LEAH AND RACHEL.
William Claiborne and his projects 286
Kent Island occupied by Claiborne 287
Conflicting grants 288
Star Chamber decision and Claiborne's resistance 289
Lord Baltimore's instructions 290
The Virginia council supports Claiborne 290, 291
Complications with the Indians 291, 292
Reprisals and skirmishes 293
Affairs in Virginia; complaints against Governor Harvey 293, 294
Rage of Virginia against Maryland 294, 295
How Rev. Anthony Panton called Mr. Secretary Kemp a
jackanapes 295
Indignation meeting at the house of William Warren 296
Arrest of the principal speakers 296
Scene in the council room 296, 297
How Sir John Harvey was thrust out of the government 297
How King Charles sent him back to Virginia 298
Downfall of Harvey 299
George Evelin sent to Kent Island 299
Kent Island seized by Leonard Calvert 300
The Lords of Trade decide against Claiborne 301
Puritans in Virginia 301, 302
The Act of Uniformity of 1631 303
Puritan ministers sent from New England to Virginia 303
The new Act of Uniformity, 1643 304
Expulsion of the New England ministers 304
Indian massacre of 1644 305
Conflicting views of theodicy 306
Invasion of Maryland by Claiborne and Ingle 306-308
Expulsion of Claiborne and Ingle from Maryland 308
Lord Baltimore appoints William Stone as governor 308
Toleration Act of 1649 309-311
Migration of Puritans from Virginia to Maryland 312
Designs of the Puritans 313
Reluctant submission of Virginia to Cromwell 314
Claiborne and Bennett undertake to settle the affairs of
Maryland 315
Renewal of the troubles 316
The Puritan Assembly and its notion of a toleration act 316
Civil war in Maryland; battle of the Severn, 1655 317
Lord Baltimore is sustained by Cromwell and peace reigns
once more 318
MAPS.
Tidewater Virginia, _from a sketch by the author_
_Frontispiece_
Michael Lok's Map, 1582, _from Hakluyt's Voyages to America_ 60
The Palatinate of Maryland, _from a sketch by the author_ 274
OLD VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBOURS.
CHAPTER I.
THE SEA KINGS.
[Sidenote: Tercentenary of the Discovery of America, 1792.]
WHEN one thinks of the resounding chorus of gratulations with which
the four hundredth anniversary of the Discovery of America was lately
heralded to a listening world, it is curious and instructive to
notice the sort of comment which that great event called forth upon
the occasion of its third centenary, while the independence of the
United States was as yet a novel and ill-appreciated fact. In America
very little fuss was made. Railroads were as yet unknown, and the
era of world's fairs had not begun. Of local celebrations there were
two; one held in New York, the other in Boston; and as in 1892, so in
1792, New York followed the Old Style date, the twelfth of October,
while Boston undertook to correct the date for New Style. This work
was discreditably bungled, however, and the twenty-third of October
was selected instead of the true date, the twenty-first. In New York
the affair was conducted by the newly founded political society named
for the Delaware chieftain Tammany, in Boston by the Massachusetts
Historical Society, whose founder, Dr. Jeremy Belknap, delivered a
thoughtful and scholarly address upon the occasion. Both commemorations
of the day were very quiet and modest.[1]
[Sidenote: Abbé Raynal.]
In Europe little heed was paid to America and its discovery, except
in France, which, after taking part in our Revolutionary War, was at
length embarking upon its own Revolution, so different in its character
and fortunes. Without knowing much about America, the Frenchmen of that
day were fond of using it to point a moral and adorn a tale. In 1770
the famous Abbé Raynal had published his "Philosophical and Political
History of the Establishments and Commerce of the Europeans in the
Two Indies," a book in ten volumes, which for a time enjoyed immense
popularity. Probably not less than one third of it was written by
Diderot, and more than a dozen other writers contributed to its pages,
while the abbé, in editing these various chapters and adding more from
his own hand, showed himself blissfully ignorant of the need for any
such thing as critical judgment in writing history. In an indescribably
airy and superficial manner the narrative flits over the whole vast
field of the intercourse of Europeans with the outlying parts of the
earth discovered since the days of Columbus and Gama; and at length,
in the last chapter of the last volume, we are confronted with the
question, What is all this worth? Our author answers confidently,
Nothing! worse than nothing! the world would have been much better off
if America had never been discovered and the ocean route to Asia had
remained unknown!
[Sidenote: Was the discovery of America a blessing or a curse to
mankind?]
[Sidenote: Abbé Genty.]
[Sidenote: Quinine.]
This opinion seems to have been a favourite hobby with the worthy
Raynal; for in 1787, in view of the approaching tercentenary, we find
him proposing to the Academy of Lyons the offer of a prize of fifty
louis for the best essay upon the question whether the discovery of
America had been a blessing or a curse to mankind. It was furthermore
suggested that the essay should discuss the most practicable methods
of increasing the benefits and diminishing the ills that had flowed
and continued to flow from that memorable event. The announcement of
the question aroused considerable interest, and a few essays were
written, but the prize seems never to have been awarded. One of these
essays was by the Marquis de Chastellux, who had served in America as
major-general in the army of Count Rochambeau. The accomplished author
maintains, chiefly on economic grounds, that the discovery has been
beneficial to mankind; in one place, mindful of the triumph of the
American cause in the grand march upon Yorktown wherein he had himself
taken part, he exclaims, "O land of Washington and Franklin, of Hancock
and Adams, who could ever wish thee non-existent for them and for us?"
To this Baron Grimm[2] replied, "Perhaps he will wish it who reflects
that the independence of the United States has cost France nearly two
thousand million francs, and is hastening in Europe a revolutionary
outbreak which had better be postponed or averted." To most of these
philosophers no doubt Chastellux seemed far too much of an optimist,
and the writer who best expressed their sentiments was the Abbé Genty,
who published at Orleans, in 1787, an elaborate essay, in two tiny
volumes, entitled "The Influence of the Discovery of America upon the
Happiness of the Human Race." Genty has no difficulty in reaching the
conclusion that the influence has been chiefly for the bad. Think what
a slaughter there had been of innocent and high-minded red men by
brutal and ruthless whites! for the real horrors described by Las Casas
were viewed a century ago in the light of Rousseau's droll notions as
to the exalted virtues of the noble savage. Think, too, how most of
the great European wars since the Peace of Westphalia had grown out of
quarrels about colonial empire! Clearly Columbus had come with a sword,
not with an olive branch, and had but opened a new chapter in the long
Iliad of human woe. Against such undeniable evils, what benefits could
be alleged except the extension of commerce, and that, says Genty,
means merely the multiplication of human wants, which is not in itself
a thing to be desired.[3] One unqualified benefit, however, Genty and
all the other writers freely admit; the introduction of quinine into
Europe and its use in averting fevers. That item of therapeutics is the
one cheery note in the mournful chorus of disparagement, so long as
our attention is confined to the past. In the future, perhaps, better
things might be hoped for. Along the Atlantic coast of North America
a narrow fringe of English-speaking colonies had lately established
their political independence and succeeded in setting on foot a federal
government under the presidency of George Washington. The success
of this enterprise might put a new face upon things and ultimately
show that after all the discovery of the New World was a blessing to
mankind.[4] So says the Abbé Genty in his curious little book, which
even to-day is well worth reading.
[Sidenote: Spanish and English America.]
If now, after the lapse of another century, we pause to ask the
question why the world was so much more interested in the Western
hemisphere in 1892 than in 1792, we may fairly say that it is because
of the constructive work, political and social, that has been done
here in the interval by men who speak English. Surely, if there were
nothing to show but the sort of work in colonization and nation-making
that characterized Spanish America under its Old Régime, there would
be small reason for celebrating the completion of another century of
such performance. During the present century, indeed, various parts
of Spanish America have begun to take on a fresh political and social
life, so that in the future much may be hoped for them. But the ideas
and methods which have guided this revival have been largely the ideas
and methods of English-speaking people, however imperfectly conceived
and reproduced. The whole story of this western hemisphere since Genty
wrote gives added point to his opinion that its value to mankind would
be determined chiefly by what the people of the United States were
likely to do.
[Sidenote: Precious metals.]
The smile with which one regards the world-historic importance accorded
to the discovery of quinine is an index of the feeling that there are
broad ways and narrow ways of dealing with such questions. To one
looking through a glass of small calibre a great historical problem may
resolve itself into a question of food and drugs. Your anti-tobacco
fanatic might contend that civilized men would have been much better
off had they never become acquainted with the Indian weed. An economist
might more reasonably point to potatoes and maize--to say nothing of
many other products peculiar to the New World--as an acquisition of
which the value can hardly be overestimated. To reckon the importance
of a new piece of territory from a survey of its material productions
is of course the first and most natural method. The Spanish conquerors
valued America for its supply of precious metals and set little store
by other things in comparison. But for the discovery of gold mines
in 1496 the Spanish colony founded by Columbus in Hispaniola would
probably have been abandoned. That was but the first step in the
finding of gold and silver in enormous quantities, and thenceforth for
a long time the Spanish crown regarded its transatlantic territories
as an inexhaustible mine of wealth. But the value of money to mankind
depends upon the uses to which it is put; and here it is worth our
while to notice the chief use to which Spain applied her American
treasure during the sixteenth century.
[Sidenote: Aims of Columbus.]
The relief of the church from threatening dangers was in those days the
noblest and most sacred function of wealth. When Columbus aimed his
prow westward from the Canaries, in quest of the treasures of Asia, its
precious stones, its silk-stuffs, its rich shawls and rugs, its corals
and dye-woods, its aromatic spices, he expected to acquire vast wealth
for the sovereigns who employed him and no mean fortune for himself. In
all negotiations he insisted upon a good round percentage, and could
no more be induced to budge from his price than the old Roman Sibyl
with her books. Of petty self-seeking and avarice there was probably
no more in this than in commercial transactions generally. The wealth
thus sought by Columbus was not so much an end as a means. His spirit
was that of a Crusader, and his aim was not to discover a New World (an
idea which seems never once to have entered his head), but to acquire
the means for driving the Turk from Europe and setting free the Holy
Sepulchre. Had he been told upon his melancholy death-bed that instead
of finding a quick route to Cathay he had only discovered a New World,
it would probably have added fresh bitterness to death.
[Sidenote: Spain and the Protestant revolt.]
