From the first nobody reaped any profit from investments made in the

new colony except the clique of merchants who had been allowed to sell

wretched supplies for the distant settlers at ruinous rates. Rich and

those interested with him had abundantly reimbursed themselves for all

outlays on their part. The Virginia Company, swindled by commercial

peculators at home, robbed by a pirate governor in America, and

embarrassed by Spanish intrigues at the English court, had also been

deprived of the lotteries, large and small, which had supplied money

for sending eight hundred emigrants to Virginia. The lottery, which

had fallen into great disrepute and had suffered "many foul

aspersions," was abolished in compliance with a public sentiment. The

company was tottering swiftly to a fall; vultures like Warwick were

waiting longingly for its death.

[Sidenote: Revival of interest, 1618.]

But there set in once more a widespread patriotic movement in its

behalf. Such movements were characteristic of that vital age when love

of country was fast coming to count for more as a motive to action

than loyalty to the person of a prince. "Divers lords, knights,

gentlemen, and citizens, grieved to see this great action fall to

nothing," came to its rescue with one final effort which resulted

after some years in putting the enterprise well beyond the danger of

failure. They formed auxiliary societies within the Virginia Company,

after the custom of corporations in that day. Each of these undertook

to plant a settlement or "hundred." In one year the population rose

from less than four hundred to about a thousand. The newly active

element infused a more liberal spirit into the company, and set about

correcting the abuses in its management.

XV.

[Sidenote: The Great Charter, 1618.]

[Sidenote: Pub. Rec. Off. Col. Papers, iii, 40. Disc. of the Old Va.

Co.]

[Sidenote: Note 15.]

The movement of 1618 was retarded by the disgrace into which the

colony had fallen. An unbroken series of misfortunes and

disappointments, the bad conduct of the company's affairs, the ill

fame of Dale's remorseless tyranny, and the fresh Argall scandal, had

made Virginia odious. One convict to whom the alternative was

proposed, chose hanging in preference to transportation to Virginia.

It was needful that something should be done to restore credit. The

men who took the lead in the patriotic movement of 1618 on behalf of

Virginia were mainly liberal statesmen--that Earl of Southampton who

is known as the friend of Shakespeare; Sir Edwin Sandys, one of the

greatest men of a great age, whose brave support of popular liberty

had lost him the favor of the king; Sir John Danvers, and others. The

records before the election of Sandys in 1619 were probably destroyed

to conceal the guilt of the managers. We can only conjecture that the

rising influence of the men who were able a few months later to

overthrow the ruling party had much to do with the most notable

change that took place in the conduct of affairs in the Virginia

Company at this time. On the 13th of November, 1618--memorable but

neglected and forgotten date--the Virginia Company, acting within the

powers conferred on it by its charter, granted to the residents in

Virginia a document styled a "Great Charter or Commissions of

Priviledges, Orders, and Lawes." No copy of this instrument now

exists, but some of its provisions have been preserved. It established

a legislative body, to consist of councilors of estate and of

representatives or burgesses chosen by the several "plantations" or

hundreds, and it limited the power of the governor. This charter was

the starting point of constitutional government in the New World. It

contained in embryo the American system of an executive power lodged

mainly in one person, and a Legislature of two houses. One might

without much exaggeration call this paper a sort of Magna Charta of

America, and it was a long and probably a deliberate step toward

popular government. If the results that have followed it be

considered, it can hardly be accounted second in importance to any

other state paper of the seventeenth century.

XVI.

[Sidenote: Division of land.]

[Sidenote: Note 16.]

[Sidenote: Aspinwall Papers, p. 14, note.]

[Sidenote: True Declaration, p. 25.]

Not only did this admirable charter establish a representative form of

government and do away with martial law, but it fairly launched the

Virginians on the current of freedom and advancement by authorizing a

liberal division of land to all those who had arrived before the

departure of Sir Thomas Dale. The oldest land titles in Virginia are

deduced from the authority of the Great Charter of 1618. Communism,

pernicious everywhere, is at its worst in an infant settlement. "Every

man sharked for his own bootie," says a writer on Virginia in 1609,

"but was altogether careless of the succeeding penurie." The

distribution of land abolished the common stock system of labor, and

opened a pathway to the ambition of the diligent.

[Sidenote: The good news in Virginia.]

[Sidenote: Note 17.]

[Sidenote: Tragicall Relation, 1623.]

Tidings of the great change wrought in their condition and prospects

by the new charter reached the dwellers on the James River in the

spring of 1619, and the colonists were "ravished with so much joy"

that they felt themselves "now fully satisfied for their long labors

and as happy men as there were in the world." They valued their

liberties as no man can who has not known the bitterness of bondage,

and in 1623, when they had reason to fear the re-establishment of the

old tyranny, the Virginia Assembly petitioned the king in these strong

words: "Rather than be reduced to live under the like government, we

desire his Majesty that commissioners may be sent over to hang us." We

have here, perhaps, the very first of the many protests of colonial

Legislatures against oppression from England.

XVII.

[Sidenote: The sending of wives to Virginia.]

[Sidenote: Note 18.]

[Sidenote: Note 19.]

In 1618, before the adoption of the charter, it was concluded, in the

quaint phrase of the time, "that a plantation can never flourish till

families be planted and the respects of Wives and Children fix the

people on the soyle," or, in simpler words, that a colony of bachelors

can hardly found a state. The first ship laden with home-makers

carried over ninety maids, and the company thought it necessary to

promise special rewards to the men who should marry these young women.

If the maids were as certified, "young, handsome, and well

recommended," they needed no such dowry in a land that had hardly a

woman in it. Young or old, handsome or homely, the maids did not prove

a drug. Shipload after shipload of them were eagerly bought by the

planters, who had to pay a round sum in the high-priced tobacco of

that early time to defray the cost of transporting these wives.

Besides having to pay for his wife, the planter could have her only on

the condition of winning her consent; and the eager courtship that

ensued on the arrival of a shipload of maids must have been one of the

most amusing scenes in the settlement of America. Suitors far

outnumbered the women, and the latter had things pretty much their own

way. The first cargo of this interesting merchandise was landed in

1619, but as late as 1624 the women were probably in danger of setting

the colonists by the ears, for the governor felt obliged to issue a

proclamation threatening fine or whipping for the offense of betrothal

to more than one person at a time. In 1632, thirteen years after the

first shipment, we find the colony still being replenished with women

sent in the same fashion. In that year, two, whose behavior during the

voyage had been disgraceful, were sent back as unfit to be mothers of

Virginians. The precaution could not have been of much practical use,

but it indicates the early growth of a wholesome local pride. When

there were house mothers in the cabins, and children born in the

country, the settlers no longer dreamed of returning to England; and

there was soon a young generation that knew no other skies than those

that spanned the rivers, fields, and vast primeval forests of their

native Virginia, which now for the first time became a home.

XVIII.

[Sidenote: The struggle ended, 1624.]

It is not the Virginia colony alone that we have seen in the crucible.

The fate of English colonization was no doubt settled by the

experiments made during the first years on the James River, and the

story told in this chapter is but the overture to the whole history of

life in the United States. In our colonizing age a settlement might be

made in the heart of Africa with a far smaller loss of life than was

incurred in the first sixteen years in Virginia. From 1607 to 1623

there were landed in Virginia more than six thousand people. The

number that returned to England was inconsiderable, but in the year

1624, when the colony passed under a royal government, there remained

alive in the colony only twelve hundred and seventy-five. Of those who

came in these early years four fifths perished. A part of this loss

was due to radically wrong conceptions of the nature, end, and proper

methods of colonization, a part to corrupt and incompetent management

in the London Company. The bad character of many of the earliest

emigrants was one cause of difficulty. The writers of the time

probably exaggerated this evil in order to excuse the severity of the

government and the miseries into which the settlers fell. But the loss

of many of the early comers must be accounted a distinct gain to

Virginia. Unfitted for their environment, they were doomed to

extinction by that pitiless law which works ever to abolish from the

earth the improvident, the idle, and the vicious.

ELUCIDATIONS.

[Sidenote: Note 1, page 29.]

In 1889, when I visited Jamestown, there was no apparent trace of

Sandy Beach which had connected the island with the mainland. This bit

of sand, in the antique phrase of one of the early colonists, was "no

broader than a man may well quaite a tileshard." Strachey, in Purchas,

p. 1752. Jamestown is now a farm; the ruins of the church and many of

the tombs in the eighteenth-century churchyard remain; but the upper

end of the island is wearing away, and I picked out of the crumbling

sand, far from the later burying place, human bones of earlier

burials, possibly of the victims of the famines and epidemics. The

walls of the magazine had been exposed by erosion. I brought away

wrought nails, bits of glass grown iridescent from long burial, and

an exploded bombshell of so small a caliber as to mark its antiquity.

By the aid of a negro youth living on the farm I found the hearth

bricks turned up in various places by the plow, and the arrangement,

or rather lack of arrangement, of the town could thus be made out. My

guide volunteered the information that Jamestown was "the first place

discovered after the Flood." Some drawings made at the time were

reproduced with an article on Nathaniel Bacon in the Century Magazine

for July, 1890.

[Sidenote: Note 2, page 37.]

Whether Smith was injured by gunpowder and required treatment, as he

asserts, or was sent home under charges, has been matter of dispute.

