BOOK I.

Produced by David Edwards, Christine P. Travers and the

Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

(This file was produced from images generously made

available by The Internet Archive)

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.]