But if this lofty and ill-understood enthusiast failed in his search
for the treasures of Cathay, it was at all events not long before
Cortes and Pizarro succeeded in finding the treasures of Mexico and
Peru, and the crusading scheme of Columbus descended as a kind of
legacy to the successors of Ferdinand and Isabella, the magnanimous
but sometimes misguided Charles, the sombre and terrible Philip. It
remained a crusading scheme, but, no longer patterned after that
of Godfrey and Tancred, it imitated the mad folly which had once
extinguished in southern Gaul the most promising civilization of its
age. Instead of a Spanish crusade which might have expelled the most
worthless and dangerous of barbarians from eastern Europe, it became
a Spanish crusade against everything in the shape of political and
religious freedom, whether at home or abroad. The year in which Spanish
eyes first beheld the carved serpents on Central American temples was
the year in which Martin Luther nailed his defiance to the church door
at Wittenberg. From the outworn crust of mediævalism the modern spirit
of individual freedom and individual responsibility was emerging, and
for ninety years all Europe was rent with the convulsions that ensued.
In the doubtful struggle Spain engaged herself further and further,
until by 1570 she had begun to sacrifice to it all her energies. Whence
did Philip II. get the sinews of war with which he supported Alva and
Farnese, and built the Armada called Invincible? Largely from America,
partly also from the East Indies, since Portugal and her colonies were
seized by Philip in 1580. Thus were the first-fruits of the heroic age
of discovery, both to east and to west of Borgia's meridian, devoted
to the service of the church with a vengeance, as one might say, a
lurid vengeance withal and ruthless. By the year 1609, when Spain
sullenly retired, baffled and browbeaten, from the Dutch Netherlands,
she had taken from America more gold and silver than would to-day be
represented by five thousand million dollars, and most of this huge
treasure she had employed in maintaining the gibbet for political
reformers and the stake for heretics. In view of this grewsome fact,
Mr. Charles Francis Adams has lately asked the question whether the
discovery of America was not, after all, for at least a century,
fraught with more evil than benefit to mankind. One certainly cannot
help wondering what might have been the immediate result had such an
immense revenue been at the disposal of William and Elizabeth rather
than Philip.
[Sidenote: Nations are made wealthy, not by inflation but by
production.]
Such questions are after all not so simple as they may seem. It is not
altogether clear that such a reversal of the conditions from the start
would have been of unmixed benefit to the English and Dutch. After
the five thousand millions had been scattered to the winds, altering
the purchasing power of money in all directions, it was Spain that
was impoverished while her adversaries were growing rich and strong.
A century of such unproductive expenditure went far toward completing
the industrial ruin of Spain, already begun in the last Moorish wars,
and afterward consummated by the expulsion of the Moriscos. The Spanish
discovery of America abundantly illustrates the truths that if gold
were to become as plentiful as iron it would be worth much less than
iron, and that it is not inflation but production that makes a nation
wealthy. In so far as the discovery of America turned men's minds from
steady industry to gold-hunting, it was a dangerous source of weakness
to Spain; and it was probably just as well for England that the work of
Cortes and Pizarro was not done for her.
[Sidenote: Deepest significance of the discovery of America.]
But the great historic fact, most conspicuous among the consequences of
the discovery of America, is the fact that colonial empire, for England
and for Holland, grew directly out of the long war in which Spain used
American and East Indian treasure with which to subdue the English and
Dutch peoples and to suppress the principles of civil and religious
liberty which they represented. The Dutch tore away from Spain the
best part of her East Indian empire, and the glorious Elizabethan sea
kings, who began the work of crippling Philip II. in America, led the
way directly to the English colonization of Virginia. Thus we are
introduced to the most important aspect of the discovery of America.
It opened up a fresh soil, enormous in extent and capacity, for the
possession of which the lower and higher types of European civilization
and social polity were to struggle. In this new arena the maritime
peoples of western Europe fought for supremacy; and the conquest of so
vast a field has given to the ideas of the victorious people, and to
their type of social polity, an unprecedented opportunity for growth
and development. Sundry sturdy European ideas, transplanted into
this western soil, have triumphed over all competitors and thriven
so mightily as to react upon all parts of the Old World, some more,
some less, and thus to modify the whole course of civilization. This
is the deepest significance of the discovery of America; and a due
appreciation of it gives to our history from its earliest stages an
epic grandeur, as the successive situations unfold themselves and
events with unmistakable emphasis record their moral. In the conflict
of Titans that absorbed the energies of the sixteenth century, the
question whether it should be the world of Calderon or the world of
Shakespeare that was to gain indefinite power of future expansion was a
question of incalculable importance to mankind.
The beginnings of the history of English-speaking America are thus to
be sought in the history of the antagonism between Spain and England
that grew out of the circumstances of the Protestant Reformation. It
was as the storehouse of the enemy's treasure and the chief source of
his supplies that America first excited real interest among the English
people.
[Sidenote: Voyages of the Cabots.]
English ships had indeed crossed the Atlantic many years before this
warfare broke out. The example set by Columbus had been promptly
followed by John Cabot and his young son Sebastian, in the two
memorable voyages of 1497 and 1498, but the interest aroused by those
voyages was very short-lived. In later days it suited the convenience
of England to cite them in support of her claim to priority in
the discovery of the continent of North America; but many years
elapsed before the existence of any such continent was distinctly
known and before England cared to put forth any such claim. All that
contemporaries could see was that the Cabots had sailed westward
in search of the boundless treasures of Cathay, and had come home
empty-handed without finding any of the cities described by Marco
Polo or meeting any civilized men. So little work was found for
Sebastian Cabot that he passed into the service of Spain, and turned
his attention to voyages in the South Atlantic. Such scanty record was
kept of the voyages of 1497 and 1498 that we cannot surely tell what
land the Cabots first saw; whether it was the bleak coast of northern
Labrador or some point as far south as Cape Breton is still a matter of
dispute. The case was almost the same as with the voyage of Pinzon and
Vespucius, whose ships were off Cape Honduras within a day or two after
Cabot's northern landfall, and who, after a sojourn at Tampico, passed
between Cuba and Florida at the end of April, 1498. In the one case, as
in the other, the expeditions sank into obscurity because they found no
gold.
[Sidenote: The Newfoundland fisheries.]
The triumphant return of Gama from Hindustan, in the summer of 1499,
turned all men's eyes to southern routes, and little heed was paid to
the wild inhospitable shores visited by John Cabot and his son. The
sole exception to the general neglect was the case of the fisheries on
the banks of Newfoundland. From the beginning of the sixteenth century
European vessels came almost yearly to catch fish there, but at first
Englishmen took little or no part in this, for they had long been wont
to get their fish in the waters about Iceland, and it took them some
years to make the change. On the bright August day of 1527 when Master
John Rut sailed into the bay of St. John, in Newfoundland, he found two
Portuguese, one Breton, and eleven Norman ships fishing there. Basques
also came frequently to the spot. Down to that time it is not likely
that the thought of the western shores of the Atlantic entered the
heads of Englishmen more frequently than the thought of the Antarctic
continent, discovered sixty years ago, enters the heads of men in
Boston to-day.
[Sidenote: Earliest English references to America.]
The lack of general interest in maritime discovery is shown by the
fact that down to 1576, so far as we can make out, only twelve books
upon the subject had been published in England, and these were in
great part translations of works published in other countries. The
earliest indisputable occurrence of the name America in any printed
English document is in a play called "A new interlude and a mery of the
nature of the iiii elements," which was probably published in 1519.[5]
About the same time there appeared from an Antwerp press a small book
entitled "Of the newe landes and of y^e people found by the messengers
of the Kynge of Portugal;" in it occurs the name _Armenica_, which is
probably a misprint for America, since the account of it is evidently
taken from the account which Vespucius gives of the natives of Brazil,
and in its earliest use the name America was practically equivalent to
Brazil. With the exception of a dim allusion to Columbus in Sebastian
Brandt's "Ship of Fools," these are the only references to the New
World that have been found in English literature previous to 1553.
[Sidenote: The Muscovy Company.]
[Sidenote: Richard Eden.]
The youthful Edward VI., who died that year, had succeeded in recalling
Sebastian Cabot from Spain, and under the leadership of that navigator
was formed the joint-stock company quaintly entitled, "The Mysterie and
Companie of the Merchant Adventurers for the Discoverie of Regions,
Dominions, Islands, and Places unknown." It was the first of that
series of sagacious and daring combinations of capital of which the
East India Company has been the most famous. It was afterwards more
briefly known as the Muscovy Company. Under its auspices, on the
21st of May, 1553, an English fleet of exploration, under Sir Hugh
Willoughby, set sail down the Thames while the cheers of thronging
citizens were borne through the windows of the palace at Greenwich to
the ears of the sick young king. The ill-fated expedition, seeking a
northeasterly passage to Cathay, was wrecked on the coast of Lapland,
and only one of the ships got home, but the interest in maritime
adventure grew rapidly. A few days before Edward's death, Richard Eden
published his "Treatyse of the Newe India," which was largely devoted
to the discoveries in America. Two years later, in 1555, Eden followed
this by his "Decades of the Newe World," in great part a version of
Peter Martyr's Latin. This delightful book for the first time made the
English people acquainted with the results of maritime discovery in all
quarters since the great voyage of 1492. It enjoyed a wide popularity;
poets and dramatists of the next generation read it in their boyhood
and found their horizon wondrously enlarged. In its pages doubtless
Shakespeare found the name of that Patagonian deity Setebos, which
Caliban twice lets fall from his grotesque lips. Three years after
Eden's second book saw the light the long reign of Queen Elizabeth
began, and with it the antagonism, destined year by year to wax more
violent and deadly, between England and Spain.
[Sidenote: John Hawkins and the African slave-trade.]
Meanwhile English mariners had already taken a hand in the African
slave-trade, which since 1442 had been monopolized by the Portuguese.
