to be truly executed."
Seventeenth-century English law herself was terrible enough in all
conscience, but "Dale's Laws" went beyond. Offences ranged from failure
to attend church and idleness to lese majeste. The penalties were
gross--cruel whippings, imprisonments, barbarous puttings to death. The
High Marshal held the unruly down with a high hand.
But other factors than this Draconian code worked at last toward order
in this English West. Dale was no small statesman, and he played ferment
against ferment. Into Virginia now first came private ownership of land.
So much was given to each colonist, and care of this booty became
to each a preoccupation. The Company at home sent out more and more
settlers, and more and more of the industrious, peace-loving sort. By
1612 the English in America numbered about eight hundred. Dale projected
another town, and chose for its site the great horseshoe bend in the
river a few miles below the Falls of the Far West, at a spot we now call
Dutch Gap. Here Dale laid out a town which he named Henricus after the
Prince of Wales, and for its citizens he drafted from Jamestown three
hundred persons. To him also are due Bermuda and Shirley Hundreds and
Dale's Gift over on the Eastern Shore. As the Company sent over more
colonists, there began to show, up and down the James though at far
intervals, cabins and clearings made by white men, set about with a
stockade, and at the river edge a rude landing and a fastened boat. The
restless search for mines of gold and silver now slackened. Instead eyes
turned for wealth to the kingdom of the plant and tree, and to fur trade
and fisheries.
* Hitherto there had been no trading or landholding by
individuals. All the colonists contributed the products of
their toil to the common store and received their supplies
from the Company. The adventurers (stockholders) contributed
money to the enterprise; the colonists, themselves and their
labor.
Those ships that brought colonists were in every instance expected
to return to England laden with the commodities of Virginia. At first
cargoes of precious ores were looked for. These failing, the Company
must take from Virginia what lay at hand and what might be suited to
English needs. In 1610 the Company issued a paper of instructions upon
this subject of Virginia commodities. The daughter was expected to
send to the mother country sassafras root, bay berries, puccoon,
sarsaparilla, walnut, chestnut, and chinquapin oil, wine, silk grass,
beaver cod, beaver and otter skins, clapboard of oak and walnut, tar,
pitch, turpentine, and powdered sturgeon.
It might seem that Virginia was headed to become a land of fishers, of
foresters, and vine dressers, perhaps even, when the gold should be
at last discovered, of miners. At home, the colonizing merchants and
statesmen looked for some such thing. In return for what she laded into
ships, Virginia was to receive English-made goods, and to an especial
degree woolen goods, "a very liberall utterance of our English cloths
into a maine country described to be bigger than all Europe." There was
to be direct trade, country kind for country kind, and no specie to be
taken out of England. The promoters at home doubtless conceived a hardy
and simple trans-Atlantic folk of their own kindred, planters for their
own needs, steady consumers of the plainer sort of English wares, steady
gatherers, in return, of necessaries for which England otherwise must
trade after a costly fashion with lands which were not always friendly.
A simple, sturdy, laborious Virginia, white men and Indians. If this was
their dream, reality was soon to modify it.
A new commodity of unsuspected commercial value began now to be grown in
garden-plots along the James--the "weed" par excellence, tobacco. That
John Rolfe who had been shipwrecked on the Sea Adventure was now a
planter in Virginia. His child Bermuda had died in infancy, and his wife
soon after their coming to Jamestown. Rolfe remained, a young man, a
good citizen, and a Christian. And he loved tobacco. On that trivial
fact hinges an important chapter in the economic history of America.
In 1612 Rolfe planted tobacco in his own garden, experimented with its
culture, and prophesied that the Virginian weed would rank with the
best Spanish. It was now a shorter plant, smaller-leafed and
smaller-flowered, but time and skilful gardening would improve it.
England had known tobacco for thirty years, owing its introduction to
Raleigh. At first merely amused by the New World rarity, England was
now by general use turning a luxury into a necessity. More and more she
received through Dutch and Spanish ships tobacco from the Indies. Among
the English adventurers to Virginia some already knew the uses of the
weed; others soon learned from the Indians. Tobacco was perhaps not
indigenous to Virginia, but had probably come through southern tribes
who in turn had gained it from those who knew it in its tropic habitat.
Now, however, tobacco was grown by all Virginia Indians, and
was regarded as the Great Spirit's best gift. In the final happy
hunting-ground, kings, werowances, and priests enjoyed it forever. When,
in the time after the first landing, the Indians brought gifts to the
adventurers as to beings from a superior sphere, they offered tobacco as
well as comestibles like deer-meat and mulberries. Later, in England and
in Virginia, there was some suggestion that it might be cultivated among
other commodities. But the Company, not to be diverted from the path
to profits, demanded from Virginia necessities and not new-fangled
luxuries. Nevertheless, a little tobacco was sent over to England, and
then a little more, and then a larger quantity. In less than five years
it had become a main export; and from that time to this profoundly has
it affected the life of Virginia and, indeed, of the United States.