Both accounts are correct, as is shown by the testimony of an

important manuscript at Petworth House, in Surrey, which I was allowed

to examine by the courtesy of Lord Leconsfield. It is from the pen of

George Percy, a brother of the Earl of Northumberland, who was chosen

to succeed Smith on his departure from the colony. It is not the

narrative from which Purchas makes extracts, but a sequel to it. The

title is "A Trewe Relacyon of the pceedinge and Ocvrrentes of momente

wch have hapned in Virginia from the Tyme Sr Thomas Gates was

shipwrackde vpon the Bermudes Ano. 1609 vntill my depture ovtt of the

country wch was in Ano Dni 1612." It is a quarto of forty-one pages.

Percy was a man of courage, but his own narrative in this little book

shows that he had no qualification for the office of governor except

the rank of his family. His ill health is made an excuse for his

inefficiency, but Dale's letter of May 25, 1611, shows that even the

horrible events of Percy's first government had not taught him to

plant corn when again left in charge. Percy naturally resents Smith's

boastfulness, and bluntly accuses him of laying claim to credit that

was not his. The charge that Smith, unable to control the unruly

settlers at the Falls under West, advised the Indians to attack them,

is supported by Percy; and a very different charge, that he stirred up

the Indians to assassinate West himself, appears at a later time in

Spelman's Relation, a tract that bears abundant internal evidence of

the writer's mental inability to speak the truth. Percy himself

relates that the Indians were already hostile to West's party, and

that they had wounded and killed some of West's men in resentment of

their wanton outrages. See also the account in the Oxford Tract, with

the signatures of Pots and Phettiplace, for Smith's version of the

affair. "Bloody-mindedness" seems not to have been a trait of Smith.

But the exigency was a terrible one, for death by starvation was

already impending, and only the restoration of discipline at any cost

could have saved the colony from the horrible fate it met. Such a

course would not have done much violence to the notions of the time,

and would have found precedents in the various plots against the lives

of Smith, Wingfield, and others in the colony. It is quite probable,

however, that there is no truth in the story. The violent hatred of

the factions will account for the suspicion.

[Sidenote: Note 3, page 38.]

Captain Smith's True Relation was sent from Virginia and was printed

in London in 1608. In 1612 he published what is commonly referred to

as the Oxford Tract. Its proper title is very long. The first part of

it is as follows: "Map of Virginia, with a description of the Covntry,

the Commodities, People, Government, and Religion. Written by Captain

Smyth, sometime Governor of the Covntry. And wherevnto is annexed the

proceedings of those colonies since their first departure from

England," etc. The second part of the book professes to be taken from

the writings of eight of the colonists, whose names are given, and to

have been edited by W. S.--that is, the Reverend Dr. Symonds. The

Generall Historie was first proposed in a well-considered and rather

elegant speech by Captain Smith at a meeting of the Virginia Company,

April 12, 1621, while the new patent which was to be submitted to

Parliament was under discussion. He suggested the writing of a history

to preserve the memory of the worthies of Virginia, dead and living,

and gave it as his opinion that no Spanish settlement of the same age

afforded matter more interesting. "Which worthy speech," says the

record, "had of the whole court a very great applause as spoken freely

to a speciall purpose, and therefore thought fitt to be considered and

put in practice in his due time. And for which also Mr. Smyth as

preferring allwaies mocions of speciall consequence was exceedingly

commended." MS. Records of the Virginia Company, i, 197-200. A first

edition of the Generall Historie appeared in 1624, the last two

editions in 1632. The book is a compilation of Smith's earlier works,

somewhat expanded, not to say inflated. The later portions are mostly

made up from the official and _quasi_-official pamphlets. Just what

was Dr. Symonds's part in the preparation of the Oxford Tract and the

Generall Historie it would be interesting to know. The latter work

was in some sense by authority of the company, and liable to the

peculiar suspicion that hangs about writings designed to advance the

colony and not primarily to record history. Its descriptive portions

are of high value, and we are now able to control its historical

errors to a certain extent. Besides these three works on Virginia,

Smith published a Description of New England, 1616, New England's

Trials, 1620, and Advertisements for the Unexperienced Planters of New

England or Elsewhere, in 1631, the year of his death. These all

contain valuable matter relating to Virginia. He also published in

1627 two works on seamanship, a Sea Grammar, and the Accidence or

Pathway to Experience necessary for a Young Seaman. In 1630 he

published his True Travels, a book which contains an account of his

own adventures previous to his going to Virginia. More than a quarter

of a century had elapsed between the occurrence of these adventures

and their publication. Smith's vivid imagination had meantime no doubt

greatly magnified his own exploits. It is quite impossible at this day

to sift what truth there is in the True Travels from the

exaggerations. Travelers in that time were not held to a very rigid

account, and their first obligation seems to have been to amuse their

readers. No distinct line had yet been drawn in literature between

fact and fiction.

Many years ago, before I had had an opportunity to examine and compare

all his writings, I rashly printed a brief argument in favor of the

trustworthiness of Captain John Smith and the credibility of the

Pocahontas story. I believe no person of critical judgment can make a

thorough comparison of Smith's successive books without being

convinced of the ineradicable tendency of his mind to romance in

narrating adventure, especially his own adventure. Even his style

where his vanity speaks loses something of its native directness and

force. His practical writings on navigation and on the proper conduct

of colonization, and his descriptions of the country and the savages,

are plain, direct, and lucid. His speeches in the Virginia Company

appear to have been exceedingly wise, and to have impressed his

hearers. Note, for example, his proposals (Records, i, 197) that

colonial governors should be liable to trial in England; his proposal

to reduce the fee for sending a child to Virginia from five pounds to

five marks, the cost of apprenticing to a trade (i, 174); and his

preference for a governor well paid to one working "for love"

(February 4, 1623). His personal morals were probably unexceptionable.

One of his associates certifies to his freedom from tobacco, wines,

dice, debts, and oaths. But a comparison between the statements made

in the Oxford Tract and those in the Generall Historie leaves upon the

mind of the critic a distinct impression of the very processes by

which his adventures were exaggerated in his own memory as time

elapsed. The three or four hundred savages on the Potomac (Oxford

Tract, p. 32, a sufficiently marvelous story) rise to three or four

thousand in the Generall Historie. Pocahontas becomes the central

figure in incidents as told in 1624 in which she had no place in 1612.

There is but one allusion to Pocahontas in the entire Oxford Tract (p.

103), and that has to do with the charge that Smith intended to marry

her. A just and witty judgment of Captain Smith was made almost in his

own time by Thomas Fuller. He says: "Such his perils, preservations,

dangers, deliverances, they seem to most men beyond belief, to some

beyond truth. Yet we have two witnesses to attest them, the prose and

the pictures, both in his own book; and it soundeth much to the

diminution of his deeds that he alone is the herald to publish and

proclaim them.... However, moderate men must allow Captain Smith to

have been very instrumental in settling the plantation in Virginia,

whereof he was Governor, as also admiral of New England." Fuller's

Worthies, edition of 1840, i, 276. Those who desire to see an

ingenious and learned defense of Captain Smith, particularly in the

matter of the Pocahontas story, will find it in an address by Mr.

William Wirt Henry, published by the Virginia Historical Society.

Prof. Arber's discussion of the subject in his edition of Smith's

Works is sentimental rather than critical. Compare Deane's Wingfield

for the other side. Unnecessary heat has characterized some of the

debates about John Smith. History pitched in a shrill polemical key is

not instructive and is something less than amusing. These debates

center themselves on the Pocahontas story, which is of little

historical importance except as it involves the trustworthiness of

Smith's narrative.

The conduct of Captain Smith in the Virginia colony will be better

understood if we appreciate the character of his principal opponent,

Gabriel Archer. Archer's return to Virginia in 1609 and his agency in

overthrowing Captain Smith are alluded to apparently in a passage in

the New Life of Virginea, 1612, "In which distemper that envious man

stept in, sowing plentifull tares in the hearts of all," etc. One of

Archer's schemes seems to have been to establish a parliament and a

complicated government at the beginning. Purchas and Strachey both

take sides against Archer in his controversy with Smith. Purchas, iv,

p. 1749, Oxford Tract, 22. Wingfield warned Newport of the danger of

disturbance from Archer, who was "troubled with an ambitious spirit."

Wingfield's Discourse, 77, 94, 95. Wingfield also says, "In all their

disorders was Mr. Archer a ringleader." He adds that Ratcliffe "did

wear no other eies or eares than grew on Mr. Archer's head." For a

bibliographical account of Smith's works the reader is referred to the

valuable notes in Mr. Winsor's Narrative and Critical History of

America, vol. iii, _passim_.

[Sidenote: Note 4, page 38.]