It is always difficult to say with entire confidence just who first
began anything, but William Hawkins, an enterprising merchant of
Plymouth, made a voyage on the Guinea coast as early as 1530, or
earlier, and carried away a few slaves. It was his son, the famous
Captain John Hawkins, who became the real founder of the English trade
in slaves. In this capacity Americans have little reason to remember
his name with pleasure, yet it would be a grave mistake to visit him
with unmeasured condemnation. Few sturdier defenders of political
freedom for white men have ever existed, and among the valiant sea
kings who laid the foundations of England's maritime empire he was one
of the foremost. It is worthy of notice that Queen Elizabeth regarded
the opening of the slave-trade as an achievement worthy of honourable
commemoration, for when she made Hawkins a knight she gave him for
a crest the device of a negro's head and bust with the arms tightly
pinioned, or, in the language of heraldry, "a demi-Moor proper bound
with a cord." Public opinion on the subject of slavery was neatly
expressed by Captain Lok, who declared that the negroes were "a people
of beastly living, without God, law, religion, or commonwealth,"[6]
so that he deemed himself their benefactor in carrying them off to a
Christian land where their bodies might be decently clothed and their
souls made fit for heaven. Exactly three centuries after Captain Lok,
in the decade preceding our Civil War, I used to hear the very same
defence of slavery preached in a Connecticut pulpit; so that perhaps we
are not entitled to frown too severely upon Elizabeth's mariners. It
takes men a weary while to learn the wickedness of anything that puts
gold in their purses.
[Sidenote: Hawkins and Laudonnière.]
It was in 1562 that John Hawkins made his first famous expedition to
the coast of Guinea, where he took three hundred slaves and carried
them over to San Domingo. It was illicit traffic, of course, but the
Spanish planters and miners were too much in need of cheap labour to
scrutinize too jealously the source from which it was offered. The
Englishman found no difficulty in selling his negroes, and sailed
for home with his three ships loaded with sugar and ginger, hides
and pearls. The profits were large, and in 1564 the experiment was
repeated with still greater success. On the way home, early in August,
1565, Hawkins stopped at the mouth of the St. John's River in Florida,
and found there a woebegone company of starving Frenchmen. They were
the party of René de Laudonnière, awaiting the return of their chief
commander, Jean Ribaut, from France. Their presence on that shore was
the first feeble expression of the master thought that in due course of
time originated the United States of America, and the author of that
master thought was the great Admiral Coligny. The Huguenot wars had
lately broken out in France, but already that far-sighted statesman
had seen the commercial and military advantages to be gained by
founding a Protestant state in America. After an unsuccessful attempt
upon the coast of Brazil, he had sent Jean Ribaut to Florida, and the
little colony was now suffering the frightful hardships that were the
lot of most new-comers into the American wilderness. Hawkins treated
these poor Frenchmen with great kindness, and his visit with them was
pleasant. He has left an interesting account of the communal house of
the Indians in the neighbourhood, an immense barn-like frame house,
with stanchions and rafters of untrimmed logs, and a roof thatched
with palmetto leaves. Hawkins liked the flavour of Indian meal, and
in his descriptions of the ways of cooking it one easily recognizes
both "hasty pudding" and hoe-cake. He thought it would have been more
prudent in the Frenchmen if they had raised corn for themselves
instead of stealing it from the Indians and arousing a dangerous
hostility. For liquid refreshment they had been thrown upon their own
resources, and had contrived to make a thousand gallons or more of
claret from the native grapes of the country. A letter of John Winthrop
reminds us that the Puritan settlers of Boston in their first summer
also made wine of wild grapes,[7] and according to Adam of Bremen
the same thing was done by the Northmen in Vinland in the eleventh
century,[8] showing that in one age and clime as well as in another
thirst is the mother of invention.
[Sidenote: Massacre of Huguenots: the painter Le Moine.]
As the Frenchmen were on the verge of despair, Hawkins left them one of
his ships in which to return to France, but he had scarcely departed
when the long expected Ribaut arrived with reinforcements, and soon
after him came that terrible Spaniard, Menendez, who butchered the
whole company, men, women, and children, about 700 Huguenots in all.
Some half dozen escaped and were lucky enough to get picked up by
a friendly ship and carried to England. Among them was the painter
Le Moine, who became a friend of Sir Philip Sidney, and aroused
much interest with his drawings of American beasts, birds, trees,
and flowers. The story of the massacre awakened fierce indignation.
Hostility to Spain was rapidly increasing in England, and the idea of
Coligny began to be entertained by a few sagacious heads. If France
could not plant a Protestant state in America, perhaps England could.
A little later we find Le Moine consulted by the gifted half-brothers,
Humphrey Gilbert and Walter Raleigh.
[Sidenote: Francis Drake.]
[Sidenote: The affair of San Juan de Ulua.]
Meanwhile, in 1567, the gallant Hawkins went on an eventful voyage,
with five stout ships, one of which was commanded by a very capable and
well educated young man, afterwards and until Nelson's time celebrated
as the greatest of English seamen. Francis Drake was a native of
Devonshire, son of a poor clergyman who had been molested for holding
Protestant opinions. The young sea king had already gathered experience
in the West Indies and on the Spanish Main; this notable voyage taught
him the same kind of feeling toward Spaniards that Hannibal cherished
toward Romans. After the usual traffic among the islands the little
squadron was driven by stress of weather to seek shelter in the port
of San Juan de Ulua, at the present site of Vera Cruz. There was
no force there fit to resist Hawkins, and it is droll to find that
pious hero, such a man of psalms and prayers, pluming himself upon
his virtue in not seizing some Spanish ships in the harbour laden
with what we should call five million dollars' worth of silver. The
next day a fleet of thirteen ships from Spain arrived upon the scene.
Hawkins could perhaps have kept them from entering the harbour, but
he shrank from the responsibility of bringing on a battle in time of
peace; the queen might disapprove of it. So Hawkins parleyed with the
Spaniards, a solemn covenant of mutual forbearance was made and sworn
to, and he let them into the harbour. But the orthodox Catholic of
those days sometimes entertained peculiar views about keeping faith
with heretics. Had not his Holiness Alexander VI. given all this
New World to Spain? Poachers must be warned off; the Huguenots had
learned a lesson in Florida, and it was now the Englishmen's turn.
So Hawkins was treacherously attacked, and after a desperate combat,
in which fireships were used, three of his vessels were destroyed.
The other two got out to sea, but with so scanty a larder that the
crews were soon glad to eat cats and dogs, rats and mice, and boiled
parrots. It became necessary to set 114 men ashore somewhere to the
north of Tampico. Some of these men took northeasterly trails, and
mostly perished in the woods, but David Ingram and two companions
actually made their way across the continent and after eleven months
were picked up on the coast of Nova Scotia by a friendly French vessel
and taken back to Europe. About seventy, led by Anthony Goddard, less
prudently marched toward the city of Mexico, and fell into the clutches
of the Inquisition; three were burned at the stake and all the rest
were cruelly flogged and sent to the galleys for life. When the news
of this affair reached England a squadron of Spanish treasure-ships,
chased into the Channel by Huguenot cruisers, had just sought refuge
in English harbours, and the queen detained them in reprisal for the
injury done to Hawkins.
[Sidenote: Growing hostility to Spain in England.]
News had lately arrived of the bloody vengeance wreaked by Dominique de
Gourgues upon the Spaniards in Florida, while the cruelties of Alva
were fast goading the Netherlands into rebellion. Next year, 1570, on
a fresh May morning, the Papal Bull "declaring Elizabeth deposed and
her subjects absolved from their allegiance was found nailed against
the Bishop of London's door,"[9] and when the rash young gentleman who
had put it there was discovered he was taken back to that doorstep
and quartered alive. Two years later came the Paris Matins on the day
of St. Bartholomew, and the English ambassador openly gave shelter
to Huguenots in his house. Elizabeth's policy leaned more and more
decidedly toward defiance of the Catholic powers until it culminated
in alliance with the revolted Netherlands in January, 1578. Meanwhile
the interest in America quickly increased. Those were the years when
Martin Frobisher made his glorious voyages in the Arctic Ocean, soon to
be followed by John Davis. Almost yearly Drake crossed the Atlantic and
more than once attacked and ravaged the Spanish settlements in revenge
for the treachery at San Juan de Ulua. Books and pamphlets about
America began to come somewhat frequently from the press.
[Sidenote: Size and strength of Elizabeth's England.]
[Sidenote: How the sea became England's field of war.]
It is worth our while here to pause for a moment and remark upon
the size and strength of the nation that was so soon to contend
successfully for the mastery of the sea. There is something so dazzling
in the brilliancy of the age of Queen Bess, it is so crowded with
romantic incidents, it fills so large a place in our minds, that we
hardly realize how small England then was according to modern standards
of measurement. Two centuries earlier, in the reign of Edward III., the
population of England had reached about 5,000,000, when the Black Death
at one fell swoop destroyed at least half the number. In Elizabeth's
time the loss had just about been repaired. Her England was therefore
slightly less populous, and it was surely far less wealthy, than either
New York or Pennsylvania in 1890. The Dutch Netherlands had perhaps
somewhat fewer people than England, but surpassed her in wealth. These
two allies were pitted against the greatest military power that had
existed in Europe since the days of Constantine the Great. To many
the struggle seemed hopeless. For England the true policy was limited
by circumstances. She could send troops across the Channel to help
the Dutch in their stubborn resistance, but to try to land a force in
the Spanish peninsula for aggressive warfare would be sheer madness.
The shores of America and the open sea were the proper field of war
for England. Her task was to paralyze the giant by cutting off his
supplies, and in this there was hope of success, for no defensive
fleet, however large, could watch all Philip's enormous possessions
at once. The English navy, first permanently organized under Henry
VIII., grew rapidly in Elizabeth's reign under the direction of her
incomparable seamen; and the policy she adopted was crowned with such
success that Philip II. lived to see his treasury bankrupt.
[Sidenote: Loose ideas of international law.]
[Sidenote: Bold advice to Elizabeth.]
This policy was gradually adopted soon after the fight at San Juan
de Ulua, and long before there was any declaration of war. The
extreme laxness of that age, in respect of international law, made it
possible for such things to go on to an extent that now seems scarcely
comprehensible. The wholesale massacre of Frenchmen in Florida, for
example, occurred at a time of profound peace between France and
Spain, and reprisal was made, not by the French government but by a
private gentleman who had to sell his ancestral estate to raise the
money. It quite suited Elizabeth's tortuous policy, in contending
against formidable odds, to be able either to assume or to disclaim
responsibility for the deeds of her captains. Those brave men well
understood the situation, and with earnest patriotism and chivalrous
loyalty not only accepted it, but even urged the queen to be allowed
to serve her interests at their own risk. In a letter handed to her in
November, 1577, the writer begs to be allowed to destroy all Spanish
ships caught fishing on the banks of Newfoundland, and adds, "If you
will let us first do this we will next take the West Indies from Spain.
