When Sir Thomas Smith ended his term as Treasurer of the Company in
1619, among many other charges brought against him by the opposing
faction, it was declared there was left only one old frigate belonging
to Somers' Isles, one shallop, one ship's boat, and two small boats
belonging to private persons. In his defense, Smith referred to the
150 men he had sent to Virginia to set up iron works; the making of
cordage, pitch, tar, pot and soap-ashes from material at hand; the
cutting of timber and masts; and how he had sent men to erect sawmills
for cutting planks for building houses and ships. In justification of
Smith and himself, Robert Johnson, alderman, a leader during Smith's
administration, drew up an account in which he stated among other
evidences of prosperity that barks, pinnaces, shallops, barges, and
other boats had been built in the colony; but this statement was not
accepted as fact.
Sir Edwin Sandys succeeded Smith as Treasurer; and in the Earl of
Southampton's administration in 1621, a list of improvements was drawn
up, among which it was claimed that the number of boats was ten times
multiplied and that there were four ships owned by the colony. A reply
to this may be taken from _An Answer to a Declaration of the Present
State of Virginia in May_, 1623, in which it was declared that the
new administration was many degrees behind the old government, for in
those times there were built boats of all sorts, barges, pinnaces,
frigates, hoyes, shallops and the like.
The great massacre in March, 1622, put an immediate check on any
progress in boatbuilding in the colony. For a time the settlers were
panic stricken, and there was much talk of assembling all the
remaining settlers on the Eastern Shore, but happily, wiser counsel
prevailed. That the few boatwrights then in the colony perished is
considered probable from the fact that none could be found to repair a
boat that had drifted ashore at Elizabeth City after the massacre.
When writing about the Indian massacre, Captain John Smith, in his
_General History of Virginia_, in a bitter outburst, said: "Yea, they
borrowed our boats to transport themselves over the river to consult
on the develish murder that insued and of our utter extirpation." In
Sir Francis Wyatt's commission to Sir George Yeardley on September 10,
1622, to attack the Indians in punishment for the massacre, he ordered
the use of "such ships, barks, and boats as are now riding in this
river as transports." The ships and barks may well have been English
vessels.
When Virginia became a Crown Colony in 1624, the reports on the state
of the colony named thirty-eight boats, two shallops, one bark, one
skiff, and one canoe, but this was considered inaccurate as many
plantations did not report their vessels.