A Trewe Relacyon, etc., at Petworth House, as above. The Indians in

sheer wantonness scraped out the brains of their dead victims with

mussel shells. Percy seems to have retaliated in a way to exasperate

without disabling the savages. He "burned their hawses, Ransacked

their Temples, tooke downe the corpses off their deade Kings from off

their Toambes [that is, the scaffold on which their well-dried remains

were deposited], and caryed away their pearles, caps, and bracelets

wherewith they doe decore their Kings fvneralls." (For this sacred

house thus desecrated by Percy the Indians had such reverence that

none but priests and chiefs were allowed to enter, and the Indians

never ventured to pass it without casting some offering of tobacco,

wampum, copper, or puccoon root into the water.--Strachey, 90.) When

Percy had captured a chief's wife and children, the soldiers in

revengeful wantonness, according to Percy's account, threw the

children out of the boat and shot them in the water. The inefficient

Percy was able to save the life of the "queen" or chief's wife with

difficulty. West and Ratcliffe, who had overthrown Smith, are accused

by Percy of unnecessary cruelty to the savages. West sailed away in

the ship, leaving Jamestown to its fate. Ratcliffe was put to death

with exquisite tortures. There is no doubt some truth, as there is

certainly jealousy, in Percy's charge that Captain Smith was "an

ambitious, unworthy, and vainglorious fellow, attempting to take all

men's authorities from them," but he was neither weak, like Percy and

Ratcliffe, nor visionary, like the gold-hunting Martin and the

doctrinary and demagogical Archer, nor treacherous and cruel, like

West. With all his faults he only was master of the situation in these

early years. Percy admits that the lawful authority was that of Smith.

The history of the government of Percy and his supporters seems to

justify Smith's refusal to share his lawful power with incompetent

factionaries.

[Sidenote: Note 5, page 39.]

So far the State Papers, but Percy, in his A Trewe Relacyon, adds that

he caused the man to be tortured till he confessed, and he relates

repulsive details of the crime. The effrontery of an official

publication went so far as to deny (True Declaration, 1610), on the

authority of Sir Thomas Gates, this fact so circumstantially and

abundantly attested. In Peckard's Life of Ferrar, p. 158, a petition

from the Virginia colony to the king is preserved in which occur these

words: "To tell how great things many of us have suffered through

hunger alone would be as incredible as horrible for us to repeat to

your sacred ears."

[Sidenote: Note 6, page 41.]

See, among other authorities, A Plaine Declaration of Barmudas, in

black letter, 1613, written by one of the party. Myriads of birds

nested on the island. How the hogs came to be there is matter of

conjecture. The writer of the Plaine Declaration makes old Sir George

Somers the resourceful hero of their marvelous escape, and it was from

him that the islands took the name of Somers or Summer Islands. For

want of pitch, the seams of the vessels were paid with "a kind of hard

lime" and some "wax cast up by the sea." Strachey's A True Reportory

of the Wracke and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight, etc.,

Purchas, iv, p. 1734, is also by one of the shipwrecked party. The

Rev. Joseph Hunter has written with much learning, patient research,

and fatiguing prolixity to disprove the theory that Shakespeare's

Tempest was suggested by the wreck of Gates and Somers. He succeeds in

showing its relation to another occurrence, but works of imagination

do not usually have their origin in a single fact, and it is hard to

resist the conviction that the Tempest, as we have it, contains more

than one allusion to the wreck upon "the still vexed Bermoothes."

[Sidenote: Note 7, page 42.]

The beauty of the wood of certain American trees had already been

noted. The communion table in Jamestown in De la Warr's time was made

of black walnut. The pews were of cedar, and there were "fair, broad

windows," with shutters of cedar, "to shut and open as the weather

shall occasion," but there appears to have been no glass. Window glass

was little used at that time, and there probably was not a glazed

window in the colony. The pulpit was of cedar, and the font was "hewen

hollow like a canoa." Strachey, in Purchas, p. 1755.

[Sidenote: Note 8, page 42.]

Some families appear to have gone to Virginia with De la Warr. The

purpose to send families of wives and children and servants is

expressed in A True Declaration, which was dated 1610, but, as Mr.

Alexander Brown points out, issued in December, 1609.

[Sidenote: Note 9, page 48.]

The Tragicall Relation of 1623, and the Briefe Declaration of 1624,

manuscripts in the British Public Record Office, are the most

important authorities for the facts given in the text. The Briefe

Declaration is rather the fuller, but the earlier paper supplies some

particulars. These two formal documents are not from the same hand,

and the slight difference between them in details tends rather to

confirm than to shake the reader's confidence in their testimony. The

names of Sir Francis Wyatt, George Sandys, and other prominent

colonists appended to the Tragicall Relation are a guarantee of its

good faith. It is curious to note that Raphe Hamor, whose relation is

so favorable to Dale, and who held the post of secretary under Dale

and that of vice-admiral under Argall, signs this paper, which is a

severe impeachment of Sir Thomas Smythe's administration of the

affairs of the company before 1619. Hamor's True Discourse has

heretofore usually been taken as an authority, but after reading the

documents in the Public Record Office one is compelled to believe that

Hamor, or perhaps one might say Dale, under cover of his secretary,

misrepresents the state of the colony, and makes promises to those who

may emigrate that it was hardly possible to carry out. The Discourse

of the old Virginia Company (Colonial Papers, iii, 40), and other

papers in the Public Record Office relating to the strife between the

company and the Court, throw light on this period. The half-apologies

for Dale's cruelties in Smith's Generall Historie, book iv, prove

their existence. "For amongst them, so hardened in evil," says this

writer, "the fear of a cruel, painful, and unusual death more

restrains them than death itself." See also Hamor, p. 27. There is a

letter from Whitaker appended to Hamor's Discourse. Though apparently

an incidental letter, it bears marks of having been procured for

purposes of vindication. Its defensive tone goes to show that the

character of Dale's tyranny had transpired in England. Whitaker

praises Sir Thomas Dale mainly for being religious and valiant, and

says that he had "great knowledge in Divinity and good conscience in

all his doings; both which bee rare in a martiall man." In Whitaker's

Good Newes of Virginia, 1613, there is no praise of Sir Thomas Dale.

That Dale was famous for his severity before he left Europe is

manifest from the phrase used by the Jesuit Biard, "Le Mareschal

Thomas Deel que vous auez ouy estre fort aspre en ses humeurs."

Relation, chap. xxxiii. See in this and the preceding chapter the

whole account of his savage temper toward his French prisoners, etc.

It has been the custom of our older writers to speak of Dale's

administration only in praise, but careful weighing of the original

authorities shows that Dale was utterly pitiless in the cruelty of his

discipline and unjust in his detention of the old planters, and that

when he left the colony he was more generally execrated than any other

man that ruled in these early days, not even excepting his successor,

Argall. Dale's severity was serviceable in carrying the enterprise

through straits, but the reports of his harshness brought the colony

into disrepute and checked immigration. The detestation of Dale was

shared by the best men in Virginia, yet it is to be remembered that

the savagery of Dale's government was due not wholly to the brutal

temper of the man, but partly to the age and the school in which he

had been bred. Legal torture was in use long after this. The Clarendon

Papers, quoted by Southey, state that at Henley-on-Thames, as late as

1646, it was ordered that a woman's tongue should be nailed to a tree

for complaining of the tax levied by Parliament. The cruel practices

of the agents of the Virginia Company are paralleled by those of the

East India Company at the same time. "Before they were intrusted with

martial law they made it a rule to whip to death or starve to death

those of whom they wished to get rid." Mills, British India, i, 38.

Even that champion of popular liberty, Sir Edwin Sandys, found it in

his heart to approve of Dale's course while admitting its harshness.

He said to the court of the Virginia Company of the 17th of November,

1619, that "Sir Thomas Dale, building upon these foundations with

great and constant severity, reclaymed almost miraculously those idle

and disordered people, and reduced them to labor and an honest fashion

of life." MS. Records of the Virginia Company. Compare also Sir Thomas

Smythe's defense, note to Aspinwall Papers in IV Massachusetts

Historical Collections, ix, p. 1. My citations from the Tragicall

Relation and Briefe Declaration are partly from the originals in the

British Public Record Office, which I carefully examined in 1885, but

the first of these is printed in Neill's Virginia Company, and the

Briefe Declaration was published by the State of Virginia in 1874 in a

Senate document entitled Colonial Records of Virginia. Very good

abstracts of both papers appear in Sainsbury's Calendar. I cite the

Discourse of the Old Virginia Company from the MS. in the British

Public Record Office. I do not remember to have seen it in print.

[Sidenote: Note 10, page 49.]

Birch's Court of James I, i, 415. Chamberlain to Carleton, June 22,

1616: "Sir Thomas Dale is arrived from Virginia, and brought with him

some ten or twelve old and young of that country, among whom is

Pocahuntas, daughter of Powhatan, married to one Rolfe, an Englishman.

I hear not of any other riches or matter of worth, but only some

quantity of sassafras, tobacco, pitch, tar, and clapboard, things of

no great value unless there were plenty, and nearer hand. All I can

hear of it is, that the country is good to live in, if it were stored

with people, and might in time become commodious. But there is no

present profit to be expected."

[Sidenote: Note 11, page 49.]

The Discourse of the Old Virginia Company, an exceedingly interesting

manuscript in the British Record Office, makes it appear that as late

as 1618 the colonists had no thought of staying in Virginia, and even

the directors at home were interested only in making money out of

tobacco and sassafras, with little or no care to plant a permanent

colony. Some allowance must be made, perhaps, for the _ex-parte_

nature of this paper, but its tone and the high character of those who

offered it give reason to trust it. Colonial Papers, iii, 40. Answer

of the Virginia Company to Queries of the Privy Council in 1625.