You will have the gold and silver mines and the profit of the soil.
You will be monarch of the seas and out of danger from every one. I
will do it if you will allow me; only you must resolve and not delay
or dally--the wings of man's life are plumed with the feathers of
death."[10] The signature to this bold letter has been obliterated, but
it sounds like Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and is believed to be his.
[Sidenote: The sea kings were not buccaneers.]
In connection with this it should be remembered that neither in England
nor elsewhere at that time had the navy become fully a national
affair as at present. It was to a considerable extent supported by
private speculation, and as occasion required a commercial voyage
or a voyage of discovery might be suddenly transformed into a naval
campaign. A flavour of buccaneering pervades nearly all the maritime
operations of that age and often leads modern writers to misunderstand
or misjudge them. Thus it sometimes happens that so excellent a man
as Sir Francis Drake, whose fame is forever a priceless possession
for English-speaking people, is mentioned in popular books as a mere
corsair, a kind of gentleman pirate. Nothing could show a more hopeless
confusion of ideas. In a later generation the warfare characteristic
of the Elizabethan age degenerated into piracy, and when Spain, fallen
from her greatness, became a prey to the spoiler, a swarm of buccaneers
infested the West Indies and added another hideous chapter to the lurid
history of those beautiful islands. They were mere robbers, and had
nothing in common with the Elizabethan heroes except courage. From the
deeds of Drake and Hawkins to the deeds of Henry Morgan, the moral
distance is as great as from slaying your antagonist in battle to
murdering your neighbour for his purse.
[Sidenote: Why Drake carried the war into the Pacific Ocean.]
It was Drake who first put into practice the policy of weakening Philip
II. by attacking him in America. It served the direct purpose of
destroying the sinews of war, and indirectly it neutralized for Europe
some of Spain's naval strength by diverting it into American waters
for self-defence. To do such work most effectively it seemed desirable
to carry the warfare into the Pacific Ocean. The circumstances of its
discovery had made Spanish America almost more of a Pacific than an
Atlantic power. The discoverers happened to approach the great double
continent where it is narrowest, and the hunt for precious metals soon
drew them to the Cordilleras and their western slopes. The mountain
region, with its untold treasures of gold and silver, from New Mexico
to Bolivia, became theirs. In acquiring it they simply stepped into the
place of the aboriginal conquering tribes, and carried on their work
of conquest to completion. The new rulers conducted the government by
their own Spanish methods, and the white race was superposed upon a
more or less dense native population. There was no sort of likeness to
colonies planted by England, but there were some points of resemblance
to the position of the English in recent times as a ruling race in
Hindustan. Such was the kind of empire which Spain had founded in
America. Its position, chiefly upon the Pacific coast, rendered it
secure against English conquest, though not against occasional damaging
attacks. In South America, where it reached back in one or two remote
points to the Atlantic coast, the chief purpose was to protect the
approach to the silver mines of Bolivia by the open route of the river
La Plata. It was this military need that was met by the growth of
Buenos Ayres and the settlements in Paraguay, guarding the entrance
and the lower reaches of the great silver river.
[Sidenote: Drake upon a peak in Darien.]
[Sidenote: Voyage of the Golden Hind.]
[Sidenote: A noble banquet room.]
Soon after the affair of San Juan de Ulua, Drake conceived the idea of
striking at this Spanish domain upon its unguarded Pacific side. In
1573, after marching across the isthmus of Darien, the English mariner
stood upon a mountain peak, not far from where Balboa sixty years
before had stood and looked down upon the waste of waters stretching
away to shores unvisited and under stars unknown. And as he looked,
says Camden, "vehemently transported with desire to navigate that sea,
he fell upon his knees and implored the divine assistance that he might
at some time sail thither and make a perfect discovery of the same." On
the 15th of November, 1577, Drake set sail from Plymouth, on this hardy
enterprise, with five good ships. It was a curious coincidence that in
the following July and August, while wintering on the Patagonia coast
at Port St. Julian, Drake should have discovered symptoms of conspiracy
and felt obliged to behead one of his officers, as had been the case
with Magellan at the same place. By the time he had passed the straits
in his flagship, the Golden Hind,[11] he had quite lost sight of his
consorts, who had deserted him in that watery labyrinth, as Gomez had
stolen away from Magellan. For men of common mould a voyage in the
remote South Sea still had its terrors; but the dauntless captain
kept on with his single ship of twenty guns, and from Valparaiso
northward along the Peruvian coast dashed into seaports and captured
vessels, carrying away enormous treasures in gold and silver and
jewels, besides such provisions as were needed for his crew. With other
property he meddled but little, and no acts of wanton cruelty sullied
his performances. After taking plunder worth millions of dollars,
this corsair-work gave place to scientific discovery, and the Golden
Hind sailed far northward in search of a northeast passage into the
Atlantic. Drake visited a noble bay, which may have been that of San
Francisco, and sailed some distance along that coast, which he called
New Albion. It is probable, though not quite certain, that he saw some
portion of the coast of Oregon. Not finding any signs of a northeast
passage, he turned his prow westward, crossed the Pacific, and
returned home by way of the Cape of Good Hope, arriving at Plymouth in
September, 1580. Some time afterward he went up the Thames to Deptford,
where the queen came to dinner on board the Golden Hind, and knighted
on his own quarter-deck the bold captain who had first carried the
English flag around the world. The enthusiastic chronicler Holinshed
wished that in memory of this grand achievement the ship should be
set upon the top of St. Paul's Cathedral, "that being discerned farre
and neere, it might be noted and pointed at of people with these
true termes: Yonder is the barke that hath sailed round about the
world."[12] A different career awaited the sturdy Golden Hind; for
many a year she was kept at Deptford, a worthy object of popular
admiration, and her cabin was made into a banquet room wherein young
and old might partake of the mutton and ale of merry England; until at
last, when the venerable ship herself had succumbed to the tooth of
Time, a capacious chair was carved from her timbers and presented to
the University of Oxford, where it may still be seen in the Bodleian
Library. In it sat Abraham Cowley when he wrote the poem in which occur
the following verses:--
"Drake and his ship could not have wished from Fate
A happier station or more blest estate.
For lo! a seat of endless rest is given
To her in Oxford and to him in heaven."
[Sidenote: Voyage of Gilbert and Raleigh.]
[Sidenote: Shipwreck of Gilbert.]
Meanwhile in the autumn of 1578, while the coasts of Chili were
echoing the roar of the Golden Hind's cannon, a squadron of seven
ships sailed from England, with intent to found a permanent colony on
the Atlantic coast of North America. Its captain was one of the most
eminent of Devonshire worthies, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and one of the
ships was commanded by his half-brother, Walter Raleigh, a young man
of six-and-twenty who had lately returned from volunteer service in
the Netherlands. The destination of the voyage was "Norumbega," which
may have meant any place between the Hudson and Penobscot rivers, but
was conceived with supreme vagueness, as may be seen from Michael
Lok's map of 1582.[13] This little fleet had at least one savage
fight with Spaniards, and returned to Plymouth without accomplishing
anything. In 1583 Gilbert sought a favourable place for settlement on
the southern coast of Newfoundland, probably with a view to driving the
Spaniards away from the fishing grounds, but an ill fate overtook him.
On the American coast his principal vessel crushed its bows against a
sunken rock and nearly all hands were lost. With two small ships the
captain soon set sail for home, but his own tiny craft foundered in a
terrible storm near Fayal. As she sank, Gilbert cheerily shouted over
the tafferel to his consort, "The way to heaven is as near by sea as
by land," a speech, says his chronicler, "well beseeming a soldier
resolute in Jesus Christ, as I can testify he was."
[Sidenote: Gilbert's patent granted to Raleigh.]
It was not Raleigh's fault that he did not share the fate of his
revered half-brother, for the queen's mind had been full of forebodings
and she had refused to let him go on the voyage. It was since the
former disastrous expedition that Raleigh had so quickly risen in
favour at court; that he had thrown down his velvet cloak as a mat for
Elizabeth's feet and had written on a window-pane the well-known verse
which that royal coquette so cleverly capped. He became Captain of the
Queen's Guard and Lord Warden of the Stannaries, and was presented with
the confiscated estates of traitors in England and Ireland. In 1584,
when his late half-brother's patent for land in America expired, it
was renewed in Raleigh's name. On March 25th was sealed the document
that empowered him to "hold by homage remote heathen and barbarous
lands, not actually possessed by any Christian prince, nor inhabited
by Christian people, which he might discover within the next six
years."[14] As had been the custom with Spanish and Portuguese grants
to explorers, one fifth of the gold and silver to be obtained was
to be reserved for the crown. The heathen and barbarous land which
Raleigh had in view was the Atlantic coast of North America so far as
he might succeed in occupying it. He knew that Spain claimed it all as
her own by virtue of the bull of Pope Alexander VI., but Elizabeth had
already declared in 1581 that she cared nothing for papal bulls and
would recognize no Spanish claims to America save such as were based
upon discovery followed by actual possession.[15] Raleigh's attention
had long been turned toward Florida. In youth he had served in France
under Coligny, and had opportunities for hearing that statesman's plan
for founding a Protestant state in America discussed. We have seen
Le Moine, the French artist who escaped from the Florida massacre,
consorting with Raleigh and with Sir Philip Sidney. Upon those men fell
the mantle of Coligny, and the people of the United States may well be
proud to point to such noble figures standing upon the threshold of our
history.
[Sidenote: Promise of self-government.]
One provision in the Gilbert patent, now renewed for Raleigh, is worth
especial mention. It was agreed that the English colonies which should
be planted in America "should have all the privileges of free denizens
and persons native of England, in such ample manner as if they were
born and personally resident in our said realm of England," and that
any law to the contrary should be of no effect; furthermore, that the
people of those colonies should be governed by such statutes as they
might choose to establish for themselves, provided that such statutes
"conform as near as conveniently may be with those of England, and do
not oppugn the Christian faith, or anyway withdraw the people of those
lands from our allegiance." A more unequivocal acknowledgment of the
rights of self-government which a British government of two centuries
later saw fit to ignore, it would be hard to find. Gilbert and Raleigh
demanded and Elizabeth granted in principle just what Patrick Henry and
Samuel Adams demanded and George III. refused to concede.
[Sidenote: Voyage of Amidas and Barlow, 1584.]