This then is the wide and general event with which John Rolfe is
connected. But there is also a narrower, personal happening that has
pleased all these centuries. Indian difficulties yet abounded, but Dale,
administrator as well as man of Mars, wound his way skilfully through
them all. Powhatan brooded to one side, over there at Werowocomoco.
Captain Samuel Argall was again in Virginia, having brought over
sixty-two colonists in his ship, the Treasurer. A bold and restless man,
explorer no less than mariner, he again went trading up the Potomac,
and visited upon its banks the village of Japazaws, kinsman of Powhatan.
Here he found no less a personage than Powhatan's daughter Pocahontas.
An idea came into Argall's active and somewhat unscrupulous brain.
He bribed Japazaws with a mighty gleaming copper kettle, and by that
chief's connivance took Pocahontas from the village above the Potomac.
He brought her captive in his boat down the Chesapeake to the mouth of
the James and so up the river to Jamestown, here to be held hostage for
an Indian peace. This was in 1613.
Pocahontas stayed by the James, in the rude settlers' town, which may
have seemed to the Indian girl stately and wonderful enough. Here Rolfe
made her acquaintance, here they talked together, and here, after some
scruples on his part as to "heathennesse," they were married. He writes
of "her desire to be taught and instructed in the knowledge of God; her
capableness of understanding; her aptnesse and willingnesse to
recieve anie good impression, and also the spiritual, besides her owne
incitements stirring me up hereunto." First she was baptized, receiving
the name Rebecca, and then she was married to Rolfe in the flower-decked
church at Jamestown. Powhatan was not there, but he sent young chiefs,
her brothers, in his place. Rolfe had lands and cabins thereupon up
the river near Henricus. He called this place Varina, the best Spanish
tobacco being Varinas. Here he and Pocahontas dwelled together "civilly
and lovingly." When two years had passed the couple went with their
infant son upon a visit to England. There court and town and country
flocked to see the Indian "princess." After a time she and Rolfe would
go back to Virginia. But at Gravesend, before their ship sailed, she was
stricken with smallpox and died, making "a religious and godly end," and
there at Gravesend she is buried. Her son, Thomas Rolfe, who was brought
up in England, returned at last to Virginia and lived out his life there
with his wife and children. Today no small host of Americans have for
ancestress the daughter of Powhatan. In England-in-America the immediate
effect of the marriage was really to procure an Indian peace outlasting
Pocahontas's brief life.
In Dale's years there rises above the English horizon the cloud of New
France. The old, disaster-haunted Huguenot colony in Florida was a thing
of the past, to be mourned for when the Spaniard wiped it out--for
at that time England herself was not in America. But now that she
was established there, with some hundreds of men in a Virginia that
stretched from Spanish Florida to Nova Scotia, the French shadow seemed
ominous. And just in this farther region, amid fir-trees and snow, upon
the desolate Bay of Fundy, the French for some years had been keeping
the breath of life in a huddle of cabins named Port Royal. More than
this, and later than the Port Royal building, Frenchmen--Jesuits
that!--were trying a settlement on an island now called Mount Desert,
off a coast now named Maine. The Virginia Company-doubtless with some
reference back to the King and Privy Council--De La Warr, Gates, the
deputy governor, and Dale, the High Marshal, appear to have been of
one mind as to these French settlements. Up north there was still
Virginia--in effect, England! Hands off, therefore, all European peoples
speaking with an un-English tongue!
Now it happened about this time that Captain Samuel Argall received a
commission "to go fishing," and that he fished off that coast that is
now the coast of Maine, and brought his ship to anchor by Mount Desert.
Argall, a swift and high-handed person, fished on dry land. He swept
into his net the Jesuits on Mount Desert, set half of them in an open
boat to meet with what ship they might, and brought the other half
captive to Jamestown. Later, he appeared before Port Royal, where
he burned the cabins, slew the cattle, and drove into the forest the
settler Frenchmen. But Port Royal and the land about it called Acadia,
though much hurt, survived Argall's fishing.*
* Argall, on his fishing trip, has been credited with
attacking not only the French in Acadia but the Dutch
traders on Manhattan. But there are grounds for doubt if he
did the latter.