[Sidenote: Note 12, page 49.]

We may trust Hamor's True Discourse, p. 17, for some of these details,

though the book generally is discredited by the account given in the

Tragicall Relation, which Hamor himself signed with others in 1623. A

comparison of all these authorities makes it evident that only

eighty-one who were ranked as "farmers" derived any benefit from

Dale's three-acre division, while about two hundred others were

probably left in unmitigated bondage.

[Sidenote: Note 13, page 51.]

"And to protect Captain Argall from being called to an account for his

government under shew of a new plantation to be set up in Virginia by

Captain Argall and his partners, whereof the said earl (Warwick) hath

since appeared to be one (which yet to this day hath had no

beginning), there was procured a patent to the said captain and his

associates for the said new plantation; whereby he and his Company,

their heirs and assigns (save only in time of defence by war), were

exempted from all power, authority, and jurisdiction to be from hence

derived or there established, that so he might reign there as great

and absolute master, without law or controulment, and without the fear

of ever being called to any future reckoning.... Whatsoever was

remaining at that time in the colony belonging to the public ... he

converted it in a manner wholly to his own private use and possession,

the very public lands cultivated, the Company's tenants and servants,

their rents, corn and tributes of corn, their kine and other cattle,

their stores and other provisions; whereby the company, being disabled

in all appearance of ever setting up the same again or to bear the

great burden of public charge both at home and abroad, being thus

stripped of all revenue, the said Company must have failed and decayed

and the whole colony have fallen in time into the hands of the said

captain and his association to be there established, which seemeth to

have been his prime and original desire.... This course of depredation

and roving not sufficing as likely to receive encounter and check from

hence, new engines were used, some to dishearten and some to disgrace

the Company, that so as it seemeth they might in time obtain the

plantation and leave it as a prey to the said captain, his friends and

followers, etc." Burk's History of Virginia, Appendix, vol. i. The

extract is from the document known as The Company's Chief Root of

Differences, etc. I have compared this copy with that in the MS.

Records of the Virginia Company, Library of Congress, and find only

slight verbal differences. At the instance of Warwick the authors of

this paper--Lord Cavendish, Sir Edwin Sandys, and John and Nicholas

Ferrar--were put under arrest in their own houses for this

"impertinent declaration." The Warwick party had made "threats of

blood" to deter Southampton from complaining to the king.

[Sidenote: Note 14, page 53.]

Birch's Court and Times of James the First, i, 311. Chamberlain to

Carleton, May 16, 1614: "Sir Thomas Gates is come from Virginia, and

brings word that plantation will fall to the ground if it be not

presently supplied. He speaks of wonderful commodities that are to be

had there if we could but have patience and would be at the cost to

bring them to perfection." Out of this necessity for some present

support came the great lottery. It was recommended by the Privy

Council to the Mayor of Canterbury, February 22, 1615. There was a

"running lottery" of smaller adventures in Paul's Churchyard before

the "great standing lottery" was instituted, and then there were other

"running lotteries" "in many other places after." Purchas, p. 1773. No

doubt there were corruptions and abuses in these lotteries. The

merchants prospered while Virginia languished. Its unpopularity is

attributed to "malignant tongues," in the MS. Records of the Virginia

Company, i, 158, and the overthrow of the lottery may have been part

of the plot of those who sought soon after to wreck the company

itself.

[Sidenote: Note 15, page 55.]

My attention was first attracted to the date of the Great Charter of

November 13, 1618, by a minute in the handwriting of Secretary

Williamson in the Public Record Office, as follows: "Those Adventurers

& Planters by Vertue of y{e} s{d} Lett{rs} Patent of Incorporacon &c.

made a Great charter of Lawes & Ord{rs} for y{e} govermn{t} of the

Country. It bore date at London, Nov. 13{th} 1618." Col. Pprs, i, 11.

The proceedings of the first Assembly in Virginia are preserved in the

Public Record Office in Pory's Report. This report gives the only

information we have regarding the provisions of this long-lost

charter. An abstract of these proceedings is printed in the Calendar

of Colonial Documents, and the whole document was reprinted in the New

York Historical Society Collections, second series, vol. iii, and yet

more carefully in the Colonial Records of Virginia, 1874. There is an

allusion to this charter in the Briefe Relation, 1624. Various

Virginia land grants deduce their authority from the Great Charter of

Laws and Orders of November 13, 1618, as we learn from a note in the

Aspinwall Papers, p. 14. There are many allusions to the charter of

1618 in the Manuscript Records of the Virginia Company in the Library

of Congress.

[Sidenote: Note 16, page 56.]

The Code of Lawes, Divine, Morall and Martiall, by which Dale reigned

was edited and published by Strachey in 1612, and reprinted in Force's

Tracts, vol. iii. This code appears to have had no other sanction than

the approval of Sir Thomas Smythe, the governor of the company. The

beneficial effect of these laws is maintained in Hamor's Discourse, in

Rolfe's Relation, and in certain letters of Dale in the Record Office.

It was not, indeed, the government by martial law, but Dale's abuse of

his power, that wrought the mischief. After the emancipation the old

settlers lived in perpetual terror lest some turn of the wheel should

put them once more in the power of Sir Thomas Smythe and his divine

and martial laws. See especially the Additional Statement appended to

the Discourse of the Old Virginia Company. On the long and bitter

dissension that resulted in the overthrow of the company, see Arthur

Woodnoth's Short Collection of the most remarkable Passages from the

Original to the Dissolution of the Virginia Company, a rare work of

great value to the historian of this period.

[Sidenote: Note 17, page 56.]

Rolfe's Relation has it that the ship which brought Yeardley brought

also the news of the election of Sandys and John Ferrar. But Yeardley

arrived in Virginia on the 18th of April (O.S.), and Sir Thomas

Smythe's resignation did not take place until ten days later.

Manuscript Records of the Virginia Company. The news that Sir George

Yeardley did bring was no doubt that the power of Sir Thomas Smythe

and his party was broken, and that the actual control of affairs was

in the hands of such men as Sandys, Southampton, Cavendish, Danvers,

and the two Ferrars. The whole policy of the company indicates that

the new party was really in power, and the appointment of such a man

as Yeardley was probably the work of the rising party. The records

before the resignation of Sir Thomas Smythe were probably destroyed

for purposes of concealment.

[Sidenote: Note 18, page 57.]

Manuscript Book of Instructions, etc., Library of Congress. Letter to

the Governor and Council by the ship Marmaduke, August 12, 1621. A

proposal to send women had been made seven years earlier. Commons

Journal, 1, 487, May 17, 1614. Extract from Martyn's Speech (for which

he was reprimanded): "That they require but a few honest Labourers

burthened with Children.--Moveth, a committee may consider of the

means for this, for Seven Years; at which some of the Company may be

present." On November 17, 1619, Sir Edwin Sandys pointed out in the

court of the company that the people of Virginia "were not settled in

their mindes to make it their place of rest and continuance." "For the

remedying of the Mischiefe and for establishing a perpetuitie of the

Plantation," he proposed the sending of "one hundred young maides to

become wives." Manuscript Records of the Virginia Company, i, 44, 45.

Two women, the first in the colony, had arrived in September, 1608.

Oxford Tract, 47. There were women in Gates's party in 1610. It was

even reported that some English women had intermingled with the

natives. Calendar Colonial Papers, i, 13. An allowance of food to

women in De la Warr's time is proof that women were there. In 1629

there was living Mistress Pearce, "an honest, industrious woman," who

had been in Virginia "near twenty years." Rolfe (a copy of whose

Relation is among the Duke of Manchester's MSS. now in the British

Public Record Office) sets down a remainder of seventy-five of the

three hundred and fifty-one persons in the colony at Dale's departure,

as women and children. It is worth recalling here that D'Ogeron, who

governed Santo Domingo in 1663 and after, supplied the buccaneers

with wives brought from France; and the plan was also put into

practice in Louisiana about a century later than the Virginia

experiment, and the same expedient, as is well known, was resorted to

in Canada. In Virginia more pains were taken to have all the women

thus imported of a good character than in some of the French colonies.

[Sidenote: Note 19, page 58.]

The belief that these maids were "pressed" or coerced into going is

probably erroneous (see the speech of Sandys, July 7, 1620, Manuscript

Records of the Virginia Company). He says, "These people (including

the maids) are to be provided as they have formerly beene, partlie by

printed publication of the supplies indicated, together with the

conditions offered to these publique tennants, partlie by help of such

noble friends and others in remote parts as have formerlie given great

assistance." The notion that some of the maidens were pressed seems to

have had its rise in the counterfeiting of the great seal and the

issuing of forged commissions to press maidens for "breeders for the

King" in the Bermudas and Virginia in order to extort money. One Owen

Evans was accused of such practices in October, 1618 (Sainsbury, p.