The wealthy Raleigh could act promptly, and before five weeks had
elapsed two ships, commanded by Philip Amidas and Arthur Barlow, had
started on a reconnoitring voyage. On the 4th of July, 1584, they
reached the country now known as North Carolina, at some point not
far from Cape Lookout. Thence a northerly run of over a hundred miles
brought them to the New Inlet, through which they passed into Pamlico
Sound and visited Roanoke Island. They admired the noble pine-trees
and red cedars, marvelled at the abundance of game, and found the
native barbarians polite and friendly. Their attempt to learn the
name of the country resulted as not uncommonly in such first parleys
between strange tongues. The Indian of whom the question was asked had
no idea what was meant and uttered at random the Ollendorfian reply,
"Win-gan-da-coa," which signified, "What pretty clothes you wear!" So
when Amidas and Barlow returned to England they said they had visited a
country by the name of Wingandacoa; but the queen, with a touch of the
euphuism then so fashionable, suggested that it should be called, in
honour of herself, Virginia.
[Sidenote: Ralph Lane's expedition, 1585.]
[Sidenote: Rescue of Lane by Sir Francis "the Dragon."]
In the spring of 1585 Raleigh, who had lately been knighted, sent out
a hundred or more men commanded by Ralph Lane, to make the beginnings
of a settlement. They were convoyed by Raleigh's cousin, Sir Richard
Grenville, with seven well-armed ships. They entered Pamlico Sound
through Ocracoke Inlet, and trouble with the natives at once began. One
of the Indians stole a silver cup, and Grenville unwisely retaliated
by setting fire to their standing corn. Having thus sown the seeds of
calamity he set the colonists ashore upon Roanoke Island and went on
his way. The sagacious and energetic Lane explored the neighbouring
mainland for many miles along the coast and for some distance into the
interior, and even tried to find a waterway into the Pacific Ocean. He
made up his mind that the country was not favourable for a new colony,
and he gathered sundry bits of information which seemed to point to
Chesapeake Bay as a much better place. The angry Indians made much
trouble, and after a year had passed the colonists were suffering from
scarcity of food, when all at once Sir Francis Drake appeared on the
scene with a superb fleet of three-and-twenty ships. War between Spain
and England had been declared in July, 1585, when Sidney and Drake
were about ready to execute a scheme that contemplated the founding
of an American colony by Sidney. But the queen interfered and sent
Sidney to the Netherlands, where he was so soon to die a noble death.
The terrible Drake, whom Spaniards, punning upon his name, had begun
to call "Dragon," gave them fresh cause to dread and revile him.
He had captured 20 ships with 250 cannon, he had taken and sacked
Cartagena, St. Domingo, and St. Augustine, and on his way home looked
in at Roanoke Island, in time to take Lane and his starving party on
board and carry them back to England. They had not long been gone
when Grenville arrived with supplies, and was astonished at finding
the island deserted. Knowing nothing of Lane's change of purpose,
and believing that his party must still be somewhere in the adjacent
country, Grenville left a guard of fifteen men on the island, with
ample supplies, and sailed away.
[Sidenote: Cavendish's voyage around the world, 1586-88.]
[Sidenote: Drake "singes the beard" of Philip II.]
The stirring days of the Armada were approaching. When Lane arrived
in England, his services were needed there, and after a while we
find him a member of the Council of War. One of this first American
colonizing party was the wonderful Suffolk boy, Thomas Cavendish,
aged two-and-twenty, who had no sooner landed in England than he
set sail in command of three ships, made his way into the Pacific
Ocean, and repeated the exploits of Drake from Chili to California,
captured one of Spain's finest galleons, and then in two years more
completed the circumnavigation of the globe. While the pupil was thus
nobly acquitting himself, the master in the spring of 1587 outdid all
former achievements. Sailing into the harbour of Cadiz, Drake defeated
the warships on guard there, calmly loaded his own vessels with as
much Spanish spoil as could safely be carried, then set fire to the
storeships and cut their cables. More than a hundred transports, some
of them 1,500 tons in burthen, all laden with stores for the Armada,
became a tangled and drifting mass of blazing ruin, while amid the
thunder of exploding magazines the victor went forth on his way
unscathed and rejoicing. Day after day he crouched under the beetling
crags of Cintra, catching and sinking every craft that passed that
lair, then swept like a tempest into the bay of Coruña and wrought
similar havoc to that of Cadiz, then stood off for the Azores and
captured the great carrack on its way from the Indies with treasure
reckoned by millions. Europe stood dumb with amazement. What manner of
man was it that could thus "singe the King of Spain's beard"? "Philip
one day invited a lady of the court to join him in his barge on the
Lake of Segovia. The lady said she dared not trust herself on the
water, even with his Majesty," for fear of Sir Francis Drake.[16]
Philip's Armada had to wait for another year, while by night and day
the music of adze and hammer was heard in English shipyards.
[Sidenote: White's colony on Roanoke Island, 1587.]
Just as "the Dragon" returned to England another party of Raleigh's
colonists was approaching the American coast. There were about 150,
including 17 women. John White, a man deft with water-colours, who
had been the artist of Lane's expedition, was their governor. Their
settlement was to be made on the shore of Chesapeake Bay, but first
they must stop at Roanoke Island and pick up the fifteen men left on
watch by Grenville. Through some carelessness or misunderstanding or
bad faith on the part of the convoy, the people once landed were left
in the lurch with only one small vessel, and thus were obliged to
stay on that fatal Roanoke Island. They soon found that Grenville's
little guard had been massacred by red men. It was under these gloomy
circumstances that the first child of English parents was born on the
soil of the United States. The governor's daughter Eleanor was wife
of Ananias Dare, and their little girl, born August 18, 1587, was
named Virginia. Before she was ten days old her grandfather found it
necessary to take the ship and return to England for help.
[Sidenote: The Invincible Armada, 1588.]
But the day of judgment for Spain and England was at hand, and lesser
things must wait. Amid the turmoil of military preparation, Sir Walter
was not unmindful of his little colony. Twice he fitted out relief
expeditions, but the first was stopped because all the ships were
seized for government service, and the second was driven back into
port by Spanish cruisers. While the anxious governor waited through
the lengthening days into the summer of 1588, there came, with its
imperious haste, its deadly agony and fury, its world-astounding
triumph, the event most tremendous, perhaps, that mankind have
witnessed since the star of the Wise Men stood over the stable at
Bethlehem. Then you might have seen the sea kings working in good
fellowship together,--Drake and Hawkins, Winter and Frobisher, with
Howard of Effingham in the Channel fleet; Raleigh and Grenville active
alike in council and afield; the two great ministers, Burghley and
Walsingham, ever crafty and vigilant; and in the background on her
white palfrey the eccentric figure of the strangely wayward and wilful
but always brave and patriotic Queen. Even after three centuries it is
with bated breath that we watch those 130 black hulks coming up the
Channel, with 3,000 cannon and 30,000 men on board, among them ninety
executioners withal, equipped with racks and thumbscrews, to inaugurate
on English soil the accursed work of the Inquisition. In camp at
Dunkirk the greatest general of the age, Alexander Farnese, with 35,000
veterans is crouching for a spring, like a still greater general at
Boulogne in later days; and one wonders if the 80,000 raw militia
slowly mustering in the busy little towns and green hamlets of England
can withstand these well-trained warriors.
[Sidenote: Defeat of the Invincible Armada.]
[Sidenote: Battle of Cadiz, 1596.]
In the English fleet there were about as many ships as the enemy
had, much smaller in size and inferior in weight of metal, but at the
same time far more nimble in movement. Of cannon and men the English
had scarcely half as many as the Spaniards, but this disparity was
more than offset by one great advantage. Our forefathers had already
begun to display the inventive ingenuity for which their descendants
in both hemispheres have since become preëminent. Many of their ships
were armed with new guns, of longer range than any hitherto known,
and this advantage, combined with their greater nimbleness, made it
possible in many cases to pound a Spanish ship to pieces without
receiving any serious hurt in return. In such respects, as well as in
the seamanship by which the two fleets were handled, it was modern
intelligence pitted against mediæval chivalry. Such captains as served
Elizabeth were not reared under the blighting shadow of the Escurial.
With the discomfiture of the Invincible Armada before Dunkirk, the
army of Farnese at once became useless for invading England. Then came
the awful discovery that the mighty fleet was penned up in the German
Ocean, for Drake held the Strait of Dover in his iron grip. The horrors
of the long retreat through northern seas have never been equalled
save when Napoleon's hosts were shattered in Russia. In the disparity
of losses, as in the immensity of the issues at stake, we are reminded
of the Greeks and Persians at Salamis; of Spaniards more than 20,000
perished, but scarcely 100 Englishmen. The frightful loss of ships and
guns announced the overthrow of Spanish supremacy, but the bitter
end was yet to come. During the next three years the activity of the
sea kings reached such a pitch that more than 800 Spanish ships were
destroyed.[17] The final blow came soon after the deaths of Drake and
Hawkins in 1596, when Raleigh, with the Earl of Essex and Lord Thomas
Howard, destroyed the Spanish fleet in that great battle before Cadiz
whereof Raleigh wrote that "if any man had a desire to see Hell itself,
it was there most lively figured."[18]
[Sidenote: Mystery of the fate of White's colony.]
It was not until March, 1591, that Governor White succeeded in getting
to sea again for the rescue of his family and friends. He had to go
as passenger in a West Indiaman. When he landed, upon the return
voyage, at Roanoke Island, it was just in time to have celebrated his
little grandchild's fourth birthday. It had been agreed that should
the colonists leave that spot they should carve upon a tree the name
of the place to which they were going, and if they should add to the
name a cross it would be understood as a signal of distress. When
White arrived he found grass growing in the deserted blockhouse. Under
the cedars hard by five chests had been buried, and somebody had
afterwards dug them up and rifled them. Fragments of his own books and
pictures lay scattered about. On a great tree was cut in big letters,
but without any cross, the word CROATAN, which was the name of a
neighbouring island. The captain of the ship was at first willing
to take White to Croatan, but a fierce storm overtook him and after
beating about for some days he insisted upon making for England in
spite of the poor man's entreaties. No more did White ever hear of his
loved ones. Sixteen years afterward the settlers at Jamestown were told
by Indians that the white people abandoned at Roanoke had mingled with
the natives and lived with them for some years on amicable terms until
at the instigation of certain medicine-men (who probably accused them
of witchcraft) they had all been murdered, except four men, two boys,
and a young woman, who were spared by request or order of a chief.