There was also on Virginia in these days the shadow of Spain. In 1611
the English had found upon the beach near Point Comfort three Spaniards
from a Spanish caravel which, as the Englishmen had learned with alarm,
"was fitted with a shallop necessarie and propper to discover freshetts,
rivers, and creekes." They took the three prisoner and applied for
instructions to Dale, who held them to be spies and clapped them into
prison at Point Comfort.
That Dale's suspicions were correct, is proved by a letter which the
King of Spain wrote in cipher to the Spanish Ambassador in London
ordering him to confer with the King as to the liberty of three
prisoners whom Englishmen in Virginia have captured. The three are "the
Alcayde Don Diego de Molino, Ensign Marco Antonio Perez, and Francisco
Lembri an English pilot, who by my orders went to reconnoitre those
ports." Small wonder that Dale was apprehensive. "What may be the
daunger of this unto us," he wrote home, "who are here so few, so weake,
and unfortified,... I refer me to your owne honorable knowledg."
Months pass, and the English Ambassador to Spain writes from Madrid that
he "is not hasty to advertise anything upon bare rumours, which hath
made me hitherto forbeare to write what I had generally heard of their
intents against Virginia, but now I have been... advertised that without
question they will speedily attempt against our plantation there. And
that it is a thing resolved of, that ye King of Spain must run
any hazard with England rather than permit ye English to settle
there....Whatsoever is attempted, I conceive will be from ye Havana."
Rumors fly back and forth. The next year 1613--the Ambassador writes
from Madrid: "They have latelie had severall Consultations about our
Plantation in Virginia. The resolution is--That it must be removed, but
they thinke it fitt to suspend the execution of it,... for that they are
in hope that it will fall of itselfe."
The Spanish hope seemed, at this time, not at all without foundation.
Members of the Virginia Company had formed the Somers Islands Company
named for Somers the Admiral--and had planted a small colony in Bermuda
where the Sea Adventure had been wrecked. Here were fair, fertile
islands without Indians, and without the diseases that seemed to rise,
no man knew how, from the marshes along those lower reaches of the
great river James in Virginia. Young though it was, the new plantation
"prospereth better than that of Virginia, and giveth greater
incouragement to prosecute yt." In England there arose, from some
concerned, the cry to Give up Virginia that has proved a project awry!
As Gates was once about to remove thence every living man, so truly
they might "now removed to these more hopeful islands!" The Spanish
Ambassador is found writing to the Spanish King: "Thus they are here
discouraged... on account of the heavy expenses they have incurred, and
the disappointment, that there is no passage from there to the South
Sea... nor mines of gold or silver." This, be it noted, was before
tobacco was discovered to be an economic treasure.
The Elizabeth from London reached Virginia in May, 1613. It brought to
the colony news of Bermuda, and incidentally of that new notion brewing
in the mind of some of the Company. When the Elizabeth, after a month in
Virginia, turned homeward, she carried a vigorous letter from Dale, the
High Marshal, to Sir Thomas Smith, Treasurer of the Company.
"Let me tell you all at home [writes Dale] this one thing, and I pray
remember it; if you give over this country and loose it, you, with your
wisdoms, will leap such a gudgeon as our state hath not done the like
since they lost the Kingdom of France; be not gulled with the clamorous
report of base people; believe Caleb and Joshua; if the glory of God
have no power with them and the conversion of these poor infidels, yet
let the rich mammons' desire egge them on to inhabit these countries.
I protest to you, by the faith of an honest man, the more I range the
country the more I admire it. I have seen the best countries in Europe;
I protest to you, before the Living God, put them all together, this
country will be equivalent unto them if it be inhabited with good
people."
If ever Mother England seriously thought of moving Virginia into
Bermuda, the idea was now given over. Spain, suspending the sword until
Virginia "will fall of itselfe," saw that sword rust away.
Five years in all Dale ruled Virginia. Then, personal and family matters
calling, he sailed away home to England, to return no more. Soon his
star "having shined in the Westerne, was set in the Easterne India." At
the helm in Virginia he left George Yeardley, an honest, able man. But
in England, what was known as the "court party" in the Company managed
to have chosen instead for De La Warr's deputy governor, Captain Samuel
Argall. It proved an unfortunate choice. Argall, a capable and daring
buccaneer, fastened on Virginia as on a Spanish galleon. For a year
he ruled in his own interest, plundering and terrorizing. At last the
outcry against him grew so loud that it had to be listened to across the
Atlantic. Lord De La Warr was sent out in person to deal with matters
but died on the way; and Captain Yeardley, now knighted and appointed
Governor, was instructed to proceed against the incorrigible Argall. But
Argall had already departed to face his accusers in England.