19), and one Robinson was hanged, drawn, and quartered for this or

similar offences in November of the same year (Birch's Court of James

I, 108). In order to encourage the adventurers or shareholders to

subscribe to the sending of maids, a town was laid off in Virginia to

be called Maydstown. The subscribers were to be allowed shares in this

town. Manuscript Records, May 20, 1622, on the general subject; also

Records under date of November 3, 1621, and the 17th of the same

month, June 11, and November 21, 1621, and the manuscript book in the

Library of Congress, which I refer to in these notes as Manuscript

Book of Instructions, pp. 76 and 89. I may remark here that this book

has not been in use in recent times for reference. Its origin is

uncertain, nor can the authorities of the library tell where it came

from. It was compiled in the latter part of the seventeenth century,

judging from internal evidence, and was perhaps kept among the records

of the colony for reference on what we should call constitutional

questions. I found a loose memorandum laid in its pages in the

handwriting of Thomas Jefferson, to whom the book probably once

belonged.

CHAPTER THE THIRD.

_THE PROCESSION OF MOTIVES._

I.

[Sidenote: The chief mistake.]

The cause of the sorrows of Virginia will be more plainly seen if we

turn again to the motives that propelled Englishmen to plant a colony.

The chief mistake lay in the main purpose. If the founding of a state

had been other than a secondary and remote end, the managers might

have sent at first families and not bachelors, farmers and not

gentlemen, laborers and not riff-raff. But more visionary motives

dominated the action. A state was planted, but something else was

mainly intended by the first projectors. The work seemed continuous,

but the end in view shifted and the actors gradually changed. The only

motive that held from first to last, and ran through all the rest, was

the rivalry with Spain.

[Sidenote: The rivalry with Spain.]

[Sidenote: Lane to Sydney. Aug. 12, 1585. Sainsbury.]

[Sidenote: Lane to Walsingham. Aug. 12, 1585. Sainsbury.]

[Sidenote: Note 1.]

The colonies attempted by Frobisher and Gilbert were to serve as

relays in the work of exploration for a sea passage to the Pacific and

the search for mines, but they mark strongly the influence of the

Spanish example on English projects. Ralegh was a lifelong opponent in

peace and war of Spanish intrigue and aggression, and his efforts to

plant colonies in the virgin land were suggested by a knowledge of

the almost exhaustless treasure that flowed into Spanish coffers from

America. The opportune capture of a Spanish carack bound homeward from

Mexico with letters describing the wealth of Mexican mines brought the

support of English merchants to Ralegh's undertaking. Imbued with the

same spirit, Ralegh's governor wrote from Roanoke Island in 1585 that

his colony would be a means of deliverance from the domination of

Spain, "whose strength doth altogether grow from the mines of her

treasure." In the perilous isolation of the little company on Roanoke

Island, Lane assures himself that God will feed his men by means of

ravens rather than suffer their "enemies the papists" "to triumph at

the overthrow of this most Christian action." The home-staying English

of that age were spurred to colony-planting by three main

motives--cupidity, patriotic feeling, and religious zeal--and all of

these were provoked by emulation and jealousy of Spain.

II.

[Sidenote: Delusions in colony-planting.]

The prolonged movement for a colonial establishment, which extended

over the latter half of the reign of Elizabeth and almost the whole of

the reign of James I, was kept alive by delusions. The ultimate ends

for which colonies were proposed and planted in the last quarter of

the sixteenth and the first quarter of the seventeenth century were

none of them attained. The movable passage through North America to

the Pacific was still leading explorers a merry dance when the first

Jamestown emigrants sailed in 1606, and gold mines of comminuted mica,

of iron pyrites, of Indian mineral paints, and of pure fable were

potent attractions for some time after. The gradual increase of

geographical knowledge caused the "South Sea" to take shelter in the

unknown region behind the mountains, and the gold mines reported by

Indians and discovered by sanguine prospectors were somehow lost in

the interminable forests. In this exigency the first colony must have

perished for want of support if new hopes as illusive as the old had

not moved the English people to avert such a calamity.

[Sidenote: Commodities.]

[Sidenote: For example, Carlisle's treatise, Anderson's Commerce, year

1583.]

[Sidenote: Wine.]

[Sidenote: Silk.]

[Sidenote: Anderson on the year 1589.]

[Sidenote: 1609.]

The production of commodities which the ungenial climate of the

British Islands refused to grow was thought of from the beginning, and

they became after 1616 the main hope of wealth from Virginia. It

seemed grievous that England should spend her money in buying wine and

silk from southern Europe and naval stores from the Baltic. The only

maxim of political economy generally accepted in that day was that a

nation is enriched by getting money from abroad and keeping it at

home. The precious metals constituted the only recognized riches. Laws

were made to restrain the exportation of gold and silver, and

sumptuary laws to discourage the consumption of those things that must

be bought of the foreigner. Efforts to raise in Great Britain the

products of the Mediterranean region would have proved successful if

the climate had been half as favorable to such enterprises as the

government. The arguments advanced in favor of the possibility of

producing wine in England did much, no doubt, to secure the sunshine

of royal favor for experiments made to that end, but climatic

conditions were inexorable. King James busied himself to no profit in

raising mulberry trees and nursing a private stock of silkworms, in

imitation of Henry IV, the reigning King of France, who succeeded in

producing cocoons in the Tuileries but not in making silk culture

profitable in the north of France. Mulberries were first planted in

England in 1608, two years after the sailing of the Virginia

argonauts. James sent circulars to persons of influence among his

subjects asking them to cultivate mulberry trees, and, in the years

immediately following, the silk fever ran its course alongside the

excitement about the great lottery in behalf of the Virginia colony.

Hakluyt, spreading sails for America in every breeze, hastened to

announce at the first mention of silk culture that mulberry trees,

"apt to feed silke wormes to make silke," were a "chiefe commoditie"

of Virginia.

The first principles that govern colony-planting were not yet

understood. It was proposed to force everything from a forlorn camp of

men dwelling under roofs of bark and sedge, environed by treacherous

foes and in constant peril of starvation. The raising of silkworms was

begun in Virginia in 1613, and before the colony was nine years old it

was able to send to England silk that doubtless had cost more than a

hundred times its market value. The experiment came to nothing. It

could not have happened otherwise amid the miseries of those early

years. The rats, which opportunely destroyed the eggs of the silk

moth, were made to bear the responsibility for the failure.

[Sidenote: A new silk fever.]

[Sidenote: Cal. Dom. S. P. James I, p. 428.]

[Sidenote: Pory's Report, Pub. Rec. Off.]

[Sidenote: Phil. Trans. I, 201.]

[Sidenote: Hening i, 14.]

[Sidenote: Original Records of Colony of Va.]

[Sidenote: Note 2.]

[Sidenote: 1655.]

[Sidenote: Comp. Va. Richly Valued, 1650, and Leah and Rachel, 1636.]

[Sidenote: Note 3.]

Silk was little known in England at the beginning of Elizabeth's

reign, but it came into great request a few years later. In 1617 Lord

Carew declares that there is "a madness for silk instead of cloth."

This rage for silk led to the establishment of silk manufacturing in

England; throwsters, dyers, and weavers were brought to England from

abroad and settled in Spitalfields, "the cheap end of its metropolis,"

and in Moorfields. It seemed more than ever important to produce silk

in the king's dominions, in order to supply these manufacturers with

material without importation from alien lands. Accordingly, a new

effort was made in 1620 to secure raw silk from Virginia. The Earl of

Southampton, ever eager to promote the Virginia colony, "writt into

Italy, France, and Spayne" for silkworm "seed"; the king gave some

from his own stock, and the expert who had charge of the king's worms

was sent over to look after the business. A French book on the subject

was translated to instruct the colonists. The first Virginia Assembly

in 1619 had passed a law to promote the raising of the mulberry. To

save expense, the colonists at this time, or later, planted the trees

in hedgerows and mowed them with a scythe. In 1621 orders were sent

from England that none but members of the Council and the heads of

hundreds should wear silk, unless they had made it themselves. The

prohibition shows how general was the craze for silk clothing. The

climate of Virginia proved genial enough, but the massacre of 1622,

the bitter Indian conflicts that ensued in 1623, and the epidemic of

the same year, following one another swiftly, were enough to

annihilate a hundred feeble projects. The real doom of silk-raising,

however, came from the fact that the culture of tobacco in virgin soil

was incalculably more profitable and vastly less troublesome to

pioneers than hatching silkworms' eggs in one's pocket or bosom, or

sleeping with them in a small box under one's bolster and covering

them in the warm bed on rising. The project was blighted in the bud by

adverse economic conditions--a killing frost more deadly to such

enterprises than an ungenial climate. But a lesson in economic

principles is one of the hardest for men to learn. Long after the

colony had become prosperous, English projectors and Virginia

experimenters tried again and again to supplant tobacco with silk. If

we may credit the report, Virginia furnished a coronation robe of silk

for Charles I, and Charles II certainly wore silk from worms hatched

and fed in his Virginia dominions. One Esquire Digges brought

Armenians to Virginia to attend his worms. But in the Reformed

Virginia Silkworm, by Hartlib, the friend of Milton, it is announced

that a young lady had discovered that silkworms would care for

themselves on the trees, "to the instant wonderful enrichment of all

the planters there, requiring neither cost, labour, or hindrance in

any of their other employments." It is also suggested on the eager

title-page of the pamphlet that "the Indians, seeing and finding that

there is neither Art, Pains, or Skill in the thing," will

"incontinently fall to raising silk." Not only were the gentle

savages, and especially their women and children, to devote themselves

to silk, but the American caterpillar--"the natural silkworm" as it

was called--was expected to spin for the market if his cocoon could be

"refined."