Whether this young woman was Virginia Dare, the first American girl, we
have no means of knowing.[19]
[Sidenote: Significance of the defeat of the Armada.]
Nothing could better illustrate than the pathetic fate of this little
colony how necessary it was to destroy the naval power of Spain before
England could occupy the soil of North America. The defeat of the
Invincible Armada was the opening event in the history of the United
States. It was the event that made all the rest possible. Without it
the attempts at Jamestown and Plymouth could hardly have had more
success than the attempt at Roanoke Island. An infant colony is like
an army at the end of a long line of communications; it perishes if
the line is cut. Before England could plant thriving states in America
she must control the ocean routes. The far-sighted Raleigh understood
the conditions of the problem. When he smote the Spaniards at Cadiz he
knew it was a blow struck for America. He felt the full significance of
the defeat of the Armada, and in spite of all his disappointments with
Virginia, he never lost heart. In 1602 he wrote to Sir Robert Cecil, "I
shall yet live to see it an English nation."
In the following chapters we shall see how Raleigh's brave words came
true.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] E. E. Hale, in _Proc. Amer. Antiq. Soc._ N. S. viii. 190-212.
[2] Grimm et Diderot, _Correspondance littéraire_, tom. xv. p. 325.
[3] Genty, _L'influence de la découverte de l'Amérique_, etc., 2^e éd.,
Orleans, 1789, tom. ii. pp. 148-150.
[4] Id. p. 192 ff.
[5] Winsor, _Narr. and Crit. Hist._ iii. 19.
[6] Froude, _History of England_, viii. 439.
[7] _Winsor, Narr. and Crit. Hist._ iii. 61.
[8] See my _Discovery of America_, i. 209.
[9] Froude, _History of England_, x. 59.
[10] _Brown's Genesis of the United States_, i. 9.
[11] Originally the Pelican; see Barrow's _Life of Drake_, pp. 113,
166, 171.
[12] _Barrow's Life of Drake_, p. 167.
[13] See below, p. 61; and compare my _Discovery of America_, ii. 525.
[14] Stebbing's _Sir Walter Ralegh_, p. 43.
[15] Brown's _Genesis_, p. 10.
[16] Froude, _History of England_, xii. 392.
[17] Brown's _Genesis_, i. 20.
[18] Stebbing's _Ralegh_, p. 129.
[19] The fate of White's colony has been a subject for speculation
even to the present day; and attempts have been made to detect its
half-breed descendants among the existing population of North Carolina.
The evidence, however, is too frail to support the conclusions.
CHAPTER II.
A DISCOURSE OF WESTERN PLANTING.
[Sidenote: Sixteenth century maps.]
IN all the history of human knowledge there is no more fascinating
chapter than that which deals with the gradual expansion of men's
geographical ideas consequent upon the great voyages of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries. It is not a tale so written that he who runs
may read it, but its events have rather to be slowly deciphered from
hundreds of quaint old maps, whereon islands and continents, mountains
and rivers, are delineated with very slight resemblance to what we
now know to be the reality; where, for instance, Gog and Magog show a
strong tendency to get mixed up with Memphremagog, where the capital of
China stands a few hundred miles north of the city of Mexico, and your
eye falls upon a river which you feel sure is the St. Lawrence until
you learn that it is meant for the Yang-tse-Kiang. In the sixteenth
century scarcely any intellectual stimulus could be found more potent
than the sight of such maps, revealing unknown lands, or cities and
rivers with strange names, places of which many marvels had been
recounted and almost anything might be believed.
[Sidenote: Richard Hakluyt.]
One afternoon in the year 1568, the lawyer Richard Hakluyt was sitting
at his desk in the Middle Temple, with a number of such maps and
sundry new books of cosmography spread out before him, when the door
opened and his young cousin and namesake, then a boy of sixteen
studying at Westminster School, came into the room. The elder Richard
opened the Bible at the 107th Psalm, and pointed to the verses which
declare that "they which go downe to the sea in ships and occupy by
the great waters, they see the works of the Lord and his wonders in
the deep;" then he called the lad's attention to the maps, in which
he soon became absorbed. This incident determined the career of the
younger Richard Hakluyt, and led to his playing an important part in
the beginnings of the United States of America. A learned and sagacious
writer upon American history, Mr. Doyle, of All Souls College, Oxford,
has truly said that it is "hard to estimate at its full value the debt
which succeeding generations owe to Richard Hakluyt."[20] In 1570 he
became a student at Christ Church, Oxford, and took his master's degree
in 1577. His book called "Divers Voyages," dedicated to Sir Philip
Sidney, was published in 1582. From 1583 to 1588 he was chaplain of
the English legation at Paris, and before his return he was appointed
canon of Bristol, an office which he held till 1605. Thus for many
years he lived in the city of the Cabots, the cradle of the new era of
maritime adventure. He came to be recognized as one of the foremost
geographers of the age and the greatest living English authority on
matters relating to the New World. The year following the defeat of
the Armada witnessed the publication of his book entitled "Principal
Voyages," which Froude well calls "the prose epic of the modern English
nation."[21] In 1605 he was made a prebendary of Westminster, and
eleven years later was buried with distinguished honours beneath the
pavement of the great Abbey.
[Sidenote: Adventures of a manuscript.]
The book of Hakluyt's which here most nearly concerns us is the
"Discourse of Western Planting," written in 1584, shortly before the
return of the ships of Amidas and Barlow from Roanoke Island. It was
not published, nor was immediate publication its aim. It was intended
to influence the mind of Queen Elizabeth. The manuscript was handed to
her about September, 1584, and after a while was lost sight of until
after a long period of oblivion it turned up in the library of Sir
Peter Thomson, an indefatigable collector of literary treasures, who
died in 1770. It was bought from his family by Lord Valentia, after
whose death it passed into the hands of the famous bibliophile Henry
Stevens, who sold it to Sir Thomas Phillips for his vast collection of
archives at Thirlestane House, Cheltenham. In 1869 a copy of it was
made for Dr. Leonard Woods, President of Bowdoin College, by whom it
was ably edited for the Maine Historical Society; and at length, in
1877, after a sleep of nearly three centuries, it was printed at our
New England Cambridge, at the University Press, and published with
valuable notes by the late Dr. Charles Deane.
[Sidenote: Reasons for planting English colonies in America.]
[Sidenote: English trade with the Netherlands.]
Hakluyt wrote this document at the request of Raleigh, who wished
to persuade the queen to invest money in a colonizing expedition
to the New World. Such an enterprise, he felt, was too great for
any individual purse and needed support from government. No one had
studied the subject so thoroughly as Hakluyt, and so Raleigh enlisted
his services. In twenty-one brief chapters Hakluyt sets forth the
various reasons why England should plant colonies on the coast of
North America. The chief reasons are that such colonies will enlarge
the occasions and facilities for driving Spanish ships from the
Newfoundland fisheries and capturing Spanish treasure on its way from
Mexico and the isthmus of Darien; they will be serviceable as stations
toward the discovery and use of the northwest passage to Cathay; after
a while they will furnish a valuable market for the products of English
industry, especially woollen and linen cloths; they will increase the
royal revenue by customs duties; they will afford new material for
the growth of the navy; and in various ways they will relieve England
of its idlers and vagrants by finding occupation for them abroad. In
his terse quaint way, the writer emphasizes these points. As for the
Spanish king, "if you touche him in the Indies you touche the apple
of his eye; for take away his treasure, which is _nervus belli_, and
which he hath almoste [all] out of his West Indies, his olde bandes
of souldiers will soone be dissolved, his purposes defeated, ... his
pride abated, and his tyranie utterly suppressed." "He shall be left
bare as Æsop's proude crowe." With regard to creating a new market
he says: "Nowe if her Majestie take these westerne discoveries in
hande, and plant there, yt is like that in short time wee shall vente
as greate a masse of clothe yn those partes as ever wee did in the
Netherlandes, and in tyme moche more." In this connection he gives a
striking illustration of the closeness of the commercial ties which
had been knit between England and the Low Countries in the course of
the long alliance with the House of Burgundy. In 1550, when Charles V.
proposed to introduce the Spanish Inquisition into the Netherlands,
it was objected that all English merchants would then quit the
country, and the English trade would be grievously diminished. At this
suggestion, "search was made what profite there came and comoditie
grewe by the haunte of the Englishe marchantes. Then it was founde by
searche and enquirie, that within the towne of Antwerpe alone there
were 14,000 persons fedde and mayneteyned onlye by the workinge of
English commodities, besides the gaines that marchantes and shippers
with other in the said towne did gett, which was the greatest part
of their lyvinge, which were thoughte to be in nomber halfe as many
more; and in all other places of his Netherlandes by the indraping
of Englishe woll into clothe, and by the working of other Englishe
comodities, there were 30,000 persons more mayneteyned and fedd; which
in all amounteth to the nomber of 51,000 persons." When this report
was given to Charles V. it led him to pause and consider, as well it
might.
[Sidenote: An American market.]
[Sidenote: The change from tillage to pasturage.]
[Sidenote: Growth of pauperism.]