[Sidenote: Hening ii, 242.]

[Sidenote: Phil. Trans. XI, 628.]

By 1666 the silk delusion had passed, and the Virginia Assembly

repealed all acts for the encouragement of mulberry trees. Ten years

later, Glover, the botanist, found many of these trees still standing

as melancholy witnesses to the waste of energy by the earlier

promoters and settlers of the colony. Almost every other American

colony made the same experiment for itself, and Virginia renewed its

endeavors from time to time, each generation forgetting what its

fathers had learned.

III.

[Sidenote: Silk-grass.]

[Sidenote: 1585.]

[Sidenote: A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of

Virginia.]

[Sidenote: Proceedings of Va. Assembly, 1619. 2d N. Y. Hist. Society

Coll. iii, 348.]

[Sidenote: Purchas IV, p. 1777.]

[Sidenote: Instr. of 24 July, 1624. MS. Bk. of Instr. Libr. of Cong.]

Along with the silk fever went the silk-grass craze. Ralegh's people

had seen the Indians wearing garments woven of the fiber of the _Yucca

filamentosa_, the "Adam's needle and thread" of our popular speech.

Hariot, in his account of it, declares that "the like grows in

Persia," and that much of the "silk-works" coming thence to Europe was

made of this fiber. He probably confounded the yucca with the ramie

plant of the East, of which grass cloth is made. Of the yucca fiber

taken to England in 1585, "a piece of silk grogram" was made, and of

course pronounced "excellent good"; it was even presented to the

queen. The coarse and rather brittle fiber of this plant was exalted

by enthusiasts into something nearly equal to silk. Ordinances for

planting it were sent from England; at least one legislative act in

its favor was passed by the Virginia Assembly, and the most foolish

hopes were entertained regarding the profit to be had from it. By 1619

it had come to be called "silk flax," and it was then advocated for

homelier uses, such as cordage and linen, and every householder was

compelled by law to set a hundred plants; the governor himself set

five thousand. In 1624 it is spoken of as "a commoditie of speciall

hope and much use." There were by this time those who ventured to say

that the silk-grass enterprise was "full of difficultie"; but the

managers in England easily got rid of this objection by attributing

the difficulty to "negligence and want of experience." They were just

then intent on finding some commodity that would take the place of

tobacco, which was frowned upon by both court and Parliament. In spite

of all discouragement, the hope of good results from the yucca fiber

outlasted that generation, and was in full vigor in 1649, sixty-four

years after Hariot's mistake.

IV.

[Sidenote: Wine.]

[Sidenote: MS. Rec. Va. Co. i, 343.]

It was also proposed to produce wine in Virginia for English

consumption. No more gold and silver should go out of the realm to buy

port and canary to the profit of foreigners and the impoverishment of

the good and loyal subjects of his Majesty. The instructions on this

point were clear, and before the Virginia exiles had secured bread to

stay their hunger they had made wine of the sour wild grapes of the

country. French vine-dressers were sent over a little later and were

forbidden to plant tobacco, but were compelled to employ themselves

about vines, with the care of silkworms for variety. In 1621 these

Frenchmen sent to England a cask of wine, the arrival of which was

duly celebrated. Other experimental casks of wine were afterward sent

to England from America at long intervals, but without decreasing the

profits of wine growers in the Old World.

[Sidenote: Other products sought.]

[Sidenote: Nova Brittania.]

All the commodities sought from Virginia were unsuited to conditions

in a new country. To the folly of making such experiments at all where

living itself was an experiment, the managers added the folly of

crowding a multiplicity of problematic enterprises on the colony at

the same time. With a virgin continent in which to produce novelties,

all things seemed possible in an age so hopeful. Plants of every

clime grew rank in the imagination of projectors. Virginia was a

wonderland, and it was readily believed without evidence that the

"soyle and clymate" were "very apt and fit for sugar canes"; "also

linseed and rapeseeds to make oiles," as a black-letter pamphlet of

1609 expresses it. Along with "orenges, limons, and almonds," this

official writer proposes to plant "anniseeds, rice, cummin,

cottonwool, carroway seeds, ginger, madder, olives, oris, sumacke,"

and, as if this breathless list were not enough for one new land, he

adds, "and many such like that I can not now name." If we may trust

the publications of the company, various West India plants were tried

in the very first days of the colony, while the threefold peril of

death from famine, pestilence, and savage war was imminent.

[Sidenote: Timber and naval stores.]

[Sidenote: MS. Rec. Va. Co. 31 May and 23 June, 1620.]

[Sidenote: Note 4.]

But it was not enough to wring from an infant colony the products of

the south; those derived from the north of Europe were straightway to

be got there also. German millwrights--"Dutch carpenters," in the

phrase of the records--were brought from Hamburg by John Ferrar to

build Virginia sawmills; timber was still sawed by hand in England.

Pitch, tar, and potash were to be produced by Poles sent out for the

purpose in the second year of the colony. Patriotism dictated that

England should be relieved of her dependence on foreign countries for

naval stores. Virginia had forests: why should she not produce these

things?

[Sidenote: Glass-making.]

[Sidenote: Note 5.]

[Sidenote: Iron works.]

[Sidenote: Note 6.]

[Sidenote: Result of the massacre.]

It had been found that the savages eagerly received glass beads in

exchange for corn and peltries. Nothing more was required to prove the

profitableness of glass-making. Some Germans were sent to the colony

in 1608, and glass works were established. For some reason no proper

materials were available at first, and it became necessary to request

that sand might be sent from England to make Virginia glass of at the

glass works in the woods near Jamestown. The German glass blowers were

prone to run away to the Indians, among whom work was lighter and food

more abundant. The tribesmen encouraged these desertions by providing

dusky wives for the men whose skill with tools and weapons they valued

highly. In 1621 the glass business was revived, and this time it was

intrusted to Italian workmen. About the same time iron works were

established at Falling Creek, with "forty skilled workmen from Sussex

to carry them forward." Twenty-five ship carpenters were sent to ply

their trade on the James River, and it was also arranged that oil was

to be distilled from walnuts by the "apothecaries." George Sandys was

sent over in July, 1621, to have entire control of all schemes for

staple commodities. There was a certain fitness in intrusting these

creatures of the imagination to a poet. Pineapples, plantains, and

other fruits were to be started forthwith. There was once again great

hope from the "rich commodity of silk," an endowed school for Indians

was founded, and the little Virginia pool became iridescent with many

frail bubbles. The sudden and frightful massacre by the savages in

March, 1622, obliterated instantly all vain and premature projects.

This calamity did not cause the failure of these foredoomed schemes;

it only saved them from a painful and lingering death, and provided

their friends with a decent epitaph for them. The people who survived

the massacre were decimated by an epidemic in the following year. What

strength they could spare from frequent battles with the savages they

spent in growing corn and tobacco, which last, of all the things

tried, proved to be the only commodity profitable for export.

V.

[Sidenote: Tobacco.]

[Sidenote: A Covnter-Blaste to Tobacco, 1604.]

[Sidenote: Note 7.]

[Sidenote: Note 8.]

[Sidenote: Note 9.]

Against tobacco King James had written a book. It was denounced in

Parliament and regarded by all public-spirited men as an evil.

Nevertheless, it turned the scale and saved the colony. In

colony-planting the problem is fundamentally an economic one, and

economic problems are solved by coarse and homely means. John Rolfe,

the first Englishman that ventured to wed an Indian, planted the first

tobacco at Jamestown in 1612, and by 1616 the better West India

variety had perhaps been substituted for the harsh kind grown by the

Virginia Indians, and by them called "uppowoc" or "apooke." Tobacco

prospered and was profitable, to the disgust of the pedantic king and

the sorrow of all who had cherished hopes of beautiful products from

a colony upon which so much poetic sentiment had been lavished.

Neither gold nor spices came as had been expected; the strings of

pearls seen by Ralegh's men were not again to be found, or were

perhaps transformed on investigation into wampum beads; the silver

mine once discovered on the upper James had vanished forever; tropical

fruits refused to grow; even madder and woad failed, and, though the

indigo plant would readily mature, nobody knew how to manufacture the

dye. Silk was troublesome and unprofitable, shipbuilding, and such

coarse but patriotic products as naval stores had come to naught. But

the detestable "weed," as King James had dubbed it, throve apace. As

early as 1617 the waste margins of the broad streets of Jamestown were

planted with it by the eager settlers. The English merchants grasped

at the profits of it, the farmers of the customs rejoiced in the heavy

duties imposed on it, and a powerful mercenary interest in the

prosperity of Virginia was established. By 1624, when the Virginia

Company was dissolved, the danger that the colony would be abandoned

as a result of Spanish intrigues, Indian massacres, or prolonged

discouragement had passed away. Public spirit, patriotism, and

religious enthusiasm no longer guarded it as a feeble house plant. It

had struck root in the outdoor soil of human self-interest and its

life was assured. From that time the colony that had been for

seventeen years a fairyland to dreamers in England and a perdition to

its inhabitants, became a sober money-making enterprise, uninteresting

to enthusiasts and philanthropists.

VI.

[Sidenote: Motives of sentiment.]

In the preceding sections of this chapter we have traced what may be

called the series of commercial motives that, sometimes in succession,

often in co-operation, propelled the Virginia movement. The agitation

for a colony was primarily a commercial one. The London or Virginia

Company by which it was carried forward had been organized in the form

of the great trading corporations of the time, such as the Muscovy

Company and the East India Company, and it was expected to yield large

returns. But though commercial in form and purpose, the Virginia

Company from the outset was able to appeal successfully in every

emergency to motives that were far from mercenary. Into the

chain-threads of commercial enterprise was woven a woof of patriotic

feeling and religious sentiment.

VII.

[Sidenote: Rise of the patriot party in the Virginia Company.]

[Sidenote: Woodnoth's Short Collection, p. 6.]

[Sidenote: Peckard's Ferrar, 113.]

Dale's empty-handed return, and Argall's homecoming with hands full of

the spoil of both colony and colonists, were severe blows to the hope

of profit from Virginia, and thereafter commercial motives fell to a

second place. The company began to pass more and more out of the

control of traders like Sir Thomas Smyth and Alderman Johnson, and

the corrupt clique of predatory merchants, as well as out of the reach

of voracious noblemen like Warwick. More and more it passed into the

hands of the great liberal statesmen whose leader was the

incorruptible Sir Edwin Sandys, a man of rare gifts and knowledge and

of great resoluteness. These men had suffered some disappointment, no

doubt, in their struggle for parliamentary freedom in England. They

might have succeeded better had their antagonist been a strong king,

but against the pusillanimity, the vanity, the vacillation, and the

pedantic dogmatism of James little permanent headway could be made.

Without relinquishing the conflict in the House of Commons, they took

it up in the Quarter Courts of the Virginia Company. In this new field

they found themselves afresh confronted by the obstinacy of the king,

who was stirred up to oppose them by the discarded governor, Sir

Thomas Smyth, and his friends, by Warwick, and by all the partisans of

high prerogative and all the advocates of the Spanish match.

"Bedchamber men" and others about the king's person were engaged to

work upon the king to come to the rescue of Sir Thomas Smyth's

"honor." The Spanish ambassador Gondomar, who had spies in the

Virginia Company, took pains to feed James's discontent. He told the

king that it was time for him to look into the Virginia courts, which

were held in the great hall of the house of the Ferrar family. Too

many of the king's nobility and gentry resorted thither, in order to

be in company with the popular Lord Southampton and the dangerous

Sandys. They were deep politicians, and they entertained designs

beyond a tobacco plantation. Their leaders, he said, were "subtle men

of high courage who regarded neither his master nor their own."

[Sidenote: Sir Edwin Sandys.]

[Sidenote: Royal Hist. MS. Comm. viii, II, 45.]

[Sidenote: The king's interference.]

[Sidenote: 1620.]

[Sidenote: A land of freedom.]

[Sidenote: Note 10.]

Sandys, as assistant to Sir Thomas Smyth and virtual governor, had

already succeeded in establishing in Virginia a constitutional state

with a representative government. He was furthering plans for the

foundation of the little separatist state of New Plymouth, and his

enemies set agoing tales that he had dark designs of removing with the

Pilgrims to America, in order to found a democratic state there. In

1619 Sir Thomas Smyth tendered his resignation, and the company, to

his surprise, it would appear, accepted it, and chose Sandys to his

place. When, in 1620, his first year of government drew to a close,

Sir Edwin Sandys erected an elegant ballot-box in the midst of the

hall of the Ferrars, that the brilliant assemblage of noblemen,

knights, gentlemen, and merchants might by a secret vote exercise the

right of choice without any constraint. Just as the assemblage was

about to begin voting, two clerks of the signet were announced with a

message from the king forbidding the company to choose Sandys. "Choose

the devil, if you will, but not Sir Edwin Sandys," was one form in

which the king expressed his aversion. Southampton, braving the king's

displeasure, allowed himself to be elected, with Sandys for deputy.

In June, 1621, both Southampton and Sandys were imprisoned. This

attracted attention to Virginia as a "refuge from a more oppressive

government in England." In three months' time twenty-five ships set

sail for the colony, which gained an impetus from the king's

opposition that put it beyond the danger of destruction by the

calamities of the next two years. Even before the massacre and

pestilence of 1622 and 1623, Southampton was assured by friends at

court that it would come to "push of pike," and that the company would

be overthrown. The charter of the company was vacated in 1624, but

free government had so taken root in the colony that it could never

afterward be quite extirpated. A new English state with a popular

government had been founded of deliberate purpose by a group of

English statesmen, at the head of which, and easily first, was Sir

Edwin Sandys, whose great service to the people and nation that were

to come has been almost forgotten.

VIII.

[Sidenote: Religious propagandism.]

[Sidenote: Note 11.]

We shall not have taken a just account of Virginia colonization if we

do not reckon religious motives among the many forces that carried

that wavering enterprise to success. From the excitement about

American exploration and colonization the English church caught its

first missionary impulse. The Indian captives brought from America at

various times gave to Englishmen the novel sight of men and women

from beyond the bounds of Christendom; people who had never been

baptized, and had never learned to wear English garments, "naked

slaves of the devil," as one of the early Virginia clergymen described

them. To the benevolent desire of Englishmen for the deliverance of

the savages from devil-worship and semi-nudity, there was added the

natural wish for ecclesiastical extension. The separation of England

from the Roman hierarchy had been a blow to the aspiration for an

unattainable catholicity cherished in one form or another by Christian

ecclesiastics of almost every school. It was not possible that the

great men who were leaders of the English church in the reigns of

Elizabeth and James should be content with the narrow limits of "the

little English paddock," while Spanish conquerors and missionary

priests were winning for the Roman communion a new and vast dominion

in America. English ecclesiastics felt keenly the reproach made

against them by the Roman Catholics that they were not "converters of

infidels."

[Sidenote: Zeal of the clergy.]

Perhaps the earliest of all Anglican missionaries was Robert Hunt, the

first minister in Virginia, a light shining in a dark place indeed. He

bore with unfaltering courage and a sweet-hearted patience rarely

equaled in the history of martyrdom the accumulating miseries of

Jamestown, until he also perished in the general mortality. His

nobleness of spirit softened the detestable rivalries of the early

leaders. The most active and influential writers in favor of

colonization were clergymen such as Hakluyt, Symonds, Purchas, and

Crashaw. Other clergymen, following in the footsteps of Hunt, risked

life itself in the Virginia colony, while devout laymen spent their

money in its behalf. Thus did Anglican zeal further a colonization

that, by a curious perversity of outcome, resulted in founding a

nation of dissenters.

IX.

[Sidenote: The Ferrars.]

In the great hall of the house of Nicholas Ferrar, a London merchant,

the courts or meetings of the Virginia Company were held for years.

The two sons of this Nicholas Ferrar, John and Nicholas, served in

turn as deputy governors of the Virginia Company. This pious Ferrar

family, as it became influential, lent to the scheme of colonizing

Virginia something of the air of a project for propagating the gospel.

Nicholas, the father, gave money for the education of infidels in

Virginia. A school was founded there by the gifts of the pious, and

rewards were given to those colonists who would educate Indian

children in their families. After the younger Nicholas, who was a man

of remarkable zeal and activity, tinged with a romantic enthusiasm,

became deputy in 1622, the production of silk and wine and iron and

the educating of Indians in Christianity traveled on abreast. A

college was proposed, for which an endowment of thirteen hundred

pounds was collected, and to which a valuable library was bequeathed

by a settler. Practical men grumbled at the prematurity of all this,

and complained of those in charge that "they spent Michaelmas rent in

mid-summer moone." The governor of the colony, honest Sir Francis

Wyatt, wished that "little Mr. Ferrar were in Virginia, where he might

add to his zeal a knowledge of the country."

The horrible massacre of March, 1622, made the Indian question

something other than the Ferrars saw it. All schemes for educating the

savages were obliterated in a day. The only thought after this was how

to put the savages to death, old and young, men and women, more often

by foul means than by fair. The settlers even emulated, if they did

not surpass, the treachery of the Indians. With the dissolution of the

company by _quo warranto_ proceedings in 1624 the government of the

colony passed to the Crown, and the Ferrars had no more to do with

Virginia.

X.

[Sidenote: Later History of the Ferrars.]

[Sidenote: Peckard's Life of N. Ferrar.]

[Sidenote: Arminian Nunnery 1641.]

[Sidenote: Hearne's Langtoft's Chronicle, App. to Pref., cix.]

The later career of Nicholas Ferrar the younger, though without direct

relation to colonization, throws light on the age of colony

beginnings. Rejecting the offer of a rich bride, he bought for his

mother, now a widow, the manor lordship of Little Gidding, in

Huntingdonshire, and took the entire Ferrar family, including his

brother and his sister with eighteen children, into religious

retirement. Here this half-domestic, half-monastic community gave alms

to the poor, illuminated manuscripts of the Bible, and worshiped in

its little chapel with genuflections and other observances that

procured for it the nickname of the "Protestant Nunnery," and brought

down upon it the pious fury of the Puritans. Nicholas Ferrar, who had

taken deacon's orders, was the real head of the community. He prepared

at Little Gidding what is perhaps the earliest English monatesseron of

the four gospels. By means of relays of worshipers the Ferrars kept

their devotions always in progress. The entire Psalter was chanted

antiphonally during each twenty-four hours. Those whose turn it was to

keep vigil were wont to leave a candle at the door of Nicholas and to

wish him good-morrow at one o'clock in the morning, at which hour he

was accustomed to rise and begin the exercises of the day. The

strength of this belated mediaeval saint gave way under a discipline so

austere, and he died in 1637. Little Gidding, with its "fair grove and

sweet walks letticed and gardened on both sides," was devastated a few

years later by the counter-zeal of the Puritans, who showed an

especial indignation against the organ, which they broke into pieces

to light fires for roasting the sheep of the Ferrars. Behold an

epitome of the first half of the seventeenth century--its idealism in

affairs, and its war to the death of opposing ideals in religion!