According to Hakluyt an English colony in America would soon afford as
good a market for English labour as the Netherlands. He was impressed
with the belief that the population of England was fast outrunning its
means of subsistence. Now if the surplus of population could be drawn
to America it would find occupation in raising the products of that
new soil to exchange for commodities from England, and this exchange
in its turn would increase the demand for English commodities and
for the labour which produced them, so that fewer people in England
would be left without employment. Such is Hakluyt's idea, though he
nowhere states it quite so formally. It is interesting because there
is no doubt that he was not alone in holding such views. There was in
many quarters a feeling that, with its population of about 5,000,000,
England was getting to be over-peopled. This was probably because for
some time past the supply of food and the supply of work had both
been diminishing relatively to the number of people. For more than a
century the wool trade had been waxing so profitable that great tracts
of land which had formerly been subject to tillage were year by year
turned into pastures for sheep. This process not only tended to raise
the price of food, but it deprived many people of employment, since
sheep-farming requires fewer hands than tilling the soil. Since the
accession of Henry VIII. there had been many legislative attempts
to check the conversion of ploughed land into grassy fields, but the
change still continued to go on.[22] The enormous increase in the
quantity of precious metals had still further raised the price of
food, while as people were thrown out of employment the labour market
tended to become overstocked so that wages did not rise. These changes
bore with especial severity upon the class of peasants. The condition
of the freeholding yeomanry was much improved during the sixteenth
century. Stone houses with floors had taken the place of rude cabins
with rushes carpeting the ground; meat was oftener eaten, clothes were
of better quality. But it was otherwise with the peasants who held
by servile tenures. In the abolition of mediæval serfdom which had
been going on for two centuries and was completed in England so much
earlier than in any other part of Europe, it was not all gain for the
lowest grades of labourers. Some through energy and good fortune rose
to recruit the ranks of freeholders, but many others became paupers
and thieves. The change from tillage to pasturage affected this class
more than any other, for it turned many out of house and home; so that,
in the words of an old writer, they "prowled about as idle beggars or
continued as stark thieves till the gallows did eat them."[23] The
sudden destruction of the monasteries by Henry VIII. deprived the
pauper of such scanty support as he had been wont to get from the vast
wealth of the Church, and besides it had let loose upon society a vast
number of persons with their old occupations gone and set aside.[24] In
Elizabeth's reign, therefore, for the various reasons here mentioned,
the growth of pauperism began to attract especial attention as a
lamentable if not formidable evil, and the famous "poor law" of 1601
marks a kind of era in the social history of England. Under such
circumstances, for men disheartened by poverty and demoralized by
idleness, struggling for life in a community that had ceased to need
the kind of labour they could perform, the best chance of salvation
seemed to lie in emigration to a new colony where the demand for labour
was sure to be great, and life might be in a measure begun anew. So
thought the good Hakluyt, and the history of the seventeenth century
did much to justify his opinion. The prodigious development of the
English commercial and naval marine, to which the intercourse with
the new and thriving American colonies greatly contributed, went far
toward multiplying the opportunities for employment and diminishing
the numbers of the needy and idle class. Many of the sons of the men
who had been driven from their farms by sheep-raising landlords made
their home upon the ocean, and helped to secure England's control of
the watery pathways. Many of them found new homes in America, and as
independent yeomen became more thrifty than their peasant fathers.
[Sidenote: Opposition to Hakluyt.]
[Sidenote: The queen's penuriousness.]
While there were many people who espoused Hakluyt's views, while
preachers might be heard proclaiming from the pulpit that "Virginia was
a door which God had opened for England," on the other hand, as in the
case of all great enterprises, loud voices were raised in opposition.
To send parties of men and women to starve in the wilderness, or be
murdered by savages or Spaniards, was a proceeding worthy of severe
condemnation for its shocking cruelty, to say nothing of its useless
extravagance. Then, as usual, the men who could see a few inches in
front of their noses called themselves wise and practical, while
they stigmatized as visionary theorizers the men whose imaginations
could discern, albeit in dim outlines, the great future. As for the
queen, who clearly approved in her innermost heart the schemes of
Raleigh and Hakluyt, not much was to be expected from her when it
came to a question of spending money. Elizabeth carried into the
management of public affairs a miserly spirit inherited, perhaps, from
her grandfather, Henry VII. When the Armada was actually entering the
Channel she deemed it sound economy to let her sailors get sick with
sour ale rather than throw it away and buy fresh for them. Such a mind
was not likely to appreciate the necessity for the enormous immediate
outlay involved in planting a successful colony. That such a document
as Hakluyt's should be laid away and forgotten was no more than
natural. To blame Elizabeth unreservedly, however, without making some
allowance for the circumstances in which she was placed, would be crude
and unfair. It was the public money that she was called upon to spend,
and the military pressure exerted by Spain made heavy demands upon it.
In spite of her pennywise methods, which were often so provoking, they
were probably less ill suited to that pinching crisis than her father's
ready lavishness would have been.
[Sidenote: The beginnings of joint-stock companies.]
That Raleigh should appeal to the sovereign for aid in his enterprise
was to have been expected. It was what all explorers and colonizers
had been in the habit of doing. Since the days of Prince Henry the
Navigator the arduous work of discovering and subduing the heathen
world outside of Europe had been conducted under government control
and paid from the public purse whenever the plunder of the heathen
did not suffice. In some cases the sovereign was unwilling to allow
private capital to embark in such enterprises; as for example in the
spring of 1491, when the Duke of Medina-Celi offered to fit out two
or three caravels for Columbus and Queen Isabella refused to give him
the requisite license, probably because she was "unwilling to have
the duke come in for a large share of the profits in case the venture
should prove successful."[25] Usually, however, such work was beyond
the reach of private purses, and it was not until the middle of the
sixteenth century, and in such commercial countries as the Netherlands
and England, with comparatively free governments, that joint-stock
companies began to be formed for such purposes. I have already alluded
to the famous Muscovy Company, first formed in the reign of Edward VI.,
and from that time forth the joint-stock principle went on rapidly
gaining strength until its approach to maturity was announced by the
creation of the English East India Company in 1600 and the Dutch East
India Company in 1602. The latter was "the first great joint-stock
company whose shares were bought and sold from hand to hand,"[26] and
these events mark the beginning of a new era in European commerce.
This substitution of voluntary coöperation among interested
individuals for compulsory action under government control was one
of the most important steps taken toward bringing in the modern era.
Americans have no reason to regret that the beginnings of English
colonization in the New World were not made by an English sovereign.
There can be no doubt that the very slight connection between these
colonies and the Crown was from the first extremely favourable to their
free and untrammelled development. Far better that the worthy Hakluyt's
essay should get tucked away in a pigeon-hole than that it should have
fired Elizabeth to such zeal for Virginia as Louis XIV. a century
afterward showed for New France!
[Sidenote: Raleigh's difficulties.]
By 1589 Raleigh seems to have despaired of finding the queen disposed
to act as a fairy godmother. He reckoned that he had already spent
£40,000 on Virginia, although this sum may perhaps have included his
contributions toward the Arctic voyages of John Davis. Such a sum would
be equivalent to not less than $1,000,000 of our modern money, and no
wonder if Raleigh began to feel more than ever that the undertaking was
too great for his individual resources. In March, 1589, we find him, as
governor of Virginia, assigning not his domain but the right to trade
there to a company, of which John White, Thomas Smith, and Rev. Richard
Hakluyt were the most prominent members. He reserved for himself
a royalty of one fifth of all the gold and silver that should be
obtained. The Company did not show much activity. We may well believe
that it was too soon after the Armada. Business affairs had not had
time to recover from that severe strain. But Raleigh never lost sight
of Virginia. Southey's accusation that he sent out colonists and then
abandoned them was ill-considered. We have already seen why it proved
impossible to send help to John White's colony.
[Sidenote: The great Spanish carrack.]
[Sidenote: The Mermaid Tavern.]
[Sidenote: King James I.]
In the pursuit of his various interests the all-accomplished knight
sometimes encountered strange vicissitudes. With all his flattery
of the crowned coquette, Elizabeth Tudor, the true sovereign of his
heart was one of the ladies of the court, the young and beautiful
Elizabeth Throckmorton. To our prosaic modern minds the attitude of
the great queen toward the favourite courtiers whom she could by no
possibility dream of raising to the dignity of prince-consort seems
incomprehensible. But after a due perusal of the English dramatists
of the time, the romance of Sidney, the extravagances of Lyly, the
poetry of Spenser and Ronsard, or some of those tales of chivalry that
turned good Don Quixote's brain, we are beguiled into the right sort
of atmosphere for understanding it. For any of Elizabeth's counsellors
or favourites to make love to any other lady was apt to call down
some manifestation of displeasure, and in 1592 some circumstances
connected with Raleigh's marriage[27] led to his imprisonment in the
Tower. But his evil star was not yet in the ascendant. Within a few
weeks one of his captains, Christopher Newport, whom we shall meet
again, brought into Dartmouth harbour the great Spanish carrack Madre
de Dios, with treasure from the Indies worth nearly four millions
of modern dollars. A large part of Raleigh's own share in the booty
was turned over to his sovereign with that blithesome grace in which
none could rival him, and it served as a ransom. In 1594 we find him
commanding an expedition to Guiana and exploring the vast solitudes
of the Orinoco in search of El Dorado. On his return to England he
found a brief interval of leisure in which to write that fascinating
book on Guiana which David Hume declared to be full of lies, a gross
calumny which subsequent knowledge, gathered by Humboldt and since
his time, has entirely refuted. Then came the great battle at Cadiz
in 1596, already mentioned, and the capture of Fayal in 1597, when
Raleigh's fame reached its zenith. About this time, or soon after,
began those ambrosial nights, those feasts of the gods, at the Mermaid
Tavern, where Selden and Camden, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson and
Dr. Donne, sat around the table with Raleigh and Shakespeare. In that
happy time the opportunity for colonizing Virginia seemed once more to
have come, and in 1602 Raleigh sent out Samuel Mace on an expedition
of which less is known than one could wish, save that renewed search
was made for White's lost colony. Otherwise, says the historian Stith,
this Mace "performed nothing, but returned with idle stories and
frivolous allegations."[28] When he arrived in England in 1603, sad
changes had occurred. The great queen--great and admirable with all
her faults--had passed away, and a quaint pedantic little Scotchman,
with uncouth figure and shambling gait and a thickness of utterance
due partly to an ill-formed tongue and partly to excessive indulgence
in mountain dew, had stepped into her place. A web of intrigue, basely
woven by Robert Cecil and Henry Howard, had caught Raleigh in its
meshes. He was hurried off to the Tower, while an attainder bereft him
of his demesne of Virginia and handed it over to the crown.
[Sidenote: Henry, Earl of Southampton.]
[Sidenote: Gosnold, Pring and Weymouth.]
But other strong hands were taking up the work. That Earl of
Southampton to whom Shakespeare ten years before had dedicated his
"Venus and Adonis" had been implicated in Essex's rebellion and
narrowly escaped with his life. The accession of James I., which was
fraught with such ill for Raleigh, set Southampton free. But already
in 1602, while he was still a prisoner in the Tower, an expedition
organized under his auspices set sail for Virginia. It was commanded by
one of Raleigh's old captains, Bartholomew Gosnold, and has especial
interest as an event in the beginnings alike of Virginia and of New
England. Gosnold came to a region which some persons called Norumbega,
but was soon to be known for a few years as North Virginia, and always
thereafter as New England. It was he who first wrote upon the map the
names Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard, and the Elizabeth Islands in
what we call Buzzard's Bay. His return to England was the occasion
of a fresh and strong renewal of interest in the business of what
Hakluyt called "western planting." The voyage of Martin Pring to North
Virginia, at the expense of sundry Bristol merchants, followed in
1603, and at the same time Bartholomew Gilbert, son of Sir Humphrey,
coasted the shores of Chesapeake Bay, and was slain by the Indians with
several of his men. Early in 1605 Captain George Weymouth set out in a
vessel equipped by the Earl of Southampton, Lord Arundel of Wardour,
and Sir Ferdinando Gorges, governor of the garrison at Plymouth. After
spending a month in North Virginia, Weymouth returned to England with
five captive Indians, and the popular interest aroused by his arrival
surpassed that which had been felt upon former occasions.