[Sidenote: Advent of Puritanism.]

In the very years during which the Ferrars were most active on

behalf of Virginia the earliest Puritan movement toward America set

in. The attenuated mediaevalism of the Ferrars did not lack a

certain refined beauty, but it was hardly suited to the rough work

of hewing a road along which civilization might march into a savage

wilderness. The Puritans, with their robust contempt for aesthetic

considerations--making firewood of organs with delight, and feasting

without scruple on the sheep of those whom they esteemed

idolaters--were much the fitter to be champions against the American

Canaanites.

ELUCIDATIONS.

[Sidenote: Note 1, page 74.]

Two of the chapter heads to Hakluyt's Westerne Planting, printed in 2d

Maine Historical Collections, ii, sufficiently indicate the views

prevailing at the time:

"V. That this voyadge will be a greate bridle to the Indies of the

Kinge of Spaine, and a meane that wee may arreste at our pleasure for

the space of tenne weekes or three monethes every yere, one or two

hundred saile of his subjectes Shippes at the fysshinge in Newfounde

lande.

"VI. That the mischefe that the Indian threasure wroughte in time of

Charles the late Emperor, father to the Spanishe Kinge, is to be had

in consideration of the Queens moste excellent Majestie, least the

contynuall comynge of the like threasure from thence to his sonne

worke the unrecoverable annoye of this realme, wherof already wee have

had very dangerous experience."

The heading of the first chapter should be added: "I. That this

westerne discoverie will be greately for thinlargemente of the gospell

of Christe whereunto the princes of the refourmed relligion are

chefely bounde, amongst whome her Majestie ys principall."

It would be foreign to the purpose of the present work to tell the

story of Spanish jealousy of Virginia, and of the diplomatic intrigues

for the overthrow of the colony. See documents in Mr. Alexander

Brown's Genesis of the United States. One can not but regret that Mr.

Brown did not give also the original of his Spanish papers; no

translation is adequate to the use of the historian.

[Sidenote: Note 2, page 78.]

This method was recommended to the colonists as late as 1753 in

Pullein's Culture of Silk for the Use of the American Colonies, and it

had probably long prevailed on the continent of Europe.

[Sidenote: Note 3, page 79.]

The authorities on the early efforts to raise silk, in addition to

those cited in the text and the margin, are too numerous to find place

here. The most valuable of all is, of course, the copy of the Records

of the Virginia Company after April, 1619, in the Library of Congress,

_passim_. See, for example, under date of December 13, 1620, and June

11, 1621. See also A Declaration of Virginia, 1620, and Purchas, pp.

1777-1787, Hamor's True Discourse, Smith's General History, Book II,

Anderson's Commerce under 1620, and various state papers abstracted by

Sainsbury, with Sainsbury's preface to the first volume of his

Calendar, and Hening, _passim_. The reader is also referred to Mr.

Bruce's Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century,

issued as these pages are passing into the hands of the printer. The

wildness of some of the proposals for the production of Virginia silk

in the Commonwealth period is almost surpassed by other projects of

the time. In Virginia Richly Valued, 1650, perfume was to be extracted

from the muskrat, and the James River sturgeon were to be

domesticated. Fishes may be "unwilded," says the author. Besides

feeding silkworms, the Indians were to be used in pearl fisheries in

Virginia waters. Wyckoff on Silk Manufacture, Tenth Census, says that

experimental silkworms had been taken to Mexico by the Spaniards in

1531, without any permanent results.

[Sidenote: Note 4, page 82.]

Even in Elizabeth's time efforts had been made to procure naval stores

without the intervention of foreign merchants. As early as 1583,

Carlisle, who was son-in-law to Secretary Walsingham, had subscribed a

thousand pounds toward an American colony, which it was urged would

buy English woolens, take off idle and burdensome people, and, among

other things, produce naval stores. In 1601 Ralegh had protested

eloquently against the act to compel Englishmen to sow hemp. "Rather

let every man use his ground to that which it is most fit for," he

said. Edwards, Life of Ralegh, p. 272.

[Sidenote: Note 5, page 83.]

Why Germans were sent it is hard to say, as glass was made in England

as early as 1557. Glass was produced in Virginia, according to

Strachey, who says: "Although the country wants not Salsodiack enough

to make glasse of, and of which we have made some stoore in a goodly

howse sett up for the same purpose, with all offices and furnases

thereto belonging, a little without the island, where Jamestown now

stands." History of Travaile into Virginnia Brittannia, p. 71. The

house appears to have been standing and in operation in 1624. Calendar

of Colonial Documents, January 30, February 16, and number 20, pp. 38,

39.

[Sidenote: Note 6, page 83.]

Purchas, p. 1777, says that one hundred and fifty persons were sent

over two years earlier to set up three iron works, but the statement

seems hardly credible. In the midst of the misery following the

massacre of 1622, and notwithstanding the imminent probability of the

overthrow of the company, which was already impoverished, some of the

adventurers or shareholders sent nine men to Virginia to try a

different method of making iron from the one that had previously been

used. Letter of August 6, 1623, in Manuscript Book of Instructions in

Library of Congress, fol. 120. Having "failed to effect" the making of

iron "by those great wayes which we have formerly attempted," the

undiscouraged visionaries "most gladly embraced this more facile

project" of making iron "by bloom," but with a like result, of course.

[Sidenote: Note 7, page 84.]

The raising of tobacco in Virginia was one of the earliest projects

entertained. "We can send ... tobacco after a yeare or two, five

thousand pounds a yeare." Description of the Now-discovered river and

Country of Virginia, with the Liklyhood of ensuing Ritches by

England's Ayd and Industry, May 21, 1607. Public Record Office,

printed in Transactions of the American Antiquarian Society, iv, 59,

62. The paper is supposed to be from the pen of Captain Gabriel

Archer.

[Sidenote: Note 8, page 85.]

In 1604 the king had, by a royal commission addressed to "our

treasurer of England," arbitrarily raised the duty on tobacco from

twopence a pound to six shillings tenpence. He was probably moved to

make this surprising change by his antipathy to tobacco; but by

increasing the profits of the farmers of customs and monopolists of

tobacco, he no doubt contributed to that abandonment of Virginia to

tobacco raising which seemed to him so lamentable. The use of Spanish

tobacco in England was general before that from Virginia began to take

its place. Barnabee Rich says, in 1614: "I have heard it tolde that

now very lately there hath bin a cathologue taken of all those new

erected houses that have set vppe that trade of selling tobacco in

London, ande neare about London, and if a man may beleeue what is

confidently reported, there are found to be vpward of 7000 houses that

doth liue by that trade." He says such shops were "almost in euery

lane and in euery by-corner round about London." The Honestie of this

Age, p. 30.

[Sidenote: Note 9, page 86.]

The MS. records of the Virginia Company and the State papers relating

to Virginia in the Public Record Office, London, are the most

important authorities on the subjects treated in the text. On the

commodities attempted at the outset, Manuscript Book of Instructions,

Library of Congress, the first volume of Hening's Statutes, _passim_,

and Purchas, pp. 1777-1786, _passim_. On the inferiority of the Indian

tobacco, see Strachey, p. 121.

[Sidenote: Note 10, page 89.]

Peckard's Life of Ferrar supplies many of the particulars in this

section. The Records of the Virginia Company and other original

authorities do not sustain all of Peckard's statements. The author's

view is evidently distorted by biographer's myopia. He often seems to

depend on tradition, but in some passages his touch is more sure, and

he writes like a man who has documents before him. Arthur Woodnoth's

Short Collection of the Most Remarkable Passages from the Originall to

the Dissolution of the Virginia Company is of great value. It is a

scarce tract, which I met first in the White-Kennett Library, in the

rooms of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. It is also in

the British Museum, Harvard College, and the Library of Congress. It

is to be taken with discrimination, but the view of the inner workings

of court intrigue as it affected Virginia is so fresh and detailed

that it would be a pity to miss its information. It was printed in

1651. There is a brief sketch of the life of Sandys in Brown's Genesis

of the United States, ii, 993.

[Sidenote: Note 11, page 90.]

Hakluyt's Discourse concerneing Westerne Planting, printed first in

the Maine Historical Collections, second series, vol. ii, page 11.

"And this enterprise the princes of religion (amonge whome her

Majestie ys principall) oughte the rather to take in hande because

papists confirme themselves and drawe other to theire side shewinge

that they are the true Catholicke churche because they have bene the

onely converters of many millions of infidells. Yea, I myself have

bene demanded of them how many infidells have bene by us converted."