[Sidenote: "Eastward Ho!"]
The excitement over Virginia was promptly reflected upon the stage.
The comedy of "Eastward Ho," written by Chapman and Marston, with
contributions from Ben Jonson, was acted in 1605 and published in
the autumn of that year. The title is a survival of forms of speech
current when America was believed to be a part of the oriental world.
Some extracts from this play will serve to illustrate the popular
feeling. In the second act old Security, the money lender, is talking
with young Frank Quicksilver about the schemes of Sir Petronel Flash.
Quicksilver says, "Well, dad, let him have money; all he could anyway
get is bestowed on a ship, nowe bound for Virginia." Security replies,
"Now a frank gale of wind go with him, Master Frank! We have too few
such knight adventurers. Who would not sell away competent certainties
to purchase (with any danger) excellent uncertainties? Your true knight
venturer ever does it." In the next act a messenger enters.
_Messenger._ Sir Petronel, here are three or four gentlemen desire to
speak with you.
_Petronel._ What are they?
_Quicksilver._ They are your followers in this voyage, knight captain
Seagull and his associates; I met them this morning and told them you
would be here.
_Petronel._ Let them enter, I pray you....
_Enter Seagull, Spendall, and Scapethrift._
_Seagull._ God save my honourable colonel!
_Petronel._ Welcome, good Captain Seagull and worthy gentlemen; if you
will meet my friend Frank here and me at the Blue Anchor tavern, by
Billingsgate, this evening, we will there drink to our happy voyage,
be merry, and take boat to our ship with all expedition....
ACT III., SCENE 2. _Enter Seagull, Spendall, and Scapethrift in the
Blue Anchor tavern, with a Drawer._
_Seagull._ Come, drawer, pierce your neatest hogsheads, and let's have
cheer,--not fit for your Billingsgate tavern, but for our Virginian
colonel; he will be here instantly.
_Drawer._ You shall have all things fit, sir; please you have any more
wine?
_Spendall._ More wine, slave! whether we drink it or no, spill it, and
draw more.
_Scapethrift._ Fill all the pots in your house with all sorts of
liquor, and let 'em wait on us here like soldiers in their pewter
coats; and though we do not employ them now, yet we will maintain 'em
till we do.
_Drawer._ Said like an honourable captain; you shall have all you can
command, sir. [_Exit Drawer._
_Seagull._ Come boys, Virginia longs till we share the rest of her....
_Spendall._ Why, is she inhabited already with any English?
_Seagull._ A whole country of English is there, bred of those that
were left there in '79 [Here our dramatist's date is wrong; White's
colony, left there in 1587, is meant]; they have married [continues
Seagull] with the Indians ... [who] are so in love with them that all
the treasure they have they lay at their feet.
_Scapethrift._ But is there such treasure there, Captain, as I have
heard?
_Seagull._ I tell thee, gold is more plentiful there than copper is
with us; and for as much red copper as I can bring I'll have thrice
the weight in gold. Why, man, all their dripping-pans ... are pure
gold; and all the chains with which they chain up their streets are
massy gold; all the prisoners they take are fettered in gold; and
for rubies and diamonds they go forth on holidays and gather 'em by
the seashore to hang on their children's coats, and stick in their
children's caps, as commonly as our children wear saffron-gilt
brooches and groats with holes in 'em.
_Scapethrift._ And is it a pleasant country withal?
_Seagull._ As ever the sun shined on: temperate, and full of all sorts
of excellent viands; wild boar is as common there as our tamest bacon
is here; venison as mutton. And then you shall live freely there,
without sergeants, or courtiers, or lawyers.... Then for your means
to advancement, there it is simple and not preposterously mixed. You
may be an alderman there, and never be scavenger; you may be any
other officer, and never be a slave. You may come to preferment
enough, ... to riches and fortune enough, and have never the more
villainy nor the less wit. Besides, there we shall have no more law
than conscience, and not too much of either; serve God enough, eat and
drink enough, and enough is as good as a feast.
_Spendall._ Gods me! and how far is it thither?
_Seagull._ Some six weeks sail, no more, with any indifferent good
wind. And if I get to any part of the coast of Africa, I'll sail
thither with any wind; or when I come to Cape Finisterre, there's a
fore-right wind continual wafts us till we come to Virginia. See, our
colonel's come.
_Enter Sir Petronel Flash with his followers._
_Sir Petronel._ We'll have our provided supper brought aboard Sir
Francis Drake's ship that hath compassed the world, where with full
cups and banquets we will do sacrifice for a prosperous voyage.[29]
[Sidenote: Zuñiga's report to Philip III.]
The great popularity of this play, both on the stage and in print,--for
it went through four editions between September and Christmas,--is an
indication of the general curiosity felt about Virginia. The long war
with Spain had lately been brought to an end by the treaty of 1604. It
had left Spain so grievously weakened that the work of encroaching upon
her American demesnes was immeasurably easier than in the days when
Hawkins began it and Elizabeth connived at it. In a cipher despatch
from the Spanish ambassador Zuñiga to his sovereign, Philip III., dated
London, March 16, 1606, N. S., mention is made of an unpalatable scheme
of the English: "They also propose to do another thing, which, is to
send five or six hundred men, private individuals of this kingdom,
to people Virginia in the Indies, close to Florida. They sent to
that country some small number of men in years gone by, and having
afterwards sent again, they found a part of them alive."[30] In this
reference to White's colony the Spaniard is of course mistaken; no
living remnant was ever found. He goes on to say that the principal
leader in this business is Sir John Popham, Lord Chief Justice of
England, who is a terrible Puritan; and when reminded that this
enterprise is an encroachment upon Spanish territory and a violation of
the treaty, this astute judge says that he is only undertaking it in
order to clear England of thieves and get them drowned in the sea. I
have not yet complained of this to the king, says Zuñiga, but I shall
do so.
[Sidenote: First charter of Virginia, 1606.]
[Sidenote: The "Sea of Verrazano".]
[Illustration: ILLVSTRI VIRO, DOMINO PHILIPPO SIDNÆO MICHAEL LOK CIVIS
LONDINENSIS HANC CHARTAM DEDICABAT 1582]
It was very soon after this despatch, on April 10, O. S., that James
I. issued the charter under which England's first permanent colony was
established. This memorable document begins by defining the territorial
limits of Virginia, which is declared to extend from the 34th to the
45th parallel of latitude, and from the seashore one hundred miles
inland. In a second charter, issued three years later, Virginia is
described as extending from sea to sea, that is, from the Atlantic
Ocean to the Pacific. It is not likely that the king and his advisers
understood the westward extension of the grant, as here specified, to
be materially different from that mentioned in the first charter.
The width of the continent between Chesapeake Bay and the valley of
the St. Lawrence was supposed to be no greater than from one to two
hundred miles. It is true that before the middle of the sixteenth
century the expeditions of Soto and Coronado had proved the existence
of a continuous mass of land from Florida to California, but many
geographers believed that this continental mass terminated at the 40th
parallel or even some degrees lower, and that its northern coast was
washed by an enormous bay of the Pacific Ocean, called on old maps
the Sea of Verrazano. The coast land from Virginia to Labrador was
regarded as a thin strip separating the two oceans after somewhat the
same fashion as Central America, and hence the mouths and lower reaches
of such broad rivers as the Hudson and the Delaware were mistaken for
straits. After one has traced the slow development of knowledge through
the curious mingling of fact with fancy in the maps of Baptista Agnese
published in 1536, and that of Sebastian Münster in 1540, down to the
map which Michael Lok made for Sir Philip Sidney in 1582, he will
have no difficulty in understanding either the language of the early
charters or the fact that such a navigator as Henry Hudson should about
this time have entered New York harbour in the hope of coming out upon
the Pacific Ocean within a few days. Without such study of the old maps
the story often becomes incomprehensible.
[Sidenote: Northern and southern limits of Virginia.]
As for the northern and southern limits of Virginia, they were
evidently prescribed with a view to arousing as little antagonism as
possible on the part of Spain and France. Expressed in terms of the
modern map, the 34th parallel cuts through the mouth of the Cape Fear
River and passes just south of Columbia, the capital of South Carolina;
while the 45th parallel is that which divides Vermont from Canada.
English settlers were thus kept quite clear of the actual settlements
of Spaniards in Florida, and would not immediately be brought into
collision with the French friars and fur-traders who were beginning to
find their way up the St. Lawrence.
[Sidenote: The twin joint-stock companies, and the three zones.]
The Virginia thus designated was to be open for colonization by
two joint-stock companies, of which the immediate members and such
as should participate with them in the enterprise should be called
respectively the First Colony and the Second Colony. The First
Colony was permitted to occupy the territory between the 34th and
the 41st parallels, while the Second Colony was permitted to occupy
the territory between the 38th and the 45th parallels. It will thus
be observed that the strip between the 38th and 41st parallels was
open to both, but it was provided that neither colony should make a
plantation or settlement within a hundred miles of any settlement
already begun by the other. The elaborate ingenuity of this arrangement
is characteristic of James's little device-loving mind; its purpose,
no doubt, was to quicken the proceedings by offering to reward
whichever colony should be first in the field with a prior claim upon
the intervening region. The practical result was the division of the
Virginia territory into three strips or zones. The southern zone,
starting from the coast comprised between the mouth of the Cape Fear
River and the mouth of the Potomac, was secured to the First Colony.
The northern zone, starting from the coast comprised between the Bay
of Fundy and Long Island Sound, was secured to the Second Colony. The
middle zone, from the lower reaches of the Hudson River down to the
mouth of the Potomac, was left open to competition between the two,
with a marked advantage in favour of the one that should first come to
be self-